Why Monolithic L1s Are Winning the Real-World Throughput Race

Splitting execution, settlement, and data availability across chains like Celestia and EigenDA introduces inherent latency for cross-domain communication. For high-frequency DeFi or gaming, this kills the user experience.

• Sequencer-to-Prover Latency: ~12 seconds for optimistic rollups.
• Prover-to-Settlement Latency: Adds another ~20 minutes for fraud proofs.
• Result: ~500ms monolithic finality vs. ~20+ minute modular finality for disputes.

Atomic composability—the ability for multiple smart contract calls to succeed or fail as one unit—is native to monolithic L1s like Solana and Sui. In modular stacks, cross-rollup transactions require slow, expensive bridging, breaking the seamless DeFi 'money legos' model.

• Example: A flash loan arbitrage across Aave and Uniswap on separate rollups is impossible.
• Cost: Bridges add ~$5-20+ in fees and ~3-10 minute delays per hop.

Monolithic L1s like Solana, Aptos, and Sui achieve 50k-200k+ TPS in lab conditions by optimizing every layer (networking, mempool, execution, storage) in a single, co-designed system. This avoids the coordination overhead of a modular stack.

• Parallel Execution: Sealevel and Block-STM enable non-conflicting transactions to process simultaneously.
• Native Fee Markets: Single gas token and mempool prevent MEV fragmentation seen in Ethereum's PBS + rollup landscape.

Building a high-performance dApp on a modular stack means managing infrastructure across multiple teams (Celestia, EigenLayer, Arbitrum). Monolithic L1s offer a single, deterministic environment with unified tooling (Solana's Anchor, Move for Aptos/Sui), reducing devops complexity and failure points.

• Unified State: No need for cross-chain messaging like LayerZero or Wormhole for core logic.
• Simplified Scaling: Throughput scales with the L1's upgrades, not by deploying another fragmented rollup.

Modular thesis assumes data availability (Celestia) is the bottleneck. For real apps, the cost of execution and proving dominates. Monolithic L1s amortize these costs over massive, parallelized blocks, while rollups pay for Ethereum calldata AND a separate prover network.

• Ethereum L2 Cost: ~$0.10 per simple swap (calldata + prover).
• Solana Cost: ~$0.0001 per swap (fully bundled execution).
• Hidden Cost: Modular security requires paying for EigenLayer restaking or a separate validator set.

Monolithic L1s provide sovereign security—a single, large validator set (e.g., Solana's 2000+ validators) securing all assets and apps. Modular rollups inherit security from a parent chain (Ethereum), but their execution layer is secured by a smaller, often permissioned sequencer set, creating a weaker trust assumption.

• Ethereum L2 Security: ~$90B ETH securing settlement, but only ~5-10 entities running sequencers.
• Attack Surface: A monolithic chain has one attack vector; a modular app has multiple (DA, settlement, bridge).

Cross-domain messaging between separate execution, settlement, and data layers introduces unavoidable latency and complexity overhead. This kills user experience for applications requiring fast, atomic composability.

• ~2-10 second finality for optimistic bridges vs. sub-second on monolithic L1s.
• Sequencer pre-confirmations (like Arbitrum) are a band-aid, not a solution, adding trust assumptions.
• Apps like high-frequency DEXs and on-chain games cannot tolerate this tax.

Solana's monolithic architecture with localized fee markets and a single global state enables sustained ~3k-5k TPS with ~400ms block times. This is the benchmark for real-world scaling.

• Sealevel parallel VM processes non-conflicting transactions simultaneously.
• No fragmented liquidity; all assets and protocols share the same state and security.
• The cost of synchronous composability (e.g., a single arbitrage transaction across 10 DEXs) is ~1000x cheaper than on a modular rollup stack.

Sovereign rollups (e.g., Celestia, Eclipse) offer theoretical sovereignty but impose operational burden on applications to bootstrap validators, sequencers, and liquidity. This is a non-starter for most teams.

• You are building an entire chain, not deploying a contract.
• Zero shared security with the parent chain; you must secure your own validator set.
• Fragmented liquidity and disjointed user experience isolate your app from the main economic hub.

Next-gen monolithic L1s like Aptos and Sui are betting on advanced VMs (Move) and aggressive parallelization to push throughput beyond 100k TPS. This is an architectural moat.

• Move's resource-oriented model enables safer, more efficient on-chain assets.
• BlockSTM (Aptos) and Narwhal-Bullshark (Sui) are parallel execution engines that dynamically find concurrency.
• This creates a developer experience advantage where scaling is automatic, not a puzzle of layer-2 orchestration.

Modularity fragments liquidity across dozens of rollups and L2s. Bridges like LayerZero and Axelar are bandwidth constrictors, not liquidity unifiers. This creates arbitrage opportunities but cripples capital efficiency for end-users.

• TVL is trapped in silos; moving it is slow and expensive.
• Yield farming across chains requires managing 5+ different wallets and gas tokens.
• Monolithic L1s like Solana and Avalanche (with its subnets) keep liquidity in a single, deep pool.

The primary cost for a successful application is user acquisition and retention, not gas fees. Monolithic L1s with superior UX (speed, simplicity) win here. Ethereum L2s compete on cost, but monolithic L1s compete on experience.

• Solana's Phantom wallet UX is a generation ahead of fragmented EVM meta-transaction hell.
• ~$0.001 average transaction cost is cheap enough for 99% of use cases.
• The market has voted: Solana's daily active addresses consistently 2-5x Ethereum's.