Best Nonprofit Layer 1 Protocols of 2025

Hive

Hive has a thriving ecosystem of over 126 apps, communities & projects and is home to some of the most-used Web3 apps in the world, such as Splinterlands, PeakD and HiveBlog. Wallets are incredibly important to securely store your cryptocurrencies and to interact with Web3 apps. Hive has multiple community-owned and open-source wallets available for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android & Web. The development of Hive and its ecosystem is made possible by contributors. To incentivize crucial work, such as Core Development, a DAO-like structure: the Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF), is being leveraged to intelligently fund important work.

109 Ratings

Starting Price: Free

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Velas

The fork of Solana with embedded EVM integration. Fastest EVM/EBPF hybrid chain inherited best from Solana and applied to EVM world. Supports all smart contracts built on the Ethereum blockchain. Extremely efficient performance at a fraction of the cost. Stake to support decentralization and get rewards. Through the Velas Network users gain access to decentralized services, delegating the security of his passwords, keys or seed-phrases to segmentation algorithms and validators that are interested in data security. Most important, this information will be distributed over the network and not available to any of its participants.

6 Ratings

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TRON

TRON Foundation

DAppChain is TRON's sidechain project. The goal is to help DApps to operate on TRON with lower energy consumption, faster speed and enhanced safety, providing unlimited capacity for TRON's main network. High throughput is achieved by improving the TPS in TRON, which has surpassed Bitcoin and Ethereum, to a daily-use practical degree. Applications are given a wider variety of ways to be deployed in TRON because of its scalability and highly effective smart contract. It can support enormous numbers of users. More reliable network structure, user asset, intrinsic value and a higher degree of decentralization consensus come with an improved rewards distribution mechanism. A decentralized trading platform under Poloniex, formerly known as TRON's largest decentralized trading platform TRXMarket, and for long ranked among Top 5 in TRON's DApp ecosystem in terms of trading volume.

2 Ratings

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MultiversX

MultiversX (formerly Elrond) is a highly scalable, secure and decentralized blockchain network created to enable radically new applications, for users, businesses, society, and the new metaverse frontier. Scale across the Multiverse. Build new apps, new economies, new worlds. Sovereign blockchain module, and core blockchain applications. Deployable in minutes. Fully customizable. Including a great set of features and use cases for any creative, brand, or company. The portal to the Metaverse. The home of your avatar. Everything finance. A debit card. Friends, chat and social. Accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. A world creation engine. A network of interoperable metaverses. The very first Metaverse planet of this new world.

1 Rating

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Meter

Decentralized Finance Labs

Meter is a high performance infrastructure that allows smart contracts to scale and travel seamlessly through heterogeneous blockchain networks. Meter is a Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchain protocol. The Meter system consists of two tokens: MTRG, the governance token (eMTRG is the ERC20 version), and MTR, the low-volatility currency token. Financial assets should flow freely among blockchains. Meter’s HotStuff-based consensus allows 1000s of validator nodes, making Meter the most decentralized Layer 2 for Ethereum. Meter processes thousands of transactions per second and transactions are confirmed almost instantly. Meter Passport allows assets and smart contracts travel and communicate across heterogeneous blockchains for the best price, liquidity and yield. Meter is an Ethereum Compatible with unique enhancements. Unlike other Layer 2, DEXes build on Meter are front running/MEV resistant, fast and uncensorable.

1 Rating

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Bitcoin

Bitcoin is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority or banks; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is open-source; its design is public, nobody owns or controls Bitcoin and everyone can take part. Through many of its unique properties, Bitcoin allows exciting uses that could not be covered by any previous payment system. Bitcoin transactions are secured by mathematics and energy. Cryptographic signatures prevent other people from spending your money. Energy spent by proof of work (PoW) prevents other people from undoing, rearranging or losing your transactions. So long as you take the required steps to protect your wallet, Bitcoin can give you control over your money and a strong level of protection against many types of fraud.

1 Rating

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Stellar

Stellar Development Foundation

Stellar makes it possible to create, send, and trade digital representations of all forms of money: dollars, pesos, bitcoin, pretty much anything. It’s designed so all the world’s financial systems can work together on a single network. Stellar's API and SDKs are ready to help you transform the world of finance, and the network’s currency connections could give even a small company the power and reach of an international bank. Leverage the many currency-backed tokens already on the Stellar network. Use Stellar's built-in decentralized exchange for crypto, forex, or securities. Users can swap between tokens using simple functions built into the protocol. Leverage the Stellar Disbursement Platform (SDP) to initiate and disburse bulk payments that move in real-time and settle instantly 24/7/365 with full certainty of funds delivery. Stellar has the documentation, tooling, and support to help you get your project up quickly.

Starting Price: $0

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Zano

Zano is an open source platform designed to provide a simple, efficient way to manage and monitor personal data and digital identity. It allows users to take control of their online presence by offering tools for secure file storage, communication, and access management. Zano emphasizes privacy and security, providing end-to-end encryption for sensitive data and ensuring that users' information is protected from unauthorized access. It is designed for individuals who are concerned about the security of their personal information and want to safeguard their digital identity in a user-friendly environment. Zano also includes features such as customizable privacy settings, enabling users to control who can access their data and how it is shared. By combining secure storage and communication tools, Zano provides a comprehensive solution for managing and protecting personal digital assets.

Starting Price: Free

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Polkadot

Polkadot is a blockchain network being built to enable Web 3.0, a decentralized and fair internet where users control their own data and markets prosper from network efficiency and security. Polkadot was founded in 2016 by Gavin Wood, former Co-Founder and CTO of Ethereum. Polkadot’s technology addresses the major issues that have stymied blockchain adoption in recent years. Polkadot’s software development toolkit, Substrate, created by Parity Technologies, makes it easy for blockchain developers to build their own custom, fit-for-use blockchains. Polkadot also enables multiple blockchains to communicate between each other, allows for easy upgradeability, and introduces “shared security”, a plug-and-play network security model that allows developers to focus on the technology and avoid spending time and resources recruiting a set of operators to run a new blockchain.

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NEAR

NEAR Blockchain

The Builder’s fastest path to market, NEAR is an open source platform that accelerates the development of decentralized applications. Building the tools to enable community-driven innovation that benefits people around the world. Near Inc is building NEAR, a new application platform designed to bring blockchain to wide variety of mainstream applications. Focusing on developer and end user experience, NEAR is high performance infrastructure that real people can use. NEAR is a decentralized application platform that is secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of the Open Web in their hands. NEAR’s token economy is built around the NEAR token, a unit of value on the platform that enables token holders to use applications on NEAR, participate in network governance, and earn token rewards by staking to the network.

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Bitcoin Diamond

With lower transaction fees than any credit card, better exchange rates than any government-backed currency, and faster transaction confirmations than other digital payments, Bitcoin Diamond is the internet’s native currency. Bitcoin Diamond is a global currency that you can use to purchase products from any country and have them shipped to your doorstep, anywhere in the world. It all costs less than a penny per transaction and no currency exchange is required. With traditional government-backed currency, it can be difficult to protect your money from theft and inflation. Bitcoin Diamond is a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain, the most widely-used and most secure cryptocurrency. Unlike fiat currency, Bitcoin Diamond has a limited supply to make sure inflation is kept under control. It is based on a decentralized blockchain that keeps inflation under control by design; it can be easily accessed from any location; each transaction is verified by multiple computers around the world.

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Concordium

A blockchain that’s compliance ready with today’s and tomorrow’s economies. That enables private and public transactions. That offers high throughput, fast transactions, and predictable fees. That allows businesses, developers, and traders to harness blockchain’s true power and potential. Concordium’s decentralised blockchain technology is the first with layer-one ID built into the protocol. This means it offers forward-thinking businesses, application developers, and cryptocurrency traders unrivalled security, privacy, transparency and most importantly, compliance with regulations, if and when these come through. Utilizing zero-knowledge-proofs (ZKP) allows parties to verify information without exchanging or storing that information on-chain other than hash functions, so users can trust that their confidential business will become no one else’s business.

Starting Price: Free

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Vision Chain

The First Blockchain Built for GameFi and Metaverse. Vision expects to create a high-performance, interoperability, scalability, and high security metaverse space, to lower the threshold for users to enter it. Evolved from PoS, the protocol is the culmination of tireless effort. The VPoS network is composed of worldwide and independent validator nodes, with Very high safety factor, make it convenient login, difficult to attack. Transactions on Vision are finalized in seconds and cost little. Vision is compatible with EVM, helping users deploy and run their Ethereum dApps on Vision easily. Vision is fully compatible with Ethereum. Deploy your dApps at a fraction of the cost and experiment with Vision’s high performance. Vision code is completely open source. Everyone can read it, check on the progress, comment on it, and help us build the ecosystem. Vision Metaverse Go! Creator is a content creation-focused, scripted, component-based and data-driven game development tool.

Starting Price: Free

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Bitgert

Bitgert is a revolutionary crypto engineering organization that aims to revolutionize the way people interact with digital assets. Through their numerous projects, Bitgert has created a comprehensive ecosystem of products that cover all aspects of digital asset ownership. From the Bitgert Chain, which is a super-fast blockchain with over 100,000 transactions per second, to the Bitgert centralized crypto exchange that offers zero-fee trading experiences, Bitgert has a full suite of products that make it easy for everyone to engage with cryptocurrencies. With all these products and more, Bitgert is the fastest-growing ecosystem in the crypto space, offering a comprehensive set of solutions to meet all the needs of the modern digital asset owner. Bitgert Chain is the only blockchain that has low-cost transaction fees. Our ecosystem can provide you with the necessary resources to scale your project, with the assistance of our dedicated community and development teams.

Starting Price: $0.001 per transaction

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Ripple

Ripple Labs

Discover why 200+ financial institutions choose RippleNet to find new customers in new markets, expand services and deliver the best experience in global payments today. Too often, global payments are costly, unreliable and slow. The underlying systems are fragmented and complex. RippleNet offers the most advanced blockchain technology for global payments—making it easy for financial institutions to reach a trusted, growing network of 200+ providers across 40+ countries and  six continents. Using proven crypto and blockchain technology honed over a decade, Ripple’s enterprise-grade solutions are faster, more transparent, and more cost-effective than traditional financial services. Our customers use these solutions to source crypto, facilitate instant payments, empower their treasury, engage new audiences, lower capital requirements, and drive new revenue.

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Filecoin

The Filecoin mainnet is here. Join today to make deals, store data, and earn FIL. The Filecoin network achieves staggering economies of scale by allowing anyone to participate as a storage provider and monetize their open hard drive space. The Filecoin network is designed to reward participants at multiple levels — from large scale data centers to local entrepreneurs with mining rigs that cover the last mile. Miners combine disks and other hardware to win storage deals, store data, and earn filecoin. Mining configurations range from desktop computers to large racks with disks and compute. No useless proof-of-work here. Storing more files is directly related to winning more block rewards. The more storage you add, the more filecoin you’ll earn. With the Filecoin retrieval market, miners will be rewarded for delivering content quickly.

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Ethereum

Ethereum Foundation

Ethereum is the community-run technology powering the cryptocurrency, ether (ETH) and thousands of decentralized applications. Ethereum is a technology that's home to digital money, global payments, and applications. The community has built a booming digital economy, bold new ways for creators to earn online, and so much more. It's open to everyone, wherever you are in the world – all you need is the internet. Today, billions of people can’t open bank accounts, others have their payments blocked. Ethereum's decentralized finance (DeFi) system never sleeps or discriminates. With just an internet connection, you can send, receive, borrow, earn interest, and even stream funds anywhere in the world. Today, we gain access to 'free' internet services by giving up control of our personal data. Ethereum services are open by default – you just need a wallet. Stake your ETH to become an Ethereum validator.

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Kava

Kava Labs

Kava is a DeFi platform for decentralized lending and stablecoins compatible with major cryptocurrencies. It owns a cross-chain that offers guaranteed loans and stablecoins to users of the main crypto assets, including BTC, XRP, BNB or ATOM, among others. Users can guarantee their cryptocurrencies in exchange for USDX, Kava's stablecoin. Two types of tokens can be found on the platform, the KAVA coin and the USDX stablecoin. KAVA is the native token of the blockchain and is comprehensive in the security, governance, and mechanical functions of the platform. A highly scalable and secure Cosmos SDK blockchain that connects Kava to the 30 chains and $60B+ of the Cosmos ecosystem via the IBC protocol. An EVM-compatible execution environment that empowers Solidity developers and their dApps to benefit from the scalability and security of the Kava Network. With single-block finality and unrivaled scalability, Tendermint Consensus enables Kava to support your transaction needs.

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BNB Smart Chain (BSC)

BNB Chain (Binance)

BNB Smart Chain (BSC) is a blockchain platform developed by Binance, designed to enable decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts. It operates as a parallel chain to Binance Chain, combining high-speed transactions with the programmability of Ethereum-compatible smart contracts. BSC uses a Proof-of-Staked-Authority (PoSA) consensus mechanism, which enhances scalability and efficiency while reducing transaction costs. It is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing developers to easily port dApps and projects from Ethereum. BSC has become a popular choice for decentralized finance (DeFi), gaming, and NFT ecosystems, offering users a fast, low-cost, and secure platform for blockchain-based innovations.

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Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger

Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise-grade, distributed ledger platform that offers modularity and versatility for a broad set of industry use cases. The modular architecture for Hyperledger Fabric accommodates the diversity of enterprise use cases through plug and play components, such as consensus, privacy and membership services. Hyperledger Fabric is intended as a foundation for developing applications or solutions with a modular architecture. Hyperledger Fabric allows components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play. Its modular and versatile design satisfies a broad range of industry use cases. It offers a unique approach to consensus that enables performance at scale while preserving privacy. One of the many compelling Fabric features is the enablement of a network of networks. Members of a network work together, but because businesses need some of their data to remain private, they often maintain separate relationships within their networks.

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Algorand

Technology that enables frictionless finance. We are the technology company that built and developed the world’s first open, permissionless, pure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol that, without forking, provides the necessary security, scalability, and decentralization needed for today’s economy. With an award-winning team, we enable traditional finance and decentralized financial businesses to embrace the world of frictionless finance. Advanced technology paving the way for sophisticated applications. Comprehensive smart contract capabilities enable DeFi solutions and dApps that can scale to billions of users, tens of millions of daily transactions, with negligible transaction fees. Algorand Standard Assets are standard blockchain assets with customizable options, directly in Layer-1. Secure transfers and immediate transaction settlement for multiparty transactions built in Layer-1. Enabling enterprise to embrace decentralized finance.

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Kusama

Unprecedented interoperability and scalability for blockchain developers who want to quickly push the limits of what’s possible. Built using Substrate with nearly the same codebase and industry-leading multichain infrastructure as Kusama’s cousin, Polkadot. The relationship between society and technology has deteriorated to the point where large entities routinely stretch and overstep their authority. Kusama is a network built as a risk-taking, fast-moving ‘canary in the coal mine’ for its cousin Polkadot. It's a living platform built for change agents to take back control, spark innovation and disrupt the status quo. Move fast and ship your product. Kusama’s risk-taking and nimble mentality allows developers to move swiftly through the governance and upgrade process, enabling rapid progress and growth. Build on a next-generation, sharded, multichain network, while employing the newest features before they are deployed on Polkadot.

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VeChain

The public blockchain that derives its value from activities created by members within the ecosystem solving real world economic problems. With BlockRef and Expiration transaction fields, users can set the time when transaction is processed or expired if not being included in a block. Flexible transaction fee delegation schemes (Multi-party Payment and Designated Gas Payer) enable a freemium model within a decentralized application to onboard users without friction. Multi-function atomic transactions allow developers to batch payments, add multiple calls to different contract functions into one transaction and determine their sequence. Set dependencies to ensure the execution order meets the business need, transactions that specify a dependency will not be executed until the required transaction is processed.

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EOS

EOSIO

Our platform provides industry-leading transaction speeds and a sub-second block time latency rate, providing the ability for EOSIO to support mission-critical applications. Deploy public, private, permissioned or permissionless blockchain infrastructures. Implement custom programmable governance and business logic through executable smart contracts. Customize to suit your business and application needs. Developers can access an ever-expanding set of products, features, and tools, with extensive training & certification provided by our EOSIO experts to take your skills to the next level. Whether you are a blockchain novice or expert, you can quickly onboard and scale projects on EOSIO. Benefit from the latest in blockchain and web security verification standards with end-to-end authentication that enables superior data integrity.

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Avalanche

Build on Avalanche. Build without limits. Avalanche is an open, programmable platform for decentralized finance applications. Launch Ethereum dapps that confirm transactions instantly and process thousands of transactions per second, far beyond any decentralized blockchain platform today. Deploy blockchains that fit your own application needs. Build your own virtual machine and dictate exactly how the blockchain should operate. Stake, or lock up, your AVAX to help process transactions and further secure the platform–providing security guarantees well-above the 51% standard. You probably have the hardware required to join the platform. Avalanche is Solidity-compatible. All of your favorite tools like Remix, Truffle, and Tenderly work out of the box. Deploying smart contracts on Avalanche cost just a tenth of what they cost on Ethereum. High gas fees, front-running, and other adverse effects of slow smart contract blockchains are now a thing of the past.

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Internet Computer

DFINITY

The last original Layer 1 blockchain project is launching a revolutionary public network that provides a limitless environment for smart contracts that run at web speed, serve web, scale, and reduce compute costs by a million times or more. Build everything from DeFi, to mass market tokenized social media services that run on-chain, or extend Ethereum dapps. Chase the blockchain singularity. Limitless blockchain with the power, speed and scale of the Internet. Build tokenized mass market social media services exclusively from smart contracts.

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Fetch.ai

At Fetch.ai we build tools and infrastructure to enable a decentralized digital economy. Fetch.ai’s network is based around an open-source technology that any user can run to connect to the network, giving access to the power of AI on a world-scale secure dataset, to carry out complex coordination tasks in the modern economy. On this network a series of software agents represent and act on behalf of their owners. These autonomous agents work to provide an optimised service across a variety of ecosystems, to the benefit of both suppliers and consumers. This system has wide potential in many areas. Financial services users can optimize trading, public transport networks could be reconfigured, cities could intelligently adapt to usage by their citizens, the gig economy could be restructured, and energy networks can be connected in a smart grid.

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Arweave

Arweave is a new type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to truly store data forever, for the very first time. As a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets, Arweave allows us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely. By preserving history, it prevents others from rewriting it. On top of the Arweave network lives the permaweb, a global, community-owned web that anyone can contribute to or get paid to maintain. The permaweb looks just like the normal web, but all of its content, from images to full web apps, is permanent, retrieved quickly, and decentralized, forever. Just as the first web connected people over vast distances, the permaweb connects people over extremely long periods of time. No more 404s, no more stealth edits, and no more web apps that decline in quality.

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Flow

Flow Blockchain

Flow is a new blockchain built for the next generation of apps, games, and the digital assets that power them. Flow was designed from the ground up as a foundation for internet-scale protocols and applications that also require exceptional user experience. Conceived by the team behind CryptoKitties, Flow was developed and stress-tested with top global partners and is now open for anyone to contribute to and benefit from. Battle-tested in production and ready to help you build the kinds of applications that people want to use. A simple feature that will pay dividends in software quality and development speed. A new easy-to-learn programming language designed for dapps and digital assets. Securely and transparently patch bugs and upgrade pre-specified parts of a smart contract. Flow is built to be fast and responsive – achieving global finality within seconds.

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Terra

Anchor Protocol allows Terra stablecoin deposits to earn stable yield, powered by block rewards of leading proof-of-stake blockchains. Terra stablecoins offer instant settlements, low fees and seamless cross-border exchange - loved by millions of users and merchants. Mirror Protocol allows the creation of fungible assets, “synthetics”, that track the price of real world assets. Mirror synthetics are intended to be used as key building blocks in smart contracts, and to bring the world’s assets to the blockchain. Build smart contracts in Rust, Go, or AssemblyScript. Run on multiple chains, connected by the Cosmos IBC. Use Terra stablecoins, onchain swaps, layer 1 oracles as primitives. Expose dApp userbases to Terra's payment services in a permissionless fashion. Terra aims to make its stablecoins available to every developer on every blockchain. Now live on Ethereum and Solana, and coming to more soon.

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Best Nonprofit Layer 1 Protocols

Compare the Top Nonprofit Layer 1 Protocols as of August 2025

What are Nonprofit Layer 1 Protocols?