In 2021 - 2024 layer 1s and layer 2s were THE trade. Ethereum was slow and expensive, everyone was fighting for blockspace and the market paid up for anything promising speed ($SOL / $SUI / $SEI etc).

In 2026 the same category is quietly going obsolete. People no longer need to go on chain to trade or invest, platforms settle everything in stablecoins and NFTs lost their momentum as a macro asset class, so a huge chunk of on chain activity simply evaporated.
The lesson isn't that chains are dead, instead the way I like to think about it, is that crypto only remains profitable for you if you're solving the current bottleneck. Every cycle the market asks a different question and most people spend time answering the old one.