At the moment, Ethereum, BSC and Polygon seems to be the main chains that are leading the defi movement. What started on Ethereum, has outgrown its capacity fast, and now other chains are providing EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible options with low fees.
I have made some comparison in the past for ETH VS BSC and recently the BSC VS Poly. Now lets put all the three on one chart and see how they are doing.
Both BSC and Polygon are Proof of stake (PoS) chains. Out of the three Ethereum has the highest fees, BSC low fees and Polygon is offering extremely low fees.
We will be looking at:
- Number of Addresses
- Active Addresses
- Daily Transactions
- Fees
- Contracts
The period that we are looking into is from the beginning of 2021, with a close lookup on the last months.
Number Of Addresses
One of the key metrics for crypto projects is the number of wallets.
First the overall number of wallets.
As we can see from the unique addresses, Ethereum is still in the lead by a lot. Ethereum now has 163M addresses, BSC 83M and Polygon 22M. BSC is now half way to Ethereum, while Polygon has some space to grow 😊.
Ethereum has been growing steadily over the whole period, going from 130M wallets at the beginning of the year to 163M now. BSC had explosive growth in February 2021, and since then the trend is up but with a steady growth, almost on the same level as Ethereum. Polygon, although far behind is growing faster then the two in the last month even in a crab market.
Active Addresses
What’s more interesting in times like this is how many wallets are transacting. How many of those addresses are actually active?
Ethereum and BSC are now quite close in terms of active wallets, although BSC is in a small lead with 600k active daily wallets, compared to the 500k on Ethereum. BSC has overtaken Ethereum in terms of active wallets in April 2021 and it is leading since then, although the gap seems to be closing in the recent period. Polygon has quite low numbers compared to the two, with around 100k daily active wallets.
If we zoom in a bit more in we have this.
We can see the close “fight” with Ethereum and BSC here as well. BSC was leading with a bigger gap in June, then Ethereum has taken the lead back, and now BSC on the top again. Polygon is just above 100k now. Unlike the unique wallets we cant see a significant growth trend for Polygon in terms of active wallets.
Daily Transactions
The activity on the networks is mostly represented by the number of daily transactions. Here is the chart.
This one is interesting!
Polygon is on the top here, although it has lot less active wallets then the previous two. This just shows that the smaller the fees the higher the number of transactions. Sometimes this can be a problem as it can spam the network and fill in the blocks. A balance is needed.
Polygon is on the top here with around 6M transactions per day, BSC is second with 3.5M and Ethereum is third with 1.2M transactions. We can see that BSC had a jump in the transactions in April and May and a drop afterwards, while Polygon has grown starting from May. Ethereum has been quite constant in the period with transactions between 1.2M to 1.7M. This shows that those numbers for Ethereum are at its limits, and as the price increase the fees go up and the number of transactions remains relatively same.
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.
The fees are in dollar terms, cumulative for the day.
We can see that Ethereum is leading in fees by a lot. On occasions it has more than 30M in USD per day. It also has quite big spikes. In the last period the daily fees are around 6M per day. BSC in second with fees reaching ATH around the 9M mark. In the last period the fees are around 1.2M per day. The Polygon fees line is almost overlapping the x axis on the chart 😊. Polygon daily fees are in the range of 10k to 40k USD. This just shows how cheep the fees are on Polygon.
Contracts
These three are smart contract platforms so here is the chart for verified contracts per day.
In terms of smart contracts BSC is leading by a lot, with more than 2k in the last period. Polygon has a weird spike at the end of June, but overall, it is in the range of few hundred contracts per day. Ethereum is in the same range as well.
Overall ETH and BSC seems to be still far ahead of Polygon in lots of metrics except for the transactions. ETH is still in the lead for the total numbers of wallets, while it close to BSC in terms of daily active wallets. On the fees side, ETH is still the king, BSC has some moderate fees, while Polygon is with almost non existent fees. For the contracts, BSC is dominant.
All the best
@dalz