How an Institution Chooses a Chain: Ethereum, L2s, Solana, Stellar, Canton, Arc, Tempo and Private Ledgers Compared

Ethereum is a public chain that has run since 30 July 2015 and has used proof of stake since the Merge of 15 September 2022. It has about 830,000 active validators, by validatorqueue.com's count, holding 43.7 million staked ETH. Each validator is a key with at least 32 ETH, anyone can add one, and one operator can run many keys. Finality, the point after which a transfer cannot be reversed, comes once two-thirds of stake has attested across two epochs. Blocks arrive every 12 seconds, and ethereum.org puts finality at "about 15 minutes"; the same page says single-slot finality "is not expected to ship for several years". Finality has not been lost on mainnet since May 2023. During a Prysm client bug on 4 December 2025, participation fell as low as 75%, according to Prysm's post-mortem, and blocks kept finalizing.

More investor-held tokenized value sits on Ethereum than on any other chain: rwa.xyz counted $16.89 billion of the $39.28 billion in distributed real-world assets, stablecoins excluded, on 18 October 2026. BlackRock launched BUIDL there in March 2024, and on that reading it kept $452.0 million of the fund's $2.17 billion on Ethereum. J.P. Morgan Asset Management's JLTXX, a registered government money market fund launched on 13 May 2026, held $738.7 million there. The protocol has no identity layer, so who may hold a token is decided in its contract, through ERC-3643 or an allowlisted ERC-20. The platforms that issue such fund tokens are compared in fund tokenization providers.

Fifteen minutes is long for intraday settlement, and public state lets anyone reading the chain see the positions and transfers of an issuer's clients. Fees are paid in ETH: at a gas price of about 0.07 gwei and ETH at about $2,366, both read on 18 October 2026, a plain ETH transfer cost about $0.0035 and a token transfer about $0.011. A US national bank may hold the crypto "necessary to pay network fees" under the OCC's Interpretive Letter 1186. For a bank's own capital, the open validator set is the harder problem, set out under the Basel question below.

Base and Arbitrum One are Ethereum layer 2 rollups: they execute transactions off Ethereum, post the data back to it and let holders withdraw to Ethereum after a proof window. L2Beat rates Base Stage 1, the middle of its three stages, between a rollup controlled by a few entities and one controlled fully by code. It records that Base left the Optimism Superchain's governance on 4 March 2026 with its own upgrade path. Coinbase runs Base's sequencer, the service that orders transactions before they are posted to Ethereum. A user can force a transaction in through Ethereum with up to a 12-hour delay, and upgrades approved by the Base Coordinator Multisig and the Base Security Council apply with no delay. Arbitrum One is also Stage 1, with permissionless validation under BoLD and a challenge period of 6 days 8 hours, extended by 2 days if a claim is challenged. Its sequencer is maintained by the Arbitrum Foundation.

Base's finality documentation puts a Flashblock preconfirmation at about 200 ms, an L2 block at about 2 seconds and finality on Ethereum at about 20 minutes. A withdrawal waits 5 days with one proof, or 1 day when both the TEE and ZK provers agree. Base also has the heavier recent incident record of the two: a 17-minute halt on 21 September 2024 and a 33-minute halt on 5 August 2025. Base's own post-mortem describes a 116-minute block production outage from 15:47 UTC on 25 June 2026, which recurred for 20 minutes the next day, caused by a bug in the sequencer's block-building logic. Arbitrum's own status page reports 100% sequencer uptime since November 2024.

J.P. Morgan describes JPM Coin (JPMD) as "a deposit token issued on the Layer 2 Ethereum network Base" and says it "operates on a public blockchain where only vetted counterparties transact". It went live for institutional clients on 12 November 2025 after a June 2025 pilot, and 1,001,000 JPMD were in supply on 18 October 2026. An allowlisted token on a public chain gives a bank's own clients public-chain reach without a private ledger; whether the instrument should be a deposit token at all is covered in tokenized deposits vs stablecoins. Base now offers such controls natively: its docs say the B20 token standard "ships with a built-in compliance toolkit". Base Ledgers, which keeps balances and counterparties off public explorers, was still in early access that day.

Solana is a public proof-of-stake chain with 680 vote accounts on 18 October 2026, 18 of which held more than a third of the 437 million SOL staked. Its docs count a block as confirmed once it is voted on by "more than two-thirds of the network's active stake". On 19 October 2026, Solana's Alpenglow page put finality at "about 12.8 seconds" and the upgrade's target at "roughly 150 milliseconds", and said it "activates on mainnet in epoch 1064, which starts on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at approximately 15:00 UTC". A post-Alpenglow finality figure should be measured before it goes into a settlement design. For the migration, the page requires an Agave-based client and excludes Firedancer and Frankendancer.

Institutional use on Solana is mostly funds and dollar settlement. BUIDL's Solana share class, launched on 25 March 2025, is its largest leg, at $871.7 million. Visa launched US USDC settlement over Solana on 16 December 2025 as part of its stablecoin settlement pilot, with Cross River Bank and Lead Bank as the first banks settling. J.P. Morgan arranged a Galaxy commercial paper issue on Solana on 11 December 2025, settled in USDC, with Coinbase and Franklin Templeton as buyers. State Street and Galaxy launched their SWEEP fund there on 5 May 2026, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management added a JLTXX leg in September.

Issuer controls live in the token program. Solana's Token-2022 extensions add transfer hooks, a permanent delegate, a default account state, pause and confidential balances; confidential transfers were switched off after a bug in June 2025 and have been back on mainnet since 17 June 2026. Solana's fee docs set a base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature, about $0.0005 at the 18 October 2026 SOL price of about $102, half of it burned, plus optional priority fees. Its payments docs show how a separate fee payer can sponsor both. Programs are written in Rust, through Anchor, Pinocchio or native Rust, for Solana's own virtual machine rather than the EVM. USD stablecoins on Solana total $15.5 billion, third after Ethereum and Tron.

Stellar reaches consensus through the Stellar Consensus Protocol and closes a ledger about every 5 seconds. On 18 October 2026 its top tier held 30 validators from 10 organizations, according to OBSRVR's Radar network crawl. Among them were Franklin Templeton, MoneyGram, Blockdaemon, Figure Certificate Company and the Stellar Development Foundation, and four organizations formed a minimum blocking set. Issuers of regulated assets can require authorization, revoke it and claw tokens back through asset flags. Franklin Templeton's BENJI has used Stellar as its primary chain since April 2021, SG-FORGE added EURCV on 10 March 2026, and DTCC plans to connect its Tokenization Service to Stellar, with availability in the first half of 2027. How EURCV compares with EURC and five other euro tokens on redemption, payout time and reserve attestation is set out in our euro stablecoin guide.

The XRP Ledger's default Unique Node List names 35 validators, the same list at Ripple and the XRPL Foundation, and consensus needs 80% of them. Its compliance features came as amendments: Clawback in February 2024, DeepFreeze in May 2025, Credentials in September 2025, and Permissioned Domains and a Permissioned DEX in February 2026. SG-FORGE put EURCV on XRPL on 18 February 2026, Aviva Investors launched a tokenized share class of its USD Liquidity Fund there on 29 July 2026, and Ripple's RLUSD held $1.03 billion on the ledger. Axiology's EU DLT Pilot venue runs on a permissioned, modified version of the XRP Ledger rather than on the public one.

Stellar's base fee is 100 stroops, about $0.000002 at the 18 October 2026 XLM price of about $0.174, and a third party can pay it through a fee-bump transaction. XRPL burns 10 drops per transaction, about $0.00001 at that day's XRP price of about $1.27, and holds reserves of 1 XRP per account plus 0.2 XRP per object; its fee-sponsorship amendment had 9 of 32 votes. Stellar's Soroban contracts are written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, and no general smart-contract amendment is enabled on the XRP Ledger. Stellar connects through CCTP, LayerZero and Axelar; XRPL through Axelar and an EVM sidechain run under proof of authority since June 2025. Neither had native private transfers yet. XRPL halted for 10 minutes on 25 November 2024 and for over an hour on 4 February 2025, by its own vulnerability report and the rippled fix. Stellar did not halt, but the Stellar Development Foundation's post-mortem describes a state-archival bug that corrupted ledger entries from September 2025 until it was found that October.

Avalanche runs a Primary Network, whose C-Chain is the public EVM chain, with 595 validators on 18 October 2026, and supports Avalanche L1s, chains with their own validators and rules. Since the Etna upgrade of December 2024, L1 validators no longer stake 2,000 AVAX. A permissioned L1 can use a proof-of-authority validator manager under which only the owner changes the validator set, and allowlist precompiles decide who may send transactions or deploy contracts. That is the closest public-chain design to a bank-run network, but the named institutional example, Spruce, with T. Rowe Price, WisdomTree, Wellington and Cumberland, is still described as a testnet in Avalanche's own announcements. On the C-Chain, BUIDL held $481.6 million, its second-largest leg, and the Helicon upgrade of 22 September 2026 set settlement 5 seconds after a block is accepted. On 18 October 2026 a C-Chain transfer cost about $0.001 in AVAX, at a base fee of 5 nAVAX per gas and AVAX at about $9.51.

Polygon PoS is a separate EVM chain that checkpoints to Ethereum, with 104 active validators (cap 105). Since an October 2026 upgrade, L2Beat says each new validator "needs approval from governance or a permissioned EOA", classes the chain "Other" and warns "There is no delay on code upgrades". Polygon's docs say milestones "typically finalize a transaction within 2 to 5 seconds". The chain had finality incidents on 10 September 2025, fixed by an emergency hard fork, and on 12 January 2026. In the second, no blocks were finalized for about an hour and a half, according to the post-mortems on Polygon's status page. On 18 October 2026 a transfer cost about $0.0005 in POL, with POL at about $0.089.

Both chains have a place in the EU's DLT Pilot. ESMA's 2025 report on the regime describes 21X on "a public, permissionless blockchain (Polygon PoS)" with access "permissioned through smart contract-based whitelisting", and Securitize on "Avalanche C-Chain (public, permissionless network with permissioned access)". ESMA's list of authorized DLT market infrastructures dates 21X's permission to 3 December 2024 and Securitize Europe's to 26 November 2025; no Securitize issuance on the venue had been found by mid-October 2026. On Polygon, Fasanara launched its FAST money market fund as an ERC-3643 token, with Tokeny and Apex, on 21 January 2025.

Canton describes itself as "a public layer 1 blockchain designed for privacy-preserving transactions". Applications are written in Daml, and each validator stores only the data its parties are entitled to see. The Global Synchronizer, a two-thirds Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) service, orders transactions as encrypted messages it cannot read and keeps no ledger state. It is run by Super Validators, organizations admitted by a vote of the existing ones, and governed by them and the Canton Foundation. MainNet has run since 25 June 2024, and CantonBFT replaced CometBFT as its consensus on 10 October 2026. The live MainNet rules list 13 Super Validator nodes, two each for Digital Asset and Cumberland plus Tradeweb, MPCH, Five North and the Canton Foundation's own node among them, and 9 votes are needed for governance. The Canton Foundation lists 56 Super Validator organizations, far more than the nodes, because most of them, DTCC, Nasdaq and Visa included, hold reward weight through another operator's node. LSEG, appointed a Super Validator on 28 September 2026, does the same and was not yet on that list.

A MainNet validator needs "approval by the Tokenomics committee, an IP on the allowlist, and an onboarding secret from your SV sponsor". Canton's FAQ says "currently sponsorship is needed", so this guide scores validation as permissioned even where Canton's releases call the network permissionless. Once a verdict is sequenced and delivered, "the transaction result is final. There are no forks, reorganizations, or rollbacks." Canton's own token is public: Canton Coin balances and transaction history are visible to anyone through the network's scan service. A validator also stores the contract data of the parties it hosts, so a party hosted on another operator's node shares its data with that operator. Traffic costs USD 60 per MB above a free allowance of 200,000 bytes per 20 minutes per validator, paid by burning Canton Coin (about USD 0.099 on 18 October 2026), and only the sending validator pays.

Broadridge reports that its Distributed Ledger Repo platform processed $7.5 trillion in September 2026, $359 billion a day, and its product page calls DLR "Built on Canton Technology". Neither page names the synchronizer DLR uses, public or private. DTCC's first production trades, on 15 July 2026 with more than 30 firms, used DTC-held assets tokenized on two networks: "The digital conversions occurred on LFDT's Besu (DTCC's private network) and Canton (a public network)". DTCC planned to launch its Tokenization Service in October 2026, with Canton and its private Besu network live at launch, per its summary of 16 October; no launch had been announced by 19 October. Digital Asset and J.P. Morgan's Kinexys announced plans in January 2026 to have JPMD issued natively on Canton "in phases throughout 2026". J.P. Morgan had not confirmed live issuance by mid-October 2026, and its JPM Coin page still named only Base. Dollars arrive as USDCx, backed by USDC held in Circle's xReserve on Ethereum. LayerZero, which announced its Canton integration on 26 March 2026, lists a Canton mainnet endpoint as active in its deployment registry, and Chainlink's CCIP directory lists Canton lanes to Ethereum and Base.

Circle announced the public mainnet launch of Arc on 16 September 2026, after a public testnet from 28 October 2025 and a private mainnet whose first block dates to 15 May 2026. The release calls Arc "an open L1 blockchain" that is "operated by a permissioned validator set". It adds that "Along with Circle, Arc will have a phased rollout from the founding validator cohort", which names BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, Visa and Worldpay (now Global Payments). Which of them sign blocks today is not published. Consensus is Malachite, a Tendermint-style BFT engine, run under proof of authority, and Arc's consensus docs say the network "continues to produce blocks as long as more than two-thirds of validators are online and honest". The same release says Arc "has not been reviewed or approved by the New York State Department of Financial Services or any other regulatory authority". It also calls the 10 billion ARC genesis mint "not a commitment to publicly launch ARC"; fees stay in USDC.

On Episode 4 of The Protocol Roundtable, Circle's Gagan Mac, VP, Product & Engineering, Arc, said three questions enterprises put to a chain shaped Arc's design. They were how to account for a volatile gas token, who the validators are, and when a transaction is final. On the last he added: "Not just technically deemed final, but also legally the definition of completely settled." For gas, USDC is the native gas, and "The base fee floor targets approximately $0.001 per ERC-20 transfer", on a page that says its values "reflect the current testnet configuration". On mainnet the base fee sat at that floor in mid-October 2026, so an ERC-20 transfer cost about $0.001 in USDC. For finality, Arc's finality page describes deterministic finality once more than two-thirds of validators sign. On validators, Circle names a cohort but not who signs blocks. Arc's compliance page has the USDC blocklist checked before the mempool, before execution and at transfer.

Privacy and third-party assets are not there yet. "Privacy features are on the roadmap and not yet available on Arc." Circle said on 5 August 2026 that BlackRock "is expected to deploy BUIDL" on Arc and that DTCC would tokenize DTC-custodied assets on it "beginning in the second half of 2027". Circle's 16 September release then listed BUIDL among the assets for Arc's day-one markets, but rwa.xyz showed no BUIDL token on Arc on 18 October 2026, when stablecoins on Arc totalled $0.67 billion on DefiLlama. Visa said on 29 April 2026 that it is adding Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon and Tempo to its stablecoin settlement pilot, which now supports nine blockchains with Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana and Stellar. Circle's CCTP documentation lists Arc as domain 26, which connects it to other USDC chains.

Tempo, incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, launched mainnet on 18 March 2026 after a testnet from 9 December 2025. Its validator docs say "The active validator set is currently permissioned". Tempo named Stripe, Visa and Zodia Custody as validators on 14 April 2026 and MoneyGram and zerohash later. The chain showed 15 active validator entries on 18 October 2026, in a registry controlled by a 2-of-5 multisig whose signers are not published. Its consensus docs describe Simplex BFT, with blocks about every 600 ms and deterministic finality, and a network that "halts and resumes" if more than a third of validators go offline. The team schedules hardforks every two weeks to a month; with no token, there is no token vote.

"Tempo has no native gas token." Its fee docs let users pay in a supported USD-denominated TIP-20 stablecoin and let a separate account sponsor the fee. The base fee was fixed at launch so that a transfer cost about $0.001, but the T7 upgrade of 9 July 2026 made it dynamic. Tempo's protocol docs put a 50,000-gas transfer at about $0.0006 at the cap and about $0.00003 when blocks are quiet, the floor the public RPC quoted in mid-October 2026. Compliance sits in the token standard: TIP-20 and TIP-403 policies cover pause, allowlists and blacklists, burning from blacklisted addresses and memos that can reference Travel Rule messages. Privacy came on 14 October 2026, when Tempo said Zones "are generally available for enterprises", with Deel first in production. The same post says "The Zone operator, however, can see activity inside a Zone and can pause transfers to meet compliance requirements", and the docs still describe Zones as a limited preview in which "General TIP-20 transfers and user contract deployment are disabled", with a reference verifier that "still returns true without checking execution".

BlackRock's BUIDL came to Tempo through Securitize on 29 July 2026, as Tempo announced that day, and held $17.1 million with one holder on 18 October. Open Standard's OUSD, minted and redeemed through Coinbase, Stripe and Visa, went live on 30 September 2026 and stood at $528.9 million on DefiLlama. BlackRock's BRSRV, a tokenized government money market fund launched on 3 August 2026, keeps its official ownership record on Ethereum, Tempo and Solana, per its prospectus. Tempo is not a CCTP domain, so USDC moves in through bridges. Its status page shows public RPC outages on 28 September and 5 October 2026 and 100% chain uptime over 90 days.

Several of the largest institutional ledgers are run by banks for their own clients. J.P. Morgan says Kinexys, its blockchain business, "has processed over $4 trillion in transaction volume, with average daily transactions exceeding $7 billion" across its services. Its payments ledger, Kinexys Digital Payments, is a permissioned system for participating J.P. Morgan clients, with blockchain deposit accounts in eight currencies since June 2026. Moves between legacy accounts and those deposit accounts stop for three hours every Saturday. Citi Token Services was live in seven markets on 28 September 2026 on "a private-permissioned blockchain", and DBS and HSBC run deposit token services on their own networks. A 2026 Ledger Insights report for the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust says Citi Token Services, DBS Token Services and Standard Chartered's platform each let clients move money instantly, "but only between customers of the same bank". The report adds that Citi has partly addressed this by linking its service to its 24/7 USD Clearing network.

Shared rails connect banks to each other. Partior "operates on a global private permissioned ledger" for financial institutions only. It has been live in USD and SGD since 2023 and in euros since May 2024, when Standard Chartered became its first euro settlement bank. It lists DBS, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and Emirates NBD among its users, and Deutsche Bank also joined its Series B as a strategic investor in November 2024. Swift operates a Besu-based ledger with 17 pilot banks, and HSBC and Standard Chartered announced the first live interbank transaction on it, a tokenized deposit payment, on 19 August 2026. In it, obligations were matched and netted before final settlement through existing systems. SWIAT, which its technology page describes as Enterprise Ethereum on Hyperledger Besu and whose validators are paid "in FIAT, no crypto-currencies involved", carried Siemens' EUR 300 million digital bond, settled in central bank money in September 2024. Since 21 September 2026, ECB Pontes has offered settlement of wholesale DLT transactions in central bank money, with final settlement in T2. It admits DLT operators by license, from CSDs and DLT Pilot operators to supervised banks, rather than by type of chain.

Besu's documentation says its QBFT and IBFT 2.0 consensus "have immediate finality; there are no forks", recommends at least four nodes, and notes that the network stops creating blocks if more than a third of validators stop participating. GoQuorum is no longer maintained by Consensys, and the Besu 25.6.0 release of June 2025 removed Tessera-based privacy and onchain permissioning, so privacy now comes from Paladin. Shared networks have also failed commercially: we.trade, built on Hyperledger Fabric, closed in 2022, and Marco Polo and Contour, both on R3's Corda, closed in 2023. ASX shelved its DLT-based CHESS replacement, built with Digital Asset's Daml, in November 2022 with a write-off of A$245 to 255 million.