New base-layer networks rarely win by being faster in a benchmark. They compete for the people who will build on them, and the contest is fought with tooling, funding and compatibility.
Applications bring the users
A chain with no applications has nothing for a user to do, and a chain with useful applications acquires users without addressing them directly.
Attention therefore goes to developers, whose choice of platform determines where activity eventually settles.
This inverts the usual consumer product logic, and it explains why chains market themselves through documentation and grants rather than through features users would notice.
Compatibility lowers the cost of arriving
A chain that runs the same virtual machine as an established one inherits its languages, libraries, testing frameworks and auditor familiarity.
A team can deploy existing contracts with minimal changes, so trying the new chain costs days rather than months.
The trade-off is that compatibility also inherits the original's constraints, which is why chains offering a different execution model must justify the switching cost with a capability the incumbent lacks.
Grants buy activity that may not persist
Funding programmes pay teams to deploy, and incentive campaigns pay users to transact, which produces visible activity quickly.
The question is what remains once the payments stop, and the answer has frequently been very little.
Programmes structured around retention rather than launch, or around infrastructure other builders will need, tend to leave more behind than those paying for headline metrics.
Tooling quality is the practical differentiator
Developers spend their time in local test environments, debuggers, indexers and node providers rather than admiring consensus design.
A chain with unreliable indexing or poor local testing imposes a daily cost that outweighs theoretical advantages in throughput.
Mature tooling is slow to build and hard to copy, which makes it one of the more durable advantages an established network holds.
Composability creates a gravitational pull
Applications gain value from the other applications alongside them: shared liquidity, existing stablecoins, oracle coverage and wallets that already support the chain.
A new chain starts with none of that, so early applications must be self-sufficient in a way later ones do not.
Overcoming the gap generally requires bootstrapping a complete stack simultaneously, which is why so many networks launch with a coordinated set of core protocols rather than waiting for organic arrival.