During the last months, I have been debating with myself about the need to create a token on a different blockchain to maybe tie my hive projects with other chains. I've done some research into that and thought it might be a useful information to share...
What are the most popular blockchains?
Creating a token on a blockchain that nobody uses is definitely not a good idea. So before thinking about how much it costs to create a token, the first thing to do is to look at how popular the different blockchains are. The most popular chain is by far Solana with 17 – 30 million active users per week. After that comes BNB chain with 10 – 15 million users. Tron, Sui and Near have around 2.45 million active adresses per day. It's somewhat difficult to compare these numbers because a lot of these adresses could be bots or empty wallets or exchange proxies.
How do the blockchains evolve in terms of users?
While Solana is the blockchain with the most active users. The number of users is rather in decline. Chains like Base, Arbitrum and Sui on the contrary are growing.
Costs matter...
When it comes to create a token, the popularity of a chain is just one aspect that needs to be considered. Other aspects that have to be considered are how much it costs to create a token and how high the transaction costs are. Considering that once you have a token created, you will need to do a lot of transactions and the fees will matter more than we think.
I asked AI (source ChatGPT) to compare the costs of different chains to create a token and for running transactions:
| Chain | Creation cost in $ | Cost of an average transaction in $ |
|---|---|---|
| BNB | 25-140 | 0.03 |
| Base | 25 | 0.01 |
| Solana | 18 | 0.001 |
| Sui | 60 | 0.006 |
| Tron | 197 | 3.29 (without staking) |
| Arbitrum | 1 | 0.02 |
These numbers are averages and I don't know exactly how they have been calculated. From my personal experience, I believe that these numbers are somewhat accurate.
What chain would be the most appropriate to launch a token?
Popularity and costs are two factors that matter. Another thing to consider however is how easy it will be to have a market for your token. When I look at the data above, for me only a couple of chains would still be in the race: Solana, Sui, Base and Arbitrum. On the basis of the transaction costs, I would eliminate BNB and Tron at this stage.
On Solana, Orca offers very cheap pool creations that are between 2$ and 14$ in costs. For Sui the costs are between 15 – 20 $ on Smithii. Arbitrum and Base have very low platform costs via Uniswap clones on L2. All these blockchains have very competitive costs for token creation. The costs are quite low for most aspects and are comparable.
What are the costs on Hive-Engine to create a token?
It's interesting to compare these numbers with what we have on hive engine.
Creating a token on Hive-Engine costs 100 BEE which represents about 9.45$. Transactions fees are non existent on Hive. This is of course a great advantage. However, if you want to create a liquidity pool, a so called diesel pool on hive-engine, the costs are 1000 BEE or 94.5$ ! Compared to the other chains, this is pretty expensive. More fees are due if you want to add a reward pool to the diesel pool (100 BEE) or if you want to make a token stakable (1000 BEE).
Even if I don't know whether I really want to create a token on another chain, I think it's interesting to see what is possible and how much it would cost to do so.
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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