What Are the Most Popular Blockchain Ecosystems?
The Solana ecosystem has maintained its lead as the most popular blockchain ecosystem this year, accounting for 38.8% of global crypto investor interest in chain-specific narratives. The Solana ecosystem had enjoyed a strong start to the year with Solana rallying back to 2021 levels, alongside the outperformance of key ecosystem project tokens and native meme coins. Solana ecosystem’s popularity subsequently continued to strengthen amid the resurgence of meme coin speculation, with traders preferring the chain’s speed and low gas fees, and further fueled by the virality of meme coin generator Pump.fun.
While the Solana ecosystem’s top ranking is unchanged compared to when the study was first carried out in Q1, its share of investor interest has shrunk by 10.5 percentage points, as other ecosystems ramp up efforts to capture more mindshare.
The next most popular blockchain ecosystem is crypto exchange Coinbase’s Base ecosystem, with 16.8% of investor interest in 2024 to date. Base ecosystem has seen its share of investor interest increase by over 5 times since Q1, raising the layer 2 ecosystem’s ranking from seventh to second, and overtaking its layer 1 Ethereum ecosystem. This also means that the Base ecosystem now captures 9 times more interest than the next most popular layer 2 ecosystem Arbitrum. Similar to the Solana ecosystem, the Base ecosystem narrative benefited from the chain becoming another favored market for meme coin trading.
Meanwhile, the Ethereum ecosystem moved down one rank to become the third most popular blockchain ecosystem at a 10.8% share of investor interest. Compared to Q1, the Ethereum ecosystem’s mindshare has lost 1.9 percentage points. This is likely because Ethereum is already well-established as an ecosystem and familiar to investors, such that it is no longer considered a new, trending crypto narrative. At the same time, attention towards the Ethereum ecosystem is increasingly dispersed across the layer 2 ecosystems building on top of it.
Overall, the 20 most popular blockchain ecosystems represent a combined 97.0% of investor interest towards chain-specific narratives. The remaining 3.0% of interest is spread across another 47 blockchain ecosystems.
TON & Sui Overtake More Established Blockchain Ecosystems
Other blockchain ecosystems that have experienced rising popularity in 2024 are TON and Sui, which rank just behind the Ethereum ecosystem. The TON ecosystem now holds a 6.2% share of global investor interest, marking a 4.3 percentage point increase since Q1, while the Sui ecosystem recorded a smaller 2.7 percentage point increase to reach a 4.8% share of investor interest.
As a result, the up-and-coming TON and Sui ecosystems have overtaken the BNB Smart Chain, Cosmos and Avalanche ecosystems in both rankings and market share. Compared to their popularity in Q1, all 3 established blockchain ecosystems have suffered a decline in mindshare: the BNB Smart Chain ecosystem market share fell 1.3 percentage points to 4.1%, while the Cosmos ecosystem lost 2.0 percentage points to a 2.5% share and the Avalanche ecosystem lost 1.8 percentage points to reach a 2.1% share.
Bitcoin, Tron & Blast Ecosystems Enter Top Ranks
Since Q1, the Bitcoin, Tron and Blast ecosystems have seen an increase in investor interest that raised their rankings into the top 20. During this period, the Bitcoin ecosystem’s share of investor interest grew from 0.01% to 1.07%, as the narrative of building on Bitcoin strengthened and the Runes standard enabled native meme coins. Similarly, the Tron ecosystem market share grew from 0.02% to 1.02%, and the Blast ecosystem from 0.30% to 0.75%.
These 3 blockchain ecosystems replaced the Injective, PulseChain and Hedera ecosystems, which saw their share of investor interest dip by 0.21 to 0.34 percentage points.
Top 20 Most Popular Blockchain Ecosystems
Out of 67 blockchain ecosystems, the 20 most popular blockchain ecosystems ranked by their share of investor interest in 2024 to date, are as follows:
Rank | Blockchain Ecosystem | Market Share |
---|---|---|
1 | Solana | 38.79% |
2 | Base | 16.81% |
3 | Ethereum | 10.76% |
4 | TON | 6.20% |
5 | Sui | 4.83% |
6 | BNB Chain | 4.12% |
7 | Cosmos | 2.47% |
8 | Avalanche | 2.11% |
9 | Arbitrum | 1.77% |
10 | Polygon | 1.36% |
11 | Bitcoin | 1.07% |
12 | Tron | 1.02% |
13 | Cardano | 1.01% |
14 | zkSync | 0.95% |
15 | Sei | 0.82% |
16 | Aptos | 0.76% |
17 | Blast | 0.75% |
18 | Polkadot | 0.58% |
19 | Fantom | 0.46% |
20 | Metis | 0.31% |
- | Others | 3.05% |
Methodology
The study examined interest in blockchain ecosystems based on CoinGecko’s non-botted global web traffic, from January 1 to November 11, 2024. For the purpose of the study, only ecosystems with active listed coins and a non-zero percentage share of traffic were included.
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Curious to find out more about our previous research studies & statistics? Check out this one we did on the top blockchains by stablecoin supply.
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