Corporate chains are the new Alt-L1’s, not L1 infrastructure layer killers. New corporate L1s” being launched by payments and stablecoin companies aren’t substitutes for a general-purpose, credibly neutral base layer like Ethereum. They are purpose-built execution environments whose economics, governance and risk envelopes look and feel like specialized infrastructure—powerful for their use cases, but fundamentally different animals. If anything, their success increases the surface area where Ethereum matters. 1) What corporate L1s are actually optimizing for When a Stripe, Circle, or Tether builds a chain, they’re optimizing first for their own product constraints: throughput for a specific asset type (stablecoins), integrated compliance controls, predictable cost, and tight coupling to off-chain treasury/settlement systems. Circle says this explicitly with Arc: an “open Layer-1…purpose-built for stablecoin finance” designed to meet “enterprise-grade” demands. That is not a general-purpose mandate; it’s a payments-and-settlement mandate with programmable hooks. Stripe’s “Tempo” is motivated by the claim that “existing blockchains are not optimized” for Stripe-scale stablecoin usage. Whether or not Tempo is public yet, the rationale is clear: build rails that precisely match a corporate pipeline’s latency, cost and compliance profile. Tether’s recent moves also underline this specialization. It’s actively pruning and refocusing its supported chains to those with “high-utility” usage, a very corporate platform-fit lens. This is not a signal to replace general networks; it’s a move to optimize issuance and redemption flow for a single asset (USD₮) across ledgers where it sees meaningful activity. 2) “Alt-L1s,” not “True L1s” in the Ethereum sense Ethereum’s L1 is a general-purpose, credibly neutral settlement and execution environment with an open developer commons. Its purpose is not “USDC throughput” or “corporate rail X.” That difference is architectural and social: decentralized governance, broad programmability, permissionless entry, and an economic model built around global neutrality. Two signals make this concrete. First, developers: Ethereum remains among the largest hubs of monthly active developers in crypto (the leading indicator of future capability), even as other ecosystems surge. That developer bedrock is what makes general-purpose claims real rather than rhetorical. Second, economic gravity: Ethereum still anchors the majority share of DeFi capital, roughly ~60% by recent measures, where composability and liquidity are deepest. That is the neutral “town square” corporate chains will want to integrate with whenever they need global liquidity, collateral, or programmable finance beyond their native walled gardens. 3) The game for “general-purpose L1” dominance is effectively over The cost of bootstrapping a truly general-purpose L1 is not just technical (consensus, clients, security) but social (developers, tooling, liquidity, integrated standards, governance legitimacy). That compounding flywheel is brutally hard to replicate in 2025. Corporate L1s sidestep this by narrowing scope: they set the rules to fit a targeted business, pre-seed demand with their own users, and trim away “neutrality costs” that a global public network bears by design. It’s rational, but it’s also an admission that being a general-purpose L1 is a different, largely settled contest. Watch the tokenization wave to see this clearly. When BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager launched its flagship tokenized fund (BUIDL), it chose Ethereum because that is where institutional custody, wallet infrastructure, developer tooling, and composable DeFi primitives already are. Others (Goldman/BNY, Fidelity, Citi, JPMorgan via Onyx) are building rails and tokens, but the connective tissue repeatedly intersects Ethereum’s liquidity and standards. 4) If the Alt-L1s win, Ethereum still wins Success for purpose-built corporate L1s will increase the need for robust, neutral interoperability, routing settlement, collateral, liquidity and risk management across ledgers. That’s precisely where Ethereum’s role strengthens: as the highest-liquidity, most composable, broadest-tooling nexus to “plug into.” Even the World Economic Forum observed that fragmented ledgers create friction and trapped liquidity; the cure is interoperability with credible, neutral hubs. Corporate chains will either bridge to those hubs or reinvent a lot of public-domain innovation…only to rediscover why neutrality and openness matter. We already see the direction of travel. Payments incumbents are rolling out “open issuance” and custom-stablecoin tooling, but the promise only becomes compelling at scale when these assets can traverse into the broader onchain economy, collateralized in DeFi, custodied institutionally, settled against other assets, and integrated into wallets and apps users already rely on. That broader economy’s deepest pool remains Ethereum. 5) You can’t do serious onchain finance without touching Ethereum Follow the money. DeFi TVL hit fresh cycle highs this quarter, led by Ethereum. The densest fabric of protocols for lending, liquidity, derivatives, identity, custody workflows and compliance add-ons still lives there. Institutions piloting or scaling tokenization (money market funds, repo, collateral mobility) keep intersecting with Ethereum infrastructure, even when their internal platforms are permissioned, because network effects in liquidity and tooling matter more than any single corporate stack. This is not to diminish corporate L1s. They will likely excel at what they’re built for: regulated asset issuance, high-assurance payments, tightly integrated compliance, and deterministic throughput for a particular product surface. Expect them to ship compelling features (e.g., native KYCed subnets, deterministic sequencing windows, audit-friendly data access) and to compete vigorously on merchant and institutional UX. But those strengths do not negate the need for a neutral, general-purpose settlement commons; they increase it. 6) The emerging division of labor •Corporate L1s (Alt-L1s): vertically integrated rails for a company’s assets and flows (e.g., USDC/USDT issuance, merchant payouts), optimized for compliance, cost control, and product fit. They’ll interoperate outward when they need liquidity, collateral, or distribution. •Ethereum L1 (+ L2s): credibly neutral base for global programmability, security, and composability where independent developers build, assets intermingle, and institutions meet the broader onchain economy under open standards. The locus for tokenization liquidity (BUIDL and peers), developer tooling, and DeFi depth today. 7) Strategic takeaway Calling these new corporate chains “L1s” can confuse the conversation. Yes, they are base layers of their own systems. But in the macro topology of onchain finance, they are Alternative L1s, special-purpose railroads that will run next to, and often through, the general-purpose interstate. The more they grow, the more they’ll need to cross the Ethereum junctions where liquidity, standards and developers already congregate. That’s why the “game for general-purpose L1” is effectively won: the compounding advantages, developer flywheel, composable liquidity, institutional footholds, are entrenched. The rational move for corporates is to interoperate, not to fight the terrain. Bottom line: if these Alt-L1s succeed, Ethereum benefits, because the serious, scalable things you want to do onchain (especially in institutional finance) still require touching the largest, most neutral, most composable blockchain infrastructure in production today.