MUTE THE ROOM

No vapor on the board.

This index is six execution and settlement designs. Not logos. If the chain cannot produce blocks, order flow, or shielded value under load, it is not listed.

Why these six

Bitcoin

UTXO set, SHA-256 proof of work, ~10 minute blocks, difficulty retarget every 2016 blocks. No general-purpose VM. Script is intentionally weak. Finality is probabilistic; high-value settlement waits on depth, not a committee vote. Monetary policy is the issuance schedule in the client. Lightning and side systems are overlays. The L1 product is scarce block space and a UTXO set nobody can inflate by governance.

Solana

Proof of History as a verifiable delay pre-clock, Tower BFT on top, slot time on the order of 400ms. Sealevel runs non-overlapping account transactions in parallel. State is an account model with rent and program-owned data, not an AMM-hostile global singleton. Leader schedule is known in advance; the hot path is ingesting shreds, not waiting on a mempool beauty contest. Firedancer is a second independent client aimed at the same wire protocol. This slot is for a chain whose bottleneck is hardware and networking, not a research queue.

Zcash

Two pools: transparent Bitcoin-like UTXOs and shielded notes (Sapling, then Orchard). Spends prove in zero knowledge that a note exists and is not double-spent, without revealing link or amount. Orchard uses Halo 2 — no trusted setup. Consensus is still proof of work; privacy is a circuit, not a mixer bolted on after the fact. It is on the board because the shielded pool has depth and the proving system is in the protocol, not a mixer contract that can be sanctioned off.

Hyperliquid

A purpose-built L1 with HyperBFT, not an EVM rollup posting blobs to Ethereum. The product is a fully on-chain central limit order book: matching, margin, and liquidations are consensus state. Validators run the book. Settlement asset is typically a native stable, not a wrapped IOU from some other VM. L1 exists to bound the matching engine. That is a different architecture from “general-purpose chain plus a dex UI.”

Sui

Move bytecode, object-centric state. Owned objects can execute in parallel without a shared lock. Shared objects go through consensus (Mysticeti / prior Narwhal–Bullshark lineage). Effects are certificates on objects, not a single global trie rewrite per hot pool. Causality is explicit in the object graph. It is here because the data model matches concurrent apps instead of fighting an account or UTXO that every trader must serialize.

NEAR

Nightshade sharding: chunks per shard, one chain of blocks that commit those chunks. Doomslug-style practical finality on the order of a second, then economic finality as more shards attest. Account model with human-readable accounts and keys as first-class state. Chain signatures and account abstraction are protocol features, not a wallet hack. It holds the sixth slot as a sharded L1 that produces chunks in production, not a whitepaper about someday-shards.

Anything that outsources execution to a sequencer and calls the blob “settlement,” or that expands supply in a board meeting, sits in RIP.

Winner takes most at the protocol layer. Marketing does not get a row.

Data

Prices, caps, and volume refresh from the CoinLore public API about every 30 seconds. If the request fails, the last snapshot stays on screen. Seven-day sparklines are reconstructed from the latest price and 7-day change when a full candle history is not available. Do not treat this as a trading terminal.

Not CMC

This is an independent page. It is not affiliated with CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, or any of the six projects. No listing fees. No ads. No 59 million mystery tickers.