Which blockchain to build on in 2026: a decision framework

For most new products in 2026, the answer to "which blockchain to build on" is an Ethereum L2 such as Base or Arbitrum: EVM tooling, cheap transactions, and a short bridge to Ethereum's liquidity. Pick Solana if your product needs one fast shared state for trading or consumer apps and your team is comfortable in Rust. Pick Ethereum L1 only for high-value, low-frequency activity, HyperEVM if your product lives next to Hyperliquid's traders, and your own rollup only once you have users who would follow you there.

That is the short version. The rest of this post is the framework behind it, with current numbers so you can check our reasoning.

Start with users and liquidity, not throughput

Founders tend to compare transactions per second. That is rarely the constraint. The questions that decide success are:

1. Where are your users today, and which wallets do they already have?
2. Where is the liquidity your product needs (stablecoins, collateral, trading pairs)?
3. Which partners must integrate you: custodians, on-ramps, oracles, exchanges?
4. Can you hire people who know the stack?

Here is where capital sat on 29 October 2026, from DefiLlama's chain rankings and stablecoin data by chain:

Two things stand out. Ethereum still holds most of the onchain capital by a wide margin. And Tron's stablecoin number is huge relative to its DeFi activity, because it is mostly used for USDT payments. If you are building payments for markets where people already hold USDT on Tron, that matters more than any benchmark. If you are building DeFi, it mostly does not.

The five factors we score

1. Users and distribution

Retail crypto users cluster around specific wallets and apps. Base benefits from Coinbase's distribution. Solana has its own wallet and memecoin-driven retail base. Hyperliquid's users are traders. If your go-to-market depends on an existing community, build where that community already is.

2. Liquidity and composability

DeFi products need deep pools, reliable oracles and lending markets to plug into. A DEX aggregator on a chain with three thin pools has nothing to aggregate. Look at TVL, but also at whether the specific assets and protocols you depend on are deployed and active.

3. Fees and performance

Fees are low almost everywhere except Ethereum L1 now. Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade went live on 3 December 2025 with PeerDAS, and the follow-up blob-parameter forks raised the per-block blob target from 6 to 10 and then 14, which expands cheap data space for rollups. On Solana, the base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature (0.000005 SOL), plus optional priority fees per compute unit, and fees are charged even when a transaction fails.

What matters more than average fees is fee behaviour under load. Ask what happens to your users during a busy hour, and whether your contracts' heavy paths (liquidations, batch payouts, permissioned token transfers) stay affordable. Our platform economics comparison goes deeper on deployment and gas costs.

4. Tooling and hiring

EVM chains share Solidity, Foundry, Hardhat, viem, wagmi, Safe, OpenZeppelin and most auditors. Solana uses Rust and Anchor with a different account model, so EVM experience transfers only partly. Electric Capital's 2025 data, as reported by Cryptorank, put the Ethereum ecosystem at about 31,900 active developers and Solana at about 17,700, with Solana growing faster and the Solana Foundation disputing the count as too low. Either way, the EVM hiring pool is bigger. For the language side, see our comparison of Rust vs Solidity for smart contracts.

5. Security model and control

An L2 inherits Ethereum security to the degree its proof system and upgrade keys allow. L2BEAT rates rollups by stage; Arbitrum One, Base, OP Mainnet, Starknet, Ink and Unichain are among those at Stage 1, and most smaller L2s are still Stage 0, meaning operators can change or censor more than users might assume. Your own rollup puts that responsibility on you.

The options, one by one

Ethereum L1

Best for: high-value assets, collateral that other protocols must trust, tokenized funds and settlement layers, protocols where security is the product.

Tradeoffs: the most expensive place to transact, so frequent user actions get costly. Most consumer products should not put their main loop here. Many teams deploy the token or vault on L1 and the app on an L2.

Ethereum L2s (Base, Arbitrum, OP Mainnet and others)

Best for: most dapps, DeFi products that want EVM liquidity, consumer apps that need cheap transactions and familiar wallets.

Base has the most DeFi TVL among L2s in the table above. In February 2026 Base announced it would move from Optimism's OP Stack to its own codebase while staying compatible with OP Stack standards. For builders on Base this changes little day to day, but it is worth tracking for anyone choosing the OP Stack itself to launch a chain.

Arbitrum has a mature DeFi stack and Stylus, a second WebAssembly VM that lets you write contracts in Rust that interoperate with Solidity contracts on the same chain. Useful if you have compute-heavy logic or a Rust team.

Tradeoffs: liquidity is split across L2s, bridging is still friction for users, and each L2 has its own sequencer and upgrade keys.

Solana

Best for: trading, payments and consumer products that need low latency and one global state, not a set of L2s with bridges between them.

Tradeoffs: Rust and Anchor, a different account and fee model, a separate auditor pool, and you leave EVM composability behind. Teams that build well on Solana design for it from the start. Porting an EVM design rarely works cleanly.

Appchains and rollups-as-a-service

Best for: products with proven demand that need control over fees, sequencing, gas token or sequencer revenue, such as games, exchanges or large consumer apps.

You can launch an OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit or ZK Stack chain through a provider instead of running it yourself. Conduit, for example, lists a testnet at $250 a month, while mainnet pricing is on request plus 5% of sequencer profit. The infrastructure is the cheap part. The expensive part is bootstrapping liquidity, bridges, oracles, indexers, explorers and wallet support on a chain no one uses yet.

Our view: do not start here. Launch on a shared L2, prove demand, and move only when chain-level control would clearly pay for the empty-chain problem.

HyperEVM

Best for: DeFi and trading products that benefit from sitting next to Hyperliquid's order book and user base.

HyperEVM is the EVM layer on Hyperliquid's L1. It uses a dual-block architecture: fast small blocks for normal transactions and slower big blocks with a 30M gas limit for large deployments. Our HyperEVM deep dive covers the design.

We have shipped there. For Hyperbloom, we built a DEX aggregator that checks 12 exchanges across HyperEVM's fragmented liquidity, along with auto-compounding vaults and a swap API. The upside was a fast-growing ecosystem with active traders. The cost was a younger toolchain and liquidity spread thinly across many venues, which is exactly why an aggregator made sense.

Tradeoffs: a smaller and newer ecosystem than Ethereum L2s, a tighter link to one protocol's fortunes, and fewer auditors and infra providers with deep experience.

Other L1s

Newer chains appear in the rankings every quarter. On the same DefiLlama snapshot, Monad, Robinhood Chain and Circle's Arc each held between about $0.6B and $1.1B in DeFi TVL. They can make sense when the chain's backer brings your distribution (Arc for institutional stablecoin flows, for example). Without that, you are betting on someone else's growth.

Decision table by product type

Designing so you can move later

You will probably go multichain eventually. Make it cheaper now:

• Stay EVM-compatible unless you are committing to Solana. One codebase can then deploy to many L2s.
• Keep chain IDs, contract addresses and RPC endpoints in configuration, not code.
• Use an indexer that supports several chains from the start.
• Avoid chain-specific precompiles in core logic unless they are the reason you chose the chain.
• Pick a token bridging approach before launching the token on a second chain, not after.

Mistakes we see

• Choosing a chain because its foundation offered a grant, then finding no users there.
• Launching an appchain before having a product people use.
• Benchmarking TPS while ignoring that the needed oracle or stablecoin is not deployed.
• Picking Solana with an all-Solidity team and a three-month deadline.
• Splitting launch across four chains and getting thin liquidity on each.

For a longer walk through stack choices once the chain is decided, see our guide on how to build a dapp.

FAQ

What is the best blockchain for building dapps in 2026?

For most teams, an Ethereum L2 like Base or Arbitrum. It combines EVM tooling, low fees and access to Ethereum's liquidity. Solana is the main alternative for latency-sensitive and consumer products.

Is Solana or Ethereum better for developers?

Ethereum and its L2s have the larger developer and auditor pool and shared tooling. Solana offers one fast global state but requires Rust, Anchor and a different account model.

Should I launch my own blockchain or rollup?

Only after you have traction. Rollups-as-a-service make launching cheap, but users, liquidity, bridges and integrations do not come with the chain.

Which blockchain has the lowest fees?

Most L2s and Solana are cheap for normal transactions. On Solana the base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature. Compare fees under load for your heaviest transaction, not the average transfer.

Is HyperEVM a good chain to build on?

It is a strong choice for DeFi and trading products aimed at Hyperliquid's users. It is a weaker choice for general consumer apps, because the ecosystem is younger and narrower than Ethereum L2s.

Can I switch blockchains later?

Yes, if you design for it: stay EVM-compatible, keep chain details in config, and use a multichain indexer. Moving liquidity and users is harder than moving code.

Talk to us

We help teams pick a chain based on their users, liquidity and hiring plans, then build on it. If you are weighing Ethereum, an L2, Solana or HyperEVM for a specific product, contact us and we will give you a written recommendation with the tradeoffs spelled out. See also our blockchain consulting service.