18 mainstream L1 communities: Who has the strongest consensus?

Author: Ponyo : : FP

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

Belief, Action, Resilience, Density, or BARD, is my previous article "What the hell is the community?" 》 is used to measure the health status and strength of crypto communities. In a market where hype often obscures substance, BARD focuses on the elements that truly maintain the crypto ecosystem: belief (referring to firm beliefs and ideas), action (activity of real builders or users), resilience (ability to resist market volatility and setbacks), and density (network cohesion and social relevance).

In this article, I will have ChatGPT use the BARD model to analyze 18 leading cryptocurrency communities during the 2024-2025 period: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Ripple, Cardano, Dogecoin, Movement, Tron, Ton, Aptos, Avax, Cosmos, BNB Chain, Berachain, Stacks, Polkadot, EOS and Hyperliquid. Each item will get 1-10 ratings on each dimension.

Without further ado, the following is the ranking list.

BARD Score Overview

Below is a summary of BARD scores for each blockchain project. These scores are based on current (2024-2025) ecosystem performance: pledge and retention, developer and governance participation, cultural meme, social activity, and community response to recent market volatility.

 Scores are subjectively estimated by ChatGPT based on current indicators and trends, for entertainment only

Major Layer 1 Blockchain Community Analysis

Ethereum (36/40): "Unlimited Roadmap, Endless Delay"

The Ethereum community uniquely blends idealism and pragmatism. It unites builders, speculators and idealists under an ambitious, diverse and inclusive philosophy, advocating decentralization, innovation and the public good. Although recent governance tensions within the Ethereum Foundation slightly blur the clarity of its mission, Ethereum remains an unrivalled development center in the crypto space, with the world's highest builder activity and deep participation of social networks. In short, the Ethereum community has a rare combination of firm beliefs, continuous action and tested resilience, making it the most dynamic network giant in the field of crypto.

Bitcoin (35/40): "Avid digital gold worshiper, no calmness"

The Bitcoin community is the backbone of the crypto space, driven by its near-religious belief in decentralized and robust currencies. Although builders are slow to act, their advantage lies in their firm beliefs and resilience: Bitcoin’s biggest players are firm in their positions in the face of regulatory storms or bear markets. They may not be launching new features quickly, but Bitcoin is the pinnacle of the community in terms of belief and staying power.

Solana (34/40): "FTX PTSD Survivor Club"

The Solana community embodies tenacity and relentless action. After FTX crashes, network disruptions and a brutal market reshuffle, Solana’s loyal fans have rebounded more than ever with their pragmatic belief in their technology and scalability. Now, it has once again become a developer hotspot, leading the wave of new developers entering the market in 2024, with transaction volume soaring.

Solana's core community is dynamic, connected and has a strong sense of self-identity, and is closely linked to the network meme through a shared struggle. While slightly inferior to Bitcoin and Ethereum in concept cohesion, Solana’s gritty, counterattack-driven culture makes it a community characterized by action, resilience and revitalization ambitions.

Ripple (33/40): "Banker Token with Victim Complex"

The XRP Army is one of the most battle-hardened and loyal groups in the crypto field, united by their firm belief that Ripple will revolutionize global finance completely. Despite the limited action of grassroots developers, their advantage lies in their extraordinary resilience, and have never lost their beliefs after years of regulatory struggles, negative news and bear markets. They may not produce much code, but their strong belief and unparalleled ability to bear adversity ensure that the Ripple community is always a lasting and powerful force in the crypto space.

Cardano (31/40): "Peer-reviewed ghost chain"

In terms of patience, solidarity, and pure beliefs, the Cardano community is unmatched in the crypto space. ADA holders are extremely loyal, with over 60% of the total supply being used for pledge.

While the developer ecosystem still lags behind more dynamic competitors, Cardano’s social network (called the “Cardano Family”) is tight, active and cohesive. Their unwavering belief and resilience allowed the network to flourish amid doubts, and community culture became Cardano's most powerful long-term advantage.

Polkadot (31 / 40): "Gavin's Dream of Over-Design"

The Polkadot community sets high standards for decentralization, governance participation, and long-term builder action. Leading by founder Gavin Wood’s Web3 vision, Polkadot’s loyal followers believe in a multi-chain future built on interoperability and transparency.

Although the hype has faded in recent cycles, the community has shown admirable resilience, patiently responding to development delays and adapting to major governance changes smoothly. Polkadot's community culture connects different parachains groups and still maintains cohesion and vitality.

Berachain (29/40): "Honey-powered DeFi speculation frenzy"

The Berachain community challenges the cryptographic logic: even before the mainnet was launched, fans were extremely loyal, and the prospects of relying on network memes, jokes and innovative DeFi mechanisms were closely linked. Their beliefs withstood the test of multiple delays, locked in $3.1 billion in liquidity during the pre-start phase, making a big hype on X (Twitter) and Discord.

After the main network was launched in February 2025, activity surged, but it was still in the early stage of speculation. While true resilience has not been stress tested, the tight community, Meme-driven culture creates an unusually tight social and economic cohesion. It is small but extremely united; it proves that sometimes, faith alone can create a strong community from scratch.

Dogecoin (29/40): "The favorite joke in the crypto field"

The Dogecoin community proves that network Meme is more powerful than code. Based on pure, fun beliefs and humor, Dogecoin Army turns a joke into a lasting crypto phenomenon. Despite extremely low developer activity and scarce technological innovation, Dogecoin holders have shown extraordinary cultural resilience, rekindling their enthusiasm again and again through viral waves and celebrity hype (such as Elon Musk's help).

While the Dogecoin community is not closely linked through technology or governance, holders build close social bonds through sharing jokes and outsider identities. Its advantage lies not in what is constructed, but in the constant enthusiasm, absurdity and endurance.

Avalanche (29/40): "Looking for the Red Triangle of Narrative"

The Avalanche community is pragmatic and builder-oriented, closely linked based on shared confidence in its technology (fast consensus, customizable subnet). Although they do not have a strong conceptual color, they show continuous developer activity and healthy ecosystem participation, launch numerous subnets and maintain stable transaction activities.

Although it has not yet experienced a severe test of resilience, the Avalanche community has quietly stood firm during the market downturn, without losing its core contributors, showing steady perseverance. Community members are socially related, but have a slightly top-down management style, maintaining cohesion between developers and validators, but grassroots participation needs to be strengthened.

BNB Chain (28/40): "Zhao Changpeng's cloning factory"

The BNB Chain community has created a huge but loosely connected ecosystem with the loyalty of a large number of retail investors. Faith revolves around trust in Binance’s mature products, not conceptual persistence. Actions manifest as high transaction volume, but rely heavily on cloned decentralized applications (dapps) and profit-chasing speculative behavior. Despite its surprising resilience in the face of hacking and regulatory pressures, the community is more focused on practicality than purity.

However, a wide range of users adopts a weak social bond; most cohesion comes from Binance’s corporate umbrella rather than an organically grown culture. BNB Chain succeeds with its size and convenience, and its community lacks deeper conceptual unity or grassroots cohesion.

Cosmos (28/40): "Conflicts between blockchains: IBC"

Cosmos is the "blockchain Internet" in the crypto field, driven by powerful ideas around sovereignty and interoperability. The Cosmos community remains a gathering place for prolific application chain developers and enthusiastic builders. Despite showing resilience in dealing with many major challenges, including the Terra collapse, the fierce token economics debate and Jae Kwon’s controversial AtomOne fork, Cosmos is facing an increasing internal fragmentation problem. The team and validators have split into competing factions. Ultimately, Cosmos’ core strength remains its decentralized builder culture, but the current split states heralds a severe test of future community coordination and unity.

Ton (27 / 40): "Telegram's zombie chain"

The TON community reborn from the ashes of Telegram’s abandoned blockchain, and survives on early loyal supporters. As Telegram re-adopts TON and deeply integrates, the community’s belief in the mission of mass encryption adoption by 95 million users through Telegram has grown. Even though recent hackathons and foundation-driven initiatives have boosted developer activity, grassroots actions have continued to grow slowly.

TON demonstrates resilience in dealing with legal dilemmas is commendable, yet the overall community density is still at a moderate level; it is closely linked within the core groups associated with Telegram, but lacks broader, decentralized engagement.

Tron (26/40): "Yuchen Sun's Stable Coin Casino"

The Tron community is huge but utilitarian and practical, focusing on tangible network benefits: fast, cheap transactions, and practical use cases such as stablecoin transfers and gambling decentralized applications. Although Justin Sun is plagued by controversy, the community remains resilient, shows a stable growth trend, and the daily trading volume is considerable.

Developer creativity is limited, most of the activities are driven by the Tron Foundation, mostly simple DeFi clones. At the social level, Tron's huge user base is relatively scattered and lacks a close bond between members, making it more like a silent giant in the field of blockchain utility than a close united cultural force.

Stacks (25/40): "Brother who is ignored by the Bitcoin community"

The Stacks community builds a bridge between Bitcoin’s ultimateism and smart contract innovation, and always believes that Bitcoin can surpass the scope of digital gold. Despite being smaller and to some extent isolated from the wider Bitcoin community, their persistence in mission-driven development creates a certain degree of resilience. However, limited growth may be visibility in the wider crypto space, leaving the Stacks community in a niche position, even though it is closely united.

Hyperliquid (24/40): "Jeff's on-chain casino cult"

Hyperliquid is a new member of our list. The Hyperliquid community revolves around a compelling concept, “On-chain Binance”, unites traders under a niche but passionate mission in pursuit of high-performance decentralized trading. Driven by community-centric token economics (70% of tokens are allocated to users, and earnings are redistributed), early adopters showed strong, nearly fanatical beliefs. However, activities are mainly concentrated in the trading field rather than extensive development or governance.

Resilience has a promising prospect but has not yet been tested; Hyperliquid has not yet faced major adversity or regulatory scrutiny. Community ties are tight within the core group of traders, but are weak outside this group. Overall, Hyperliquid's focused user base makes it hopeful to be a strong player in the niche field.

**Aptos (23/40): "A Korean-Popular Song can't create a chain of

prosperity"**

Aptos went online with huge hype and venture capital support, but the light has faded. Early beliefs were mostly driven by speculation, and many people joined in for airdrops rather than sincere recognition. By 2025, the community will be more down-to-earth, with real builders, active regional groups, and an evolving ecosystem in the fields of DeFi, NFT and real-world assets (RWAs). Still, the recent departure of co-founder Mo Shaikh and ecosystem leader Neil exposed the cracks in the team. Developer growth is strong, but many activities are still driving from the top down. Resilience has withstood the test during market downturns and internal changes without a major collapse. Aptos has infrastructure, appeal and global reach, but still lacks cultural "glue".

Movement (16/40): "The Move chain that no one cares about"

Movement is an ambitious but in its infancy Layer 1 ecosystem, aiming to build a modular Move language Rollup network based on Ethereum. Its early communities were mostly driven by curiosity and speculative interests, and had not yet formed deep beliefs or widespread recognition.

So far, on-chain activities have been extremely limited, mainly developed experiments and staking, and the real ecosystem appeal still needs to be realized. The rapid and transparent response to early liquidity crises suggests potential resilience, but a greater test is still ahead. The lack of distinct culture or close relationships makes the Movement community just a concept that needs to be proved through adoption and continuous development.

EOS (8/40): "Self-destroying $4 billion ghost chain"

EOS raised $4.1 billion in 2018, promising to change the world. But it broke its promise. Over-hype but insufficient delivery, developers are lost in large quantities, users are gone one after another, gradually disappearing from people's perspective. The original community collapsed, and the confidence in EOS as a platform disappeared. Today, a small group of loyal fans run the EOS Network Foundation (ENF), trying to save the project by upgrading and rebranding. Their perseverance is admirable, but it is rebuilt on the ruins. Developer activity is minimal, with few users, and even Tether stops casting USDT on EOS.

EOS is not completely dead, but it is undoubtedly in danger. The EOS story is a warning: Without sustained beliefs, actions and cultural resilience, even with billions of dollars, you can’t buy a lasting community.

in conclusion

It is clear from this experiment that early stage communities tend to score lower in the BARD model, especially in terms of action and resilience. This is normal: New projects usually rely on top-down construction, with fewer bottom-up contributors and have not experienced adversity yet. So it may be too early to deny their potential just because they have not had the chance to prove themselves.

Meanwhile, belief and density often deepen once a community has withstood real stress tests or multiple market cycles. Grassroots movements, Meme culture and strong social networks rarely happen overnight. In view of this, the BARD model can be improved by adopting a "stage perception" approach, giving different weights to newly launched chains on certain dimensions (such as resilience), and distinguishing top-down construction from true bottom-up participation in action scores.

Another dimension is cross-project synergy. In an ecosystem like Cosmos or Polkadot, communities span multiple interrelated networks; this can have a significant impact on density (and sometimes resilience) to form a metacommunity that can be overlooked if each chain is viewed in isolation.

Finally, the BARD model can incorporate more qualitative measures such as developer tools, offline gatherings or user-initiated initiatives to ensure that the noise from hype does not inflate.

All in all, the value of the BARD model lies in asking sharper questions about what really drives the lasting development of the community. Even in a market filled with short-term attention, hype cycles and fierce competition, some ecosystems still show lasting beliefs, real building, and strong social networks. Identifying and measuring these rare traits is perhaps the best way to protect the community spirit that initially drives cryptocurrency development.