Author: Frank, PANews
Since the small games in the Telegram ecosystem have become a hit, the number of users in the crypto field has seen a surge. The user base of previous star projects seems insignificant compared to the millions or even hundreds of millions of users on TG mini-games. But we seem to have overlooked a problem - the discussion about the value of users. The daily active users of Ethereum are only between 400,000 and 500,000, yet it is the second-largest public chain by market capitalization, while TON, which easily exceeds 2 million daily active users, is only ranked around tenth. Is it a market misjudgment of value, or is there a huge gap in user value between these public chains? PANews has conducted an analysis of the real user value of various public chains in an attempt to uncover the mystery of public chain user value.
The main research methods are as follows, in order to more realistically reflect the user value of each public chain. PANews calculated the tokens of Solana, Ethereum, TON, Sui, Base, and BSC, as there has never been a ready-made indicator to show the user value of public chains. We divided the token market capitalization by the number of token holders to get the average value, and then compared this average, which is the average value per address of these popular tokens. Furthermore, to be closer to the real situation, we excluded large holders such as exchange addresses, team holding addresses, and locked addresses when calculating. Of course, this method may not be rigorous, as the average value never represents the majority, and there may be virtual market capitalization, but it has a significant reference value for the ranking of public chain user value.
In addition, PANews also calculated the average transaction size by dividing the daily transaction volume by the daily number of transactions for each public chain, which can also reflect the user value situation on the chain to a certain extent.
Ethereum: Average Address Holds $3,516, Average Transaction Size $1,160, the Gathering Place of Whales
Ethereum's data is still in a leading position. On Ethereum, we selected USDT, USDC, SHIB, UNI, and PEPE as the objects of analysis, and the average value after excluding large holder addresses is around $3,500, about 6 times that of Solana, while the market capitalization difference between the two is about 5 times. From this perspective, Solana's market value seems to be somewhat overestimated. In terms of transaction size, the average transaction size on Ethereum reaches $1,160, far higher than other public chains, indicating that Ethereum is still the first choice for whales.
Solana: Average Address Holds $635, Average Transaction Size $17, On-chain Meme is Still the Main Melody
Solana has now become the most representative high-performance public chain in the industry, and its various indicators can basically be used as a standard for comparison. However, during the research, PANews found that it was impossible to know the number of holders of Solana's governance token SOL anywhere. Therefore, in the research, we could only take some other relatively representative tokens on the Solana chain as data sources, such as JUP, USDC, USDT, BOME, and Bonk.
After calculation, the average value per address of these tokens is about $2,240 after directly dividing the market capitalization by the number of holding addresses, which is second only to Ethereum among the public chains. However, after excluding the locked, exchange, and other large holder addresses, the average holding amount per address drops to around $635.
In addition, when comparing the holding values of these tokens, it can be seen that the average amount of addresses holding MEME coins is significantly higher than that of stablecoin accounts, while the situation is reversed on Ethereum, which may indirectly indicate that Ethereum users are more inclined to DeFi, such as earning yields through stablecoins, while Solana users are more inclined to on-chain meme.
According to data from Hello Moon, in the past month, more than 86 million wallet addresses held 0 SOL, about 15.5 million users held less than 1 SOL, and about 1.5 million users held less than 10 SOL.
On October 8, Solana generated about 250 million transactions, of which about 26.2% were non-voting transactions. The total transaction volume on that day was about $1.15 billion, with an average transaction size of $17.4. This transaction size seems to be mainly dominated by on-chain meme transactions.
Arbitrum: Average Address Holds $487, Average Transaction Size $282, Inheriting the Most Ethereum Genes of L2
Arbitrum is one of the best-performing Ethereum Layer 2 networks. From the data results, Arbitrum also seems to have inherited a lot of high-value users from Ethereum. After excluding exchanges and other large holders, the average holding amount per address on Arbitrum is still $487, only lower than Ethereum and Solana. However, taking USDC as an example, half of the USDC on Arbitrum is locked in Hyperliquid, and other tokens also have a high proportion of large holder addresses. At the same time, the tokens with high market capitalization on Arbitrum are mainly stablecoins or tokens like BTC and ETH, which is similar to the user holding characteristics of Ethereum. From this perspective, Arbitrum can be said to have inherited the most Ethereum genes of any Layer 2.
Sui: Average Address Holds $271, Average Transaction Size $11.4, The New Force is Catching up with Solana?
Recently, the view that Sui will become the most formidable competitor to Solana has been widely circulated. From the on-chain data, Sui's performance is indeed outstanding. On Sui, we selected tokens such as SUI, wUSDC, USDT, CETUS, and SCA as comparisons. On Sui, these tokens are clearly more dispersed, so there are almost no high-proportion exclusions like wUSDC and USDT. Overall, the average holding amount per address of these tokens on Sui is $271, which is higher than TON and about half of Solana.
However, in terms of transaction size, the data on October 8 showed that Sui's average transaction size was $1.8, the lowest among all public chains. But this data may be due to an abnormal surge in the number of transactions on Sui, exceeding 100 million, and it is currently unknown whether it is caused by bots or another spam-like mining program. If calculated based on the data on October 3, the average transaction size is about $11.47, which is slightly lower than Solana but much higher than TON (this data may be closer to Sui's daily level).
BSC: Average Address Holds $167, Average Transaction Size $237, User Profile Similar to Ethereum
In comparison, the data level of BSC is at a medium level, unlike Solana and Sui, the characteristics of BSC are more like Ethereum. On BSC, we selected 5 tokens, BETH, BSC-USD, WBNB, USDC, and Doge, for analysis. The average holding amount of addresses is about $167 (after excluding large holders such as exchanges and locked positions). However, the average transaction size on BSC is more impressive, with an average transaction size of about $237, which is second only to Ethereum and higher than other public chains.
TON: Average address balance of $106, average transaction size of $3.3, unable to attract significant capital
Driven by several popular mini-games such as Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, and DOGS, TON has become one of the most active public chains. However, the real heat and market recognition of TON seem to be in a state of ambiguity. According to a CoinTelegraph report, on October 7, the Web3 anti-fraud solution Scam Sniffer shared a screenshot of a hacker software announcement on the TON network shutting down. The hacker stated that there were not enough crypto whales in the community, which was detrimental to their business.
On TON, we selected several tokens, including DOGS, NOT, TON, USDT, HMSTR, and CATI, for analysis. The results of these tokens show that their average address balance is only $106, which is at the bottom among the public chains analyzed, and the average transaction size on TON is only $3.38, which is also at a relatively low level. Perhaps from this perspective, the TON ecosystem is currently only bustling, without hot money.
Base: Average address balance of $96, average transaction size of $138, capital mainly concentrated in exchanges and institutions
The average user holding value on Base is about $96, and before excluding large holders, this value was $663. This change shows that as a Layer 2 network built on Coinbase, most of the capital on the Base chain is concentrated in exchanges and institutions. The capital scale of retail investors on Base is much smaller. In addition, the average transaction size on Base is around $138, which is also at a high-value transaction level.
In summary, by comparing the user value on different chains, we can discover the characteristics of different chains. For example, the emerging MEME-heated Solana and Sui chains have the characteristics of small transaction sizes, low individual address capital holdings, but large transaction volumes. The established public chains and Layer 2s represented by Ethereum are more favored by large holders, but they are clearly more inclined to investment forms such as asset staking. Among them, the performance of the TON ecosystem in various aspects seems to be somewhat disconnected from the heat of Telegram games, but this model of first attracting users and then breaking through is just beginning, and whether it can succeed remains to be seen.
