New wallets boost EVM chains despite overall market losses

Despite the overall market losses, demand for on-chain features remains strong. Several EVM-compatible L1 and L2 chains are noting an increase in new wallets. 

New active wallets are moving to several EVM-compatible chains, reflecting demand for on-chain activities. Despite the overall market drawdown, Web3 activity and apps are active, building wider adoption. 

Activity continued to flow into BNB Smart Chain and Base, as a response to a slowing Solana meme market. BNB Smart Chain became the leader with 4M active daily users, with just 2.7M for Solana. Based on unique address data, in the past week, Binance added another 2M wallets. 

Base was the leader in new wallet inflows, with an additional 2.8M addresses joining the network in the past week. Base unique addresses went vertical in the past few weeks, adding up to 30M new addresses in the whole month of February. The ongoing shift to Base showed growing demand for cheap on-chain activities, along with high available liquidity for DeFi investments and passive earnings. 

All of the L2 chains had a weekly engagement with over 9M weekly active wallets, growing for the second week in a row. The L2 ecosystem remains near peak activity, with over $10.5B in stablecoin liquidity to drive trading. Decentralized trading still reaches 18.5% of exchange activity, showing the robustness of decentralized on-chain activities even at lowered ETH prices and worsened sentiment.

The most active chains with new user growth try to avoid the fate of ‘dead networks’, where activity has only followed airdrop campaigns. Some of the top growth networks started building their app collection during the 2021 bull market, and have been trying to make a return.

Ethereum ecosystem remains relevant

Other highly active chains with an inflow of users show former stars from the 2021 Web3 bull cycle are still relevant. Users flowed into Polygon and Ronin, as well as the EVM-compatible L1 chain Avalanche. 

Polygon recently expanded its usage, carrying some of the leading apps based on DappRadar data. Polygon activity hinges on the Moonveil gaming ecosystem, the Polymarket prediction app, and legacy games retaining popularity.  

The past week also saw a shift into Sonic (formerly Fantom), as the network was mentioned widely on social media. Sonic also grew as it offered its own version of meme tokens, a fresh start from the slowing activity of Pump.fun. 

The recent expansion in users follows the robust demand for DEX trading. The top DEX is boosting all EVM chains, especially Uniswap. PancakeSwap increased the traffic and new user flows to BNB Smart Chain, while Base benefitted from its leading DEX, Aerodrome.

One of the reasons for the activity of EVM-compatible chains is the relatively low gas price of Ethereum. Gas fees are as low as $0.04, while regular transactions on Ethereum are under $1. This led to an increase in new Ethereum users, adding 752K new addresses in the past week. 

Smaller chains gain token-based traffic

On-chain analysts have noted that activity on smaller chains reflects new token launches and DEX activity. Based on DEX activity, Solana is still the highest-rank network for tokenization, but Base has ranked at a close second. 

Based on DexScreener, the currently active chains reflect their trending tokens. Sonic now ranks in the top 5 tokenization chains, while Arbitrum is back in the top 15. PulseChain and TON are just behind Sonic, drawing in their own brand of token creators. 

Trading bot usage is also changing the landscape for the most active networks. Solana takes up 82% of bot users, but BNBChain and Base recently increased their share. Base is still the smallest bot-driven chain, where still under 10K users are trading with bots. The relatively lower competition may be a factor in driving Base DEX activity. 

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