Layer 1 Showdown: Solana’s User Surge Sparks New Scalability Race

The Layer 1 landscape is entering a rather competitive phase. Solana’s surge in asset-bridging inflows, Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, and Monad’s public-sale-driven mainnet launch are reshaping how users and developers distribute their activity across major chains. The race now revolves around user acquisition, liquidity migration, and developer-facing infrastructure.

Outset PR, a data-driven crypto PR agency, has been tracking a sharp escalation in Layer 1 competition. By leveraging market intelligence and on-chain data analysis, the agency decodes current trends, maps market sentiment, and guides the timing and narrative strategy for its clients.

Solana extends its lead with user growth, asset inflows, and soaring volume

Solana continues to post metrics that reinforce its status as the most active high-performance Layer 1. Monthly active users recently reached almost 45 million, up nearly 10 million from mid-October as per the data from Tokenterminal. The momentum coincides with accelerated asset migration: users bridge assets into Solana to access liquidity pools, consumer applications, and a rapidly expanding retail base.

Over the last 30 days, Solana recorded $290 billion in trading volume — a figure fueled partly by the Firedancer client’s incremental rollout. Its architectural improvements reduce bottlenecks while preparing the network for future throughput expansion. These changes have strengthened confidence that Solana can support sustained high activity without relying on a single validator client. Bridging activity reflects the same pattern. Solana remains one of the top destinations for cross-chain inflows, consistently capturing multi-billion-dollar monthly volumes.  

Even in short-term trading windows, Solana’s relative strength stands out. In the last 24 hours, its volume-weighted performance exceeded the market by +1.31%, suggesting that liquidity continues to consolidate within its ecosystem

Monad enters the arena with the mainnet launch

One of the most anticipated entrants to the L1 competition is Monad, which has recently launched its mainnet following a public token sale.  

Monad’s value proposition focuses on parallel execution, full EVM compatibility, and an aggressive performance roadmap. The project claims high throughput while maintaining Ethereum tooling — a combination aimed at attracting developers who want speed without leaving familiar environments.

Monad is launching into a market with rising liquidity concentration in top L1s, but its entry demonstrates that investors and builders still see room for new execution-layer competitors, provided their performance gains are tangible.

Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade: usability, validator flexibility and an 8× throughput boost

Ethereum is responding to competitive pressure with its Pectra upgrade, rolled out earlier this year. Pectra improves account abstraction (via EIP-7702), increases validator effective balance limits, and enhances communication between the execution and consensus layers. It also expands blob throughput for rollups.

The upgrade delivers a meaningful 8× increase in throughput capacity for rollups — strengthening Ethereum’s layered scaling strategy.

Rather than competing directly with Solana on raw transaction speed, Ethereum is aiming to retain developers and consolidate the rollup ecosystem by improving the underlying execution and data-availability pathways.

Layer 1 liquidity is consolidating, and the competition is escalating

The broader trend across the market is consolidation. Liquidity and users are flowing from smaller chains toward a concentrated group of high-throughput networks and rollup ecosystems. Solana’s recent inflows illustrate the pattern, but Ethereum’s and Monad’s upgrades show that the contest remains open.

The competitive dynamics now revolve around:

• User access — Solana’s 45M MAUs give it a strong gravitational pull.

• Developer tooling — Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap and Pectra’s account-abstraction improvements reinforce its ecosystem stickiness.

• Performance breakthroughs — Monad is testing whether new architectures can attract users in a market that increasingly rewards speed and compatibility.

• Liquidity migration — asset flows tell the story of where users believe applications will thrive.

How Outset PR reads the competitive landscape

Outset PR was founded on the idea that crypto stories should be grounded in market reality. The agency applies a market-fit, analytics-focused approach to PR by monitoring on-chain data and media trends daily. 

Founded by crypto PR expert Mike Ermolaev, the agency evaluates market developments the same way it evaluates campaigns — through measurable signals, not assumptions. Its work is built on:

• selecting media outlets based on discoverability, domain authority, conversion, and viral potential,

• tailoring each pitch to the outlet’s audience,

• timing publications to align with momentum,

• and using proprietary tools like Syndication Map to forecast where stories gain the strongest lift.

As Layer 1 competition escalates, these same principles apply: understanding where attention, users and liquidity naturally flow — and aligning strategy with those movements.

The takeaway

With Solana, Ethereum and Monad all in focus, Layer 1s are absorbing liquidity from smaller chains. The trend is visible in user activity, volume concentration and bridging flows. At the same time, Solana still faces network congestion concerns and ongoing centralization debates, which remain part of the broader Layer 1 conversation.