Layer-1 Blockchains: The Foundation of Cryptoverse

Layer-1 Blockchain is a set of solutions that improve the underlying protocol itself.

What is Layer-1 Blockchain?

Layer-1 blockchain is a set of solutions that improve the underlying protocol itself, making the overall system more scalable. There are two of the most common Layer 1 solutions, namely consensus protocol modification and sharding.

In terms of changing the consensus protocol, projects like Ethereum are abandoning old and inconvenient consensus protocols like proof-of-work (PoW) in favour of faster and less energy-intensive protocols like proof-of-stake (PoS).

Sharding is one of the most popular methods of Layer 1 scaling. To avoid forcing the network to process each transaction sequentially, sharding divides these transaction sets into small data sets called "shards" and they are processed by the network in parallel. One of the advantages of Tier 1 solutions is that there is no need to add anything on top of the existing infrastructure.