The Rapid Growth of Blockchain Transactions: Analysis and Comparisons

Will Solana Overtake All Other Blockchains in Activity? Not long ago, Ethereum’s daily transaction volume was significantly more than its nearest competitors, making it the undisputed leader in the bright contract platform space. On the other hand, the number of on-chain transactions for several competing blockchains and layer-2 solutions has expanded dramatically in the past two years. This is mainly attributable to the exponential growth of their user bases, the increasing number of use cases for their native assets and tokens, and the expansion of their DeFi infrastructure.

Ethereum, Fourth Active Smart Contract Platform

Ethereum, Fourth Active Smart Contract Platform

Today, Ethereum ranks as the fourth most active innovative contract platform when considering the monthly transaction count. This metric measures the total number of txs executed on the blockchain monthly. Instead, Solana has surpassed all other chains regarding on-chain transaction count and is now the top blockchain overall. More than four times as active as its nearest competition, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), the platform processed an estimated 1.48 billion monthly transactions*.

There has been a significant surge in Solana-related advancements and trade activity over the past several months, and platforms like Raydium, Serum, Saber, and Marinade Finance have seen value locked up quickly. However, rather than actual value transfers, validators submit voting transactions, which account for around 90% of all transactions. Considering this, the exact monthly amount of legitimate transactions would be about 148 million. November saw 391.8 million transactions for BSC and 115.8 million for Polygon, putting them in second and third place, respectively.

Binance Smart Chain (BSC) Launching

With a valuation of about $16 billion as of this writing, BSC has quickly become one of TVL’s most valuable intelligent contract platforms since its launch in September 2020. The development of the DeFi ecosystem is mainly responsible for the remarkable growth of platforms like PancakeSwap, Venus, and Trunkss in the past few months. Polygon is comparable to BSC because it filled in for the Ethereum network when its costs and congestion became too much to handle. The number of transactions it processes is now four times that of Ethereum. Decentralized exchanges, such as QuickSwap, SushiSwap, Curve, and Balancer, now account for most Polygon activity.

Solana Overtake All Other Blockchains: By contrast, Ethereum is currently the fourth most active blockchain in terms of the total number of transactions on the network, with 38.9 million complete transactions in November. Because of its low throughput, the Ethereum blockchain is nearly constantly running at total capacity. Because of this, competition for block space has heated up over the past year, driving up transaction costs and causing some users to experience lengthy waits. Alternative chains, which do not encounter similar problems, undoubtedly flourished in this environment.

Other Smart Contract Platforms

We are also looking at two more platforms for intelligent contracts, Fantom and Avalanche. As their respective user bases expanded significantly in November, they processed 21 million and 14.5 million transactions, respectively. A robust decentralized application ecosystem has emerged on both platforms, with DeFi apps making up most of it. These apps include open lending systems, decentralized exchanges, bridges, and NFT markets. With their current growth rates, it’s not out of the question that one of them may surpass Ethereum in the next few months.Terra ranks as the seventh-largest platform for smart contracts. Although it processes 835,800 transactions monthly, its ecosystem diversity is lacking compared to other critical competitors due to its primary design for financial applications. Mirror Protocol, Anchor Protocol, and Chai are among its most popular applications right now. Unlike most decentralized applications (DApps), none have a straightforward analog on other chains.

Arbitrum, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution that was released, comes in last. Most of the over 783,000 transactions on the platform in November were led by decentralized applications (DApps) imported from Ethereum and other chains, such as Curve, Anyswap, and Abracadabra. Just 2% of all Ethereum transactions are currently captured by the platform.