Ranking The Top Smart Contract Chains | Wallets, Transactions, Fees and Contracts | Apr 2023

How are the smart contract platforms doing in the bear?
In the last bull run in 2021 there was an explosion in the smart chains platforms. More and more kept coming online and a lot of them did well. A lot of them are EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible and users can switch between them using the same wallet as Metamask. Some are unique and have their own wallets like Solana, Cardano etc.

Let’s see how things are standing during the current market conditions.

We will be looking at:

• Number of Addresses
• Active Addresses
• Daily Transactions
• Fees
• Contracts

The period that we will be looking is the latest data from August 2022.

We will be looking into the following blockchains:

• Ethereum
• BSC
• Solana
• Cardano
• Avalanche
• Polygon
• Fantom

The data for the chains will be extracted from their blockexplorers or some other data providers.

Number Of Addresses

One of the key metrics for crypto projects is the number of wallets.
Here is the chart.

In the past Ethereum was dominating this chart, but that is no longer the case. Ethereum is now on the third position in number of unique wallets. The big three so to speak consist of Binance Smart Chain, BSC, that is now on the top spot with 280M wallets, followed by Polygon with 231M wallets and then Ethereum with 228M.
After the big three we have Fantom and Solana with around 50M, and then comes Avalanche with 7M and Cardano with around 4M.

Note that the Solana data is approximate.

Obviously BSC and Polygon have grown faster than Ethereum in this metric and have outperformed it in terms of wallets. One thing to note about these types of wallets is that they are free and there is no cost for creating a wallet, like for example on Hive. Because of this there can be a lot of wallets created and even spammed.

Active Addresses

What’s more interesting in times like this is how many wallets are transacting. How many of those addresses are actually active?

BSC is on the top here with 1M DAUs.
Ethereum comes second with around 350k DAUs in the last period, followed closely by Polygon.

Daily Transactions

The activity on the networks is mostly represented by the number of daily transactions. Here is the chart.

Solana is holding the number one spot by far here.
It has around 35M daily tx in the recent period. That is what the blockchain is known for. Its speed.
BSC is on the second spot with around 3.5M transactions, followed by Polygon. Ethereum is on the fourth spot here.

When looking at the transactions, the cost of them should be kept in mind. Solana has the lowest fees per tx and is on top.
In the case of BSC and Polygon it is interesting that Polygon is cheaper than BSC, but BSC still outperforms Polygon in the number of transactions.
Ethereum is obviously with the highest fees, and it comes lower in the ranks. Avalanche and Cardano have cheaper fees but still the number of transactions is low.

Fees

Fees are quite the unpopular topic and one of the main reasons for the new EVM chains, as users are trying to find a way to escape ETH high fees.

Here is the chart.

The fees here are in dollars.
While ETH is on the top here, these fees are nothing compared to the fees in the bull run. At times ETH fees were going up to 200$ per transaction especially if it was a smart contract transaction.
The other blockchains now have low fees, with BSC at 3 cents, is on the second spot. Interesting Avalanche has a low number of transactions, but the fees are relatively high (1 cent) when compared to the other chains.
All the other chains Polygon, Fantom, Cardano, Solana, have fees lower than one cent. Solana is the cheapest blockchain to transact on.

Contracts

These three are smart contract platforms so here is the chart for verified contracts per day.

BSC is on the top here with an average of 700 contracts per day. Ethereum is in the second spot with 500, followed by Polygon.

There is no data for Solana and Cardano to compare against.

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Summary

More and more we can see the big three: Ethereum, BSC and Polygon, leading in most of the metrics on the charts. This has been a case for a period of time now, with Solana interfering for a while. Terra was also a short lived candidate.
In terms of unique addresses BSC is in a small lead before Polygon and Ethereum. BSC is also leading in terms of active addresses with 1M, that is by quite a lot in front of Ethereum that is on the second spot.
Solana leads in terms of transactions per day and super low fees, but in terms of active wallets it is lagging behind.

At the end the most important metric the market cap.

Ethereum is still dominating the space with 230B market cap at the moment. BSC is on the second spot, followed by Cardano. Its interesting how Cardano ranks so high in the market cap, but it lacks in all of the other metrics for the network activity.
Polygon comes on the fourth place, followed closely by Solana.

There are other smart contract platforms out there, like Polkadot, Cosmos, Aptos, but due to their specifics, or just lack of data I still haven’t been able to include them here. Hope to add a few more going forward.

All the best
@dalz

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