Unit 4 · Level 2 · The multichain world
Alt-L1s
While Ethereum built layers, other L1s attacked the trilemma head-on. Solana is the poster child: blocks under a second apart, fees at fractions of a cent, thousands of transactions per second, achieved partly by expecting nodes to run serious hardware. The bill showed up as reliability: in 2022 alone, Solana suffered several full outages, some lasting hours. Treat that as data rather than a gotcha. Monolithic speed versus modular layering is a genuine design fork, and both sides are still iterating.
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What you get asked
How does Solana achieve its famous speed?
Heavier machines, tighter timing, huge throughput on one layer. It's the trilemma again: raw speed, paid for at the node-accessibility counter.
Solana went fully offline several times in 2022. How should a clear-eyed learner read that?
Funds weren't stolen, but a halted chain serves nobody. Treat outages as data about the design's tradeoffs, not as ammunition for one tribe or another.
Match each design to its description
One kitchen doing everything fast, or a restaurant with specialised stations: two credible architectures, two different failure modes.
Solana went fully offline several times in ___, a reminder that uptime is part of the tradeoff.
A rough year on the reliability front, though to Solana's credit, stability improved notably in the years after.
What's the fair way to compare L1 chains?
Every chain is a bundle of tradeoffs. Measure the whole bundle (speed, uptime, who can verify) and skip the tribal warfare. 🐜
The rest of this unit
Alt-L1s, bridge hacks, and the honest fight over crypto's endgame.