Developer Tooling

Building on a new L1 is never just about the language. You inherit an entire stack — RPC providers, block explorers, indexers, wallet SDKs, testing frameworks, and deployment pipelines — and gaps in any layer become your problem on day one.

Solana developers typically work in Rust with Anchor, simulate transactions before submission, and debug account constraint errors that have no EVM equivalent. Cosmos teams compile CosmWasm contracts to Wasm and wire IBC channels. EVM-compatible L1s like Avalanche reuse Solidity tooling almost unchanged — the main switch is chain ID and RPC endpoint configuration.

The real cost shows up in production: public RPCs rate-limit under load, indexers fall behind during NFT mints, and explorers may not decode custom program logs. Mature teams run redundant RPC providers, cache aggressively, and monitor their own transaction landing rates rather than trusting marketing uptime figures.