Eighty EVM Chains: Why They Keep Multiplying

There are now more than eighty EVM-compatible chains with meaningful onchain activity, and the number keeps going up. That is worth explaining honestly, including by a network that is one of the entries on the list.

The cheap half

Everything that makes a chain "EVM-compatible" is available to copy. The execution client is open source, the opcode semantics are specified, the JSON-RPC method names are documented, and the address format is a hash of a public key. Launching a network that Solidity compiles for and MetaMask connects to is, at this point, a configuration exercise.

That is not a complaint. It is the reason a developer can target a new chain with a one-line change instead of a rewrite, and it is the single most useful thing Ethereum gave the rest of the industry.

The expensive half

None of the following copies.

• Liquidity. A market exists where traders are. You cannot deploy it.
• Users. People go where the applications they want already run.
• Security budget. What it costs to attack the consensus, which is an economic quantity and not a feature flag.
• Operational history. How the chain behaved during an incident, a congestion spike, an upgrade that went wrong. Only time produces this.
• Auditable contracts already deployed. A token standard is code; a token people trust is a history.

A new chain starts with all of the first half and none of the second. That gap is what most of them never close, and it is why the count keeps rising while the list of chains that matter changes slowly.

Why anyone launches one anyway

Sometimes for a real reason: a fee market a specific application needs, a block time a game requires, a jurisdiction, a permissioned validator set an institution is obliged to have, a rollup that inherits its security from somewhere else.

Sometimes for no reason at all beyond wanting one. Both look identical on day one, which is the problem for whoever has to choose.

How to judge one you have just met

Ask the chain, not the marketing site.

• Does the RPC answer honestly? eth_chainId takes ten seconds to check and tells you whether the chain ID being advertised is the chain ID being served.
• Is there a working explorer? Not a logo — an explorer where you can find your own transaction.
• Who produces blocks, and how many are there? A number you can look up beats an adjective.
• What is actually deployed? Verified contracts with real transaction history, or an empty state with a roadmap.
• What happens if the team disappears? Is the node software something you could run yourself?

Every one of those questions applies to Nura Chain. The answers are meant to be checkable rather than taken on trust: what Nura Chain is states the values, connecting to the RPC shows how to verify them against the node, and the explorer guide shows how to read what is actually there.

The useful conclusion is not that eighty chains is too many. It is that "EVM-compatible" tells you about the toolchain and almost nothing about the network — and it was never supposed to.