A recap of the latest public chains in 2022

After entering the multi-chain era, new optimized public chains  based on Layer 1 and Layer 2 have emerged. In 2022, nearly 30+ new public chains came out. Some of these new public chains got the investment from well-known institutions such as A16Z, Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs, etc. The new improved narrative around the impossible triangular of "security, decentralization, and high performance" is also very moving. Which public chain is worth our in-depth research and investment? What are the differences between these public chains?

Bitget Wallet (Previously Bitget Wallet (Previously BitKeep))——the Web3 multi-chain wallet has done a complete sorting and comparison for you to help you learn and research.

The following public chains are in no particular order:

Aptos

A high-performance public chain built by a former engineer from Meta, using the MOVE programming language, focusing on security, scalability and upgradeability.

Aptos is a Layer 1 public chain project initiated by former team members from Diem. At the end of January this year, Diem was sold by Meta, and some core members left to form a team to develop the Aptos public chain based on Diem's open source code.

Compared with the existing public chains on the market, the biggest feature of Aptos is the adoption of a new development language, Move, which was originally designed for the development of the Diem project, focusing on the security, scalability and upgradability of the blockchain.

Aptos completed $200 million in funding led by a16z in March this year, with participation from Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs, and PayPal Ventures.

Aptos completed a $150 million funding round in July this year, led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto, with other investors including Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures and Superscrypt.

Sui

Sui is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain that adopts the PoS consensus mechanism. Although Sui tries to solve the "Impossible Triangle Problem" of the blockchain, it mainly improves the composability of metaverse applications including games, social networking & commerce, and builds dynamic NFTs.

Sui has raised $36 million in Series A funding. The main investors are a16z, NFX, Scribble Ventures, Redpoint, Lightspeed, Electric Capital, Samsung NEXT, Slow Ventures, Standard Crypto, Coinbase Ventures.

The Series B funding was led by FTX Ventures and is expected to raise a total of $236 million.

Aleph Zero

Aleph Zero is a privacy public chain based on Directed Acyclic Graph(DAG) technology, and adopts a privacy structure developed based on ZK-SNARKs cryptography and Secure Multiparty Computing (sMPC).

Aleph Zero completed $14.8 million funding in November 2021, and then completed a $1.5 million seed round in January 2022. Investment institutions include Jun Capital, Genblock Capital, Supernova, PetRock Capital, etc.

Evmos

Evmos is a  L1 universal public chain compatible with Ethereum smart contracts using the underlying technology of Cosmos (Tendermint Core).

Evmos can integrate Ethereum and other EVM-compatible chains into Cosmos, which means that chains such as Fantom, Avalanche and Harmonry can integrate assets into the Cosmos ecosystem through Evmos, and EVM-based decentralized applications, tokens and NFTs can all be bridged to the Cosmos ecosystem.

Evmos will also enable users of the IBC Chain to be able to access the types of protocols seen on Ethereum, including but not limited to decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, NFT applications, and more.

Evmos is invested by the Cosmos Hub community with 100,000 ATOM tokens.

Linera

The former Meta engineer's high-performance Layer 1 blockchain aims at low latency and linear scalability, and pays more attention to the low latency of the network.

On June 29, Linera completed a $6 million seed round led by a16z, with participation from Cygni Capital, Kima Ventures and Tribe Capital etc.

5ire

A blockchain based on the NPoS (Nominated Proof of Stake) consensus mechanism with "Proof of 5ire" as the core technology. 5ire, which says it is building the world's most sustainable distributed ledger technology (DLT) network powered by a so-called proof-of-stake mechanism, has secured $100 million in funding from Sram and Mram.

FLare Network

Flare has the first consensus protocol for acquiring external information, i.e. dApps built on top of Flare can acquire and use other blockchains or real-world data sources in a trust-free manner, solving the oracle problem and opening up new paths for practicality .

Flare has raised a total of $11.3 million in its latest funding round, led by Kenetic Capital, with participation from prominent institutions including Digital Currency Group, Coinfund, LD Capital, cFund, Wave Financial, Borderless Capital, and Backend Capital.

Radix

Radix is a public chain based on the Cerberus consensus mechanism, dedicated to improving development efficiency by 10 times, DeFi security by at least 100 times, and scalability by at least 1,000 times.

The core of the public chain is the Cerberus sharding consensus algorithm. Its goal is to achieve the simultaneous growth of the system TPS capability with the increase of the number of nodes, without destroying the composability of DeFi, and finally breaking through the bottleneck problem that hinders the development of blockchain.

zkSync

A low-cost expansion protocol based on the ZK Rollup architecture, which mainly ensures the security of user assets through zero-knowledge proof and data availability.

Matter Labs, the development company behind the Ethereum expansion plan— zkSync, announced the completion of a $50 million financing round. This round of financing was led by a16z, with participation from Placeholder, Dragonfly, 1kx, Blockchain.com, Crypto.com, Consensys, ByBit, OKEx, Alchemy, Covalent, etc. cast. Angel investors include AAVE founder Stani Kulechov and others.

Aleo

Aleo used a new computing system called Zexe. Zexe, short for Zero-Knowledge Execution, helps make off-chain computation and on-chain default verification defaults, thereby improving the scalability and privacy properties of blockchains. In addition, Aleo has also created his own programming language, Leo, which will make it easier for developers to build decentralized and private applications.

The company’s earlier Series A round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The SoftBank Vision Fund, along with other investors, raised a $70 million Series B+ round for Aleo. The round follows an oversubscribed $200 million Series B round led by Kora Capital and Softbank Vision Fund 2.

Iron Fish

Iron Fish is a decentralized, proof-of-work (PoW)-based, censorship-resistant, and publicly accessible blockchain privacy project that aims to provide strong privacy guarantees for every transaction. Iron Fish's idea is to hide transaction information , mining information, and wallet information, and other wallet addresses cannot be viewed except for the private key owner. To achieve this, Iron Fish uses the PoW consensus mechanism (an old classic consensus mechanism) and zero-knowledge proofs (Zcash's Sapling Protocol).

Iron Fish raised $27.6 million, led by A16z, with participation from Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn Executive Chairman Jeff Weiner, and billionaire owner of the Met, Alan Howard.

AltLayer

An Ethereum scaling startup built by Yaoqi Jia, who previously co-founded the Zilliqa blockchain and served as its CTO.  It is designed as a modular and pluggable framework for a multi-chain and multi-VM world, i.e. blockchains customized for individual applications.

AltLayer completed a $7.2 million seed round through SAFT sale. This round of funding was co-led by Polychain Capital, Jump Crypto and Breyer Capital, participated by Ethereum co-founders Gavin Wood, Balaji Srinivasan, former Coinbase CTO, Circle co-founder Sean Neville, Synthetix and Bodhi Ventures co-founders Kain Warwick and Jordan Momtazi and others.

Espresso Systems

Espresso aims to optimize the privacy and scalability of public chains through zero-knowledge proof technology, which is a Layer 1 blockchain that combines proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus and ZK-Rollup mechanism. Developed the Configurable Asset Privacy (CAPE) application, a privacy application that can run on any EVM blockchain that enables asset creators to provide users with customized privacy guarantees.

Espresso Systems closed a $32 million financing round led by Greylock Partners and Electric Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Blockchain Capital and Slow Ventures.

Monad

Founded by Keone Hon, the former head of research at Jump Trading, with James Hunsaker after announcing his departure in April, Monad will use low-latency programming, compiler optimizations, and multi-threaded computing to build an ultra-high-performance smart contract platform.

Kujira

The Layer 1 new public chain of the Cosmos ecosystem is committed to building a Dapp for ordinary crypto users to balance the competitive environment of decentralized finance.

Canto

Canto is an L1 DeFi public chain based on the Cosmos SDK. Driven by developer organization Plex, the project aims to drive innovation in the DeFi space and bring more accessibility, transparency, and freedom to traditional finance by providing a range of free public infrastructure.

Sei Network

Built using the Cosmos SDK with Tendermint, a Layer 1 blockchain with a built-in Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) module.

Gear

Gear is the smart contract platform of Polkadot-Kusama ecology, and will become a parachain of Polkadot in the future. As a parachain, Gear acts as a platform for carrying multiple types of DApps such as DeFi, DAO, NFT, supply chain management systems, etc., providing developers with various infrastructures, supporting out-of-the-box creation processes, and enabling the DApp of Polkadot  to obtain the security guarantee from the Polkadot relay chain.

Gear Technologies announced the completion of a $12 million financing round, led by Blockchange, with participation from institutions such as Three Arrows Capital, Lemniscap, Distributed Globals, and a number of executives from the Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies, including the founder of Polkadot Gavin Wood.

Celestia

A Layer 1 modular blockchain network powering scalable, secure Web3 applications, the CEO is not only a PhD in blockchain scaling at UCL, but also the co-founder of Chainspace, which was acquired by Facebook.

Celestia has completed a $1.5 million seed round from investors including Interchain Foundation, Binance Labs, Maven 11 Capital, KR1, and more.

Fuel

Fuel positions itself as a modular execution layer. Fuel sees a "modular execution layer" as "a verifiable computing system designed for a modular blockchain stack." It can be understood as helping other layers or chains to prove fraud and validity, and data availability depends on modular data layers such as Celestia.

Polygon Avail

Polygon Avail, a blockchain that records blockchain transactions and certifies that the data is available. It focuses on data availability & ordering and represents a key component of Polygon's vision for modular chain design.

Portalverse

PortalVerse, as the computing power infrastructure of Metaverse, aims to build a distributed cloud rendering network with GPU miners, AAA game content providers, and player communities through the groundbreaking decentralized streaming cloud rendering verification consensus protocol (PoSR), allowing anyone to enter a truly immersive virtual world anytime, anywhere with any device.

Portalverse Network has completed a multi-million dollar seed round with participation from Big Brain Holdings, Cogitent Ventures, Octopus Venture Dao, 2Moon Capital and individual angel investors.

Metabit

Metabit is a public chain for high-performance commercial applications that integrates decentralized algorithms, smart contracts, DeFi, NFT and other blockchain technologies for Metaverse scenarios. It is committed to building the underlying operating system of the future Metaverse and providing future Metaverse applications. The standard business ecological bottom layer has become a high-performance Web3.0 public chain, carrying applications such as decentralized finance, social networking, e-commerce, search, storage, and metaverse.

Metabit completed a $2 million seed round, led by Golden Bridge Capital and Eagle Capital, with participation from MCA, DG Capital, and Tiger Venture.

Decred-Next

Decred-Next plans to implement EVM, sharding, OmniLayer and other functions in the future.

Rubix

Rubix, a Layer 1 blockchain protocol for peer-to-peer data transfer and transactions, built by the Blockchain Association of Singapore (BAS), recently announced a $100 million investment from LDA Capital.

Aztec

Based on the underlying PLONK proof system, anonymous transactions between accounts are realized, and the privacy interaction with the Defi project is realized through the grafting of the gateway contract. Aztec Network completes a $17 million Series A round led by Paradigm.

Anoma

The new public chain protocol based on proof of stake creates a payment system that allows any digital asset to be used directly as a means of payment, enabling everyone to freely choose the digital asset or asset combination used in payment transactions.

Anoma has closed a $6.75 million seed round led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, FBG Capital, CMS Holdings, Lemniscap, Cygni Labs, and Walden Bridge Capital.

Milkomeda

The purpose of Mikomeda is to maximize the value of L1's native assets. It will connect to different non-evm-compatible L1 chains, and package the native assets of the non-evm-compatible L1 chain of the side chain(such as ADA's MikeADA), and the gas fee consumed on the side chain is MikeADA, the current first step is ADA, SOL, etc.

Scroll

Scroll is a Layer 2 Ethereum scaling network. It has received $30 million in Series A financing led by Polychain Capital, with participation from BainCapital Crypto, Robot Ventures, Geometry DAO and some Ethereum community members.

StarkNet

Operating as an L2 network on Ethereum enables any dApp to achieve unlimited scale of its computation without compromising Ethereum’s composability and security. Development company StarkWare has announced an $8 billion Series D round led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue, with participation from other existing and new investors, including Tiger Global.