City guide · 🏞️ Province

Mainnet Province

A province where mainnets with only a few coins each form a neighbourhood.

At a glance

Many of the top 1,000 coins belong to mainnets of their own, but most of those chains have only one or two coins. Instead of each getting a city, they stand together in this province, each chain forming a small neighbourhood.

The chain’s own coin stands in the middle of its neighbourhood, with tokens issued on that chain around it. A chain that reaches four coins, or whose own coin enters the top 30 by market cap, moves out into a city of its own.

📰 The story of this city: Mainnet Province: Independent Chains With Few Tokens

Mainnet Province is where coins of independent blockchains (mainnets) gather when too few other tokens live on their chains to form a city. Hedera, Polkadot, Algorand, Kaspa, Cosmos, Aptos and Filecoin are among them.

A province of chains that never became cities

A mainnet is a blockchain where real value moves, as opposed to a test network. Ethereum and Solana host many tokens and so form cities on the Crypto Nation map, but independent chains such as Hedera, Polkadot and Algorand have few tokens besides their own coin among the top 1,000 this site covers. So they share one province, and each chain’s own coin is the city-hall tower of its neighbourhood.

Their makers differ: Polkadot comes from the Web3 Foundation of Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, Internet Computer from the DFINITY Foundation, Filecoin from Protocol Labs, Aptos from Aptos Labs, Cronos from the exchange Crypto.com. Algorand was founded by Turing Award winner Silvio Micali, and Kaspa grew out of academic research by Yonatan Sompolinsky and colleagues.

Different designs, different answers

Hedera uses hashgraph, in which participants spread information like gossip to reach agreement. Algorand is pure proof-of-stake, with validators drawn at random from coin holders, while Kaspa uses proof-of-work but weaves many simultaneously made blocks into a blockDAG (a graph).

Polkadot has a central relay chain providing security for specialized chains (parachains), and Cosmos lets independent chains exchange messages through a standard called IBC. Internet Computer lets programs called canisters serve web services directly, Aptos uses the Move language and parallel execution, and Filecoin pays providers for proving they store data.

Chains that opened between 2019 and 2022

Most of the best-known chains here launched between 2019 and 2022: Algorand and the Cosmos Hub in 2019 (Hedera opened to the public that year), Filecoin and Polkadot in 2020, Internet Computer, Kaspa and Cronos in 2021, and Aptos in October 2022. Many were attempts to ease Ethereum’s limits in fees and speed.

Uses vary: Filecoin for storage, Hedera for enterprise records, the Cosmos camp for dedicated app chains, Kaspa for fast payments. The province also holds Theta (video delivery), Provenance (financial records) and Terra Classic, the old chain of the Terra ecosystem that collapsed in 2022.

Things to know

A small province does not mean safe or risky. With few apps and tokens on each chain, a chain’s standing depends on how many users and developers it attracts, in competition with large networks such as Ethereum and Solana.

Governance varies: some chains lean on a foundation or a few companies, some have concentrated validators, and some have drawn criticism over early token distribution. Sharing a province guarantees nothing about quality, and Terra Classic suffered one of the industry’s largest failures in May 2022.

Coins in this city

The coin list and market caps are as of the registry built on October 18, 2026. For live prices, weather and buildings, open the map. Crypto Nation is an unofficial fan project made by an individual. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by the Ethereum Foundation, CoinGecko or the teams behind the coins and chains shown; coin names and tickers may be trademarks of their owners. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. Prices come from CoinGecko and may be delayed or wrong.