The Breakdown - The Myth of the “Most Used” Blockchain | The Breakdown

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

The race to be the “most used blockchain” misses the point. This episode examines the metrics behind Solana vs Ethereum — and why usage, revenue, and adoption are being misunderstood — followed by a discussion with Nick Almond on where these networks are actually headed. Thanks for tuning in! As always, remember this podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice. – Follow Blockworks Research: https://x.com/blockworksres Follow Nick: https://x.com/DrNickA Follow David: https://x.com/dcanellis — Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ —- Timestamps: (00:00) Intro - The Fight Over ‘Real’ Crypto Metrics (1:43) Ethereum By The Numbers (3:56) Is Solana The ‘Most Used Chain?’ (6:09) Why No Single Chain Can Win Everything (11:47) Different Chains, Different Jobs (14:00) Interview with Nick Almond - - Disclaimer: Nothing said on The Breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Host and guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

At the start of the year, the Ethereum versus Salana debate kicked off again, all because the Salana Foundation President Lily Lou told CNBC that Solana was the quote-unquote most used chain. Lily said, Solana throughout 2025 is more used than the entire rest of the industry combined, times two to three, so Solana is already the most adopted blockchain. I don't know if the Salana Foundation president really knew how much that would set some people off, but it did, Defi Dad posted on X, most used chain based on what, disguise emoji? The drifting eye contact is a dead giveaway even she doesn't believe it.

Meanwhile, Nansen's CEO Alex Svanavik pointed to Dex, volumes, active addresses and transaction counts as proof of Lily's claim. Mike Judas of Six-Man Ventures and a friend of Blockworks sub-tweeter DeFi dad a few days later, quoting a news article that pointed out that VISA was now settling transactions on the most used blockchain in the world, which I thought was pretty cute. If you like me, then you're probably tired of the whole Solana versus Ethereum thing, but the reason that people care so much about these metrics is that there is just a lot riding on even one chain figuring out how to attract and scale to billions of users. Yes, that's right.

It's the never-ending war between monolithic and modular blockchain thesis. So in this video, we're looking at chains like Ethereum and Solana through the lens of the market's recent shift towards quote-unquote real metrics. It's the revenue meter. Let's get to it. This is The Breakdown, and I'm your host, David Canales. Nothing said on The Breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Host and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Bitcoiners like to talk about hyper-bitconization,

when Bitcoin is worth so much that it forces the entire Earth onto the Bitcoin standard, pricing all goods and services in super-valuble Satoshi's. What is the blockchain version of that? What do we call the true end state for a monolithic blockchain that doubles as the default coordination layer for 6 billion plus people? Maybe it's hyperchainization or hyperchainified or something. like that. Meanwhile, it's definitely possible to show that Ethereum is the most used chain right now. Here's one way, stable coin transfer volumes. Ethereum's main net consistently sees more than double

the stablecoin transfer volume across USDC and USDT than Solana and even nearly triple the volumes on occasion. Throw in transfer volumes on base, which eventually does settle on Ethereum and it's no longer even close. All this is largely due to the fact that more than half of all stablecoin supply exists on Ethereum with $168 billion worth at the time this video was made. Salana trails far behind with under $16 billion, even if growth has been picking up of late, and Salana is actually third behind Tron. All of that really does mean something considering stable coins are about as close to a killer app for blockchains as we're ever going to get right now.

Ethereum also wins hands down for total value lock. Depending on where you look, between 60 and 70% of every dollar of crypto value tied up in Defy protocols exists on Ethereum. Right now, that converts to almost $70 billion worth of value. Solana is a very, very distant second for TVL with $8.5 billion. So if there is a stable coin to be sent or yield to be farmed, odds are that it happens on Ethereum. That makes Ethereum far and away the most used chain for those certain use cases, at least in terms of nominal value. And that's only the more obvious metrics. If we take a look at how much ETH is state directly to the chain by validators and so on

as part of consensus, we can see that around 35.5 million eath is currently committed, the equivalent of $105 billion in capital, all earning a steady eath yield. The entire market cap of Seoul is only $70 billion, with about three quarters of that state directly to the chain. So again, Ethereum is by far the most used chain by proof of stakers, at least going by the raw value of the crypto they've staked. Okay, now it's Salana's turn to be number one. This tweet from Artemis CEO John Ma covered those bases.

it tallied up Salana's on-chain activity over all of 2025. This particular arithmetic puts Salana in first place in terms of monthly active users with 98 million, transaction counts with 34 billion, trading volumes with 1.6 trillion, and application fees at 5 billion and revenue at 1.5 billion. John went on to say that by pure usage, Solana is indeed the most used chain in 2025. Look, we could spend a whole episode on breaking down each of those metrics to feel. out whether they mean anything at all, but let's just run through these very quickly. The most active users metric that John Marr is quoting here is a common mistake.

The number of active addresses on a network is simply not an indicator of the number of active users on a network, as this thread from Lockworks VP of product, Dan Smith, broke down over a year ago. Dan shows how two bots on Polydon and Tron wildly inflate their active address counts by sending small amounts of USDT and gas to a massive web of Smurf addresses. Dan tweeted, I assign zero weight to the 2.9 million active addresses this scheme has spawned, and these are certainly not valuable users in any capacity at all. He goes on to say, this is not a chain-specific problem.

All low-fee chains will experience this since the cost of spam is so low. Solana, sui, arbitram, aptos, insert your favorite blockchain, all of them. And if you want to be lazy, just look at fees. Anything is better than active addresses. So, with transaction counts and active users out, we're left with trading volumes, application fees and revenue. Conveniently for Solana, the numbers in John Mars Post are all cumulative for the entire year of 2025. But if we just look at the last half of that year, we can see that HyperLicker is actually the number one chain by revenue for five months running. Ethereum even beats

Solana for revenue in October. Now with on-chain trading volumes, Solana is ahead of Ethereum, but like all other networks, trails really far behind B&B chain, largely on account of Binance Alpha incentives, inflating volumes on pancake swap and other Dexes. or in Perp's Dex volume and Solana wouldn't even be in the top five. The truth is, the most used blockchain is a junk term. It barely means anything at all. Look at Bitcoin. Maybe it was different a decade ago, but the number one way to use Bitcoin is to hold it.

The second is to trade it at times of peak bull market. See for yourself, times of peak transaction volumes on the Bitcoin network always maps to the frothiest and most volatile times of every bull market. It means that buying and selling Bitcoin in pursuit of profit is actively using it. So is selling everything you own and smuggling your family's life savings out from rampant hyperinflation only to liquidate it for food and shelter on the other side. And the same goes for holding Bitcoin and never touching it. So holding Bitcoin is using Bitcoin. In that case, Bitcoin is by far the most used chain for a new metric that

I'll just make up right now, total value stored with more than $1.7 trillion worth of value being stored on the network. This is five times more than Ethereum and 25 times more than Solano. Now, here's what this is really about. Potential market caps. The most used chain, whatever that may be, definitely sounds like it should also be the most valuable chain. And so if Solana is the most used chain, then it must be pretty valuable. Maybe more than the market realizes. Maybe the price of Seoul should be much higher than it is. It all ties into the recent debate between Haseeb Qureshi and Santiago Royal Santos, also friends of blockworks over how layer ones in their native coins should be valued.

Check it out if you missed it, but the conversation essentially boils down to whether we should value chains and by extension their native coins by the values spent by users to use those networks, the so-called revenue meta for block space, or whether we should value them by their potential to attract that spent value value in the future, which I suppose we could call the hype meta. And Santi is right, if we were to value coins by traditional metrics, P and PS ratios, using their associated layer one revenue, profit, fee, spend, whatever you want to call it, then they are overvalued. Taking on Haseeb's train of thought, what is the potential value of any layer one blockchain network? Again, I would say that's when a blockchain would be so deeply woven into the fabric of the internet that we all barely notice we're using a blockchain at all. That blockchain protocol would be to value what SMTP is to email or what HWTP is to websites. All of this is precisely why we see Jump Crypto pushing Firedancer as the solution to Solana reaching 1 million transactions per second.

That's why MegaEath, an extension of the Ethereum ecosystem, is gunning to be the world's first real-time blockchain off the back of a single sequencer node. It's just one super machine to process all the transactions very quickly. Quick break before we continue. Blockworks's flagship institutional conference, digital asset summit is back in New York City this March 24th through 26th. Das brings together allocators, asset managers, policy makers, and the builders actually shaping crypto's next phase. Not the hype cycle, but the infrastructure and capital behind it. This year summit represents over $4 trillion in assets under management, with more than $100,000,

150 speakers and 750 250 institutions in attendance. Speakers include leaders from firms like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton, senior policy makers and regulators. Don Wilson of DRW will be there alongside core crypto infrastructure teams

across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Stable Coins. If you're looking for a serious institutional grade view of where digital assets are headed in 2026, this is where that conversation happens. Use code breakdown 200 for $200 off. Learn more at blockworks.co slash events. Now back to the show.

Both FireDenser and mega ether obvious plays to elicit the idea that a blockchain could be absorbed into the fabric of the internet. And it's also why killer crypto apps are few and far between, why Uber, Tinder, and DoorDash don't run on a blockchain. There already exist technology stacked capable of supporting all of the throughput bandwidth. They need to support billions of users. That's the internet. Why would you add a layer of complexity on top of that? And in a way, all chains really are just competing to attract the right mix of developers, users, capital and attention that can convert to that level of mass adoption. Free flowing financial plumbing accessible to all is crypto's brand, irrespective

of the project. In this world, crypto would no longer be a fringe alternative to the traditional finance system, but the standard for financial and reputational agreements between two parties, period. One big problem, so far no blockchain has come close to the throughput required to actually handle billions of users in a world where everything is a token, like in Jesse Pollack's version of the future. Solana and Hyperliquid are apparently capable of handling 100,000 transactions per second, so at best we rival the biggest individual trading apps from traditional finance, like the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange for throughput. But again, what is the potential value of any layer one blockchain network? And it depends on how big you want to think, and we know

VCs and founders can think really big, so we can really go for it. Whatever blockchain system capable of humanity-scale adoption would need to go much further than the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange. It would need to handle every trading venue around the world. as well as all the functions of Visa and Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. And that's only the financial stuff. What about passports and other digital identity systems, driver's licenses, insurance claims and parking fees? Here's the hard part. We know that layer one chains have traded degrees of decentralization for more throughput throughout the years.

How much further would chains need to centralize to actually scale to billions? Don't get me wrong, there are tons of future realities where crypto is literally everywhere for better or worse, I can't really imagine existing within a universally integrated blockchain system controlled by only a small group of validators with God mode powers. What's the point of a blockchain at all if transactions can be rolled back and your assets frozen? Or even without the God mode powers, what use is an entirely new settlement stack if the tech powering the chain is too expensive to run without any real advantages in terms of fault tolerance or decentralization?

At least in Web 2, it's mostly different groups of individuals with competing but similar interests that control all of the different apps that I use. Now I just have to trust one cabal. All of this is, of course, a pitch for the modular chain thesis, whereby there exists an injurious net of interoperable blockchains, each one handling a different corner of the new tokenized web. I don't think I need to point out that critics of the modular chain thesis would say that it simply cope, that it only gained traction once it was clear that the monolithic chain thesis

would struggle in the ways we've discussed here. We wait to see if monolithic chains are indeed doomed, the real answer is this. Solana and Ethereum are destined to persist independently of each other, each with their own value propositions that are increasingly diverging. Maybe Ethereum really will be more like an on-chain nation state with GDP and so on, and Solana more like a business with revenues and profits, because that's how their respective developer and investor communities think and express their realities. In that sense, layer ones never really compete with each other on a long enough timeline.

They simply exist within the bounds of their technical. parameters, throughput, cost, censorship resistance and so on, and the market dictates what they'll be used for. Now, that doesn't solve the question of whether ethosol should trade higher or lower than they do right now, but it's obvious in both cases there are existential limits to how high they can go, and those limits could be much lower than many people would like to admit. But at a fundamental level, what makes crypto-crypto is that you are using it simply by holding any crypto at all in any blockchain wallet. Anyone who owns crypto is actively using it, just like anyone who is actively holding Fiat in their bank account is actively using Fiat. Fiat is a system.

Crypto is a system. Opting in to opt out is the use case. And I can't help but think this is really the point of it all. The most compelling pitch for crypto has always been that it's the technological staff holding of last resort, the ultimate backstop for value and transfer storage. It's crypto's most valuable proposition and the great irony is that most people in the world, thankfully, have no real desperate need for decentralized value protocols. But they still desperately need the yield and returns are associated with investing in those protocols to advance their place within a Fiat system that is increasingly working against them. And this explains why no-fee-perps, Dexes and meme coin launch pads have pushed Solana to be the most used chain across

certain metrics, even if it's not really clear how long the likes of pump and drift can maintain the market's attention. From here, watch the Solana versus Ethereum rivalry fade as their value propositions change, just like Bitcoin's did, if based on nothing but how their respective user-based actually use crypto. If you want to talk about moat, that's the real moat. I posed all of this to Nick Armand, the head of governance for Gito Foundation. Who had this to say? What's the thing with me is Nick Armand, the head of governance for Gito Foundation. How's it going? Very good. Thank you, David.

That's good. You've heard me ramble on about, you know, this idea of what the most used chain might be for the past 15 minutes, I guess. What did I get wrong? What did I get right, what do you think? I thought you were largely over the target, actually. I think you were right to kind of critically analyze the way in which we're evaluating these chains. I think the kind of argument around pulling out how Bitcoin is different, Bitcoin's valued most in the market, and yet it effectively is close to zero on revenue in the classic sense. So the metrics that we're using to measure blockchains, things like daily active users, all of these things like need to be revisited in this kind of new paradigm of value, if you like. Yeah, this might be like kind of taking

away the curtain a little bit, but we did catch up, you know, before we kind of had this chat just now. And, you know, something that came up was that, you know, Solana is really kind of headed where the market wants it to go. And in some sense, Ethereum and under Vatheum, and under Vatina Talis leadership, that isn't so much of a concern. And instead, they're kind of looking at Ethereum would kind of play for what they think society needs in a few decades in these kind of really hyper decentralized networks for more, you know, public good use cases rather than high frequency trading and stuff like that. You know, how long do you think it will take for, you know, the market?

to kind of realize that it does have control over what these networks are doing kind of in terms of a business development sense and their trajectories. Yeah, I think we're definitely seeing this potentially like a bifurcation between the end game for these different networks. I think you're right there to frame the Ethereum goal, which is much more cypherpunk. So it's much more about building. a hyper resilient network that will be here in a hundred years. You know, Vitalik is a long-termist. The roadmap spans, you know, decades, really. So it moves slower and it optimizes for

resilience and decentralization. But the trade-off of that is it's not going to move to where the market is quite as quickly as, say, Solana is directly doing. So I think there's trade-offs of both of these dynamics. And at the moment, the market values decentralization very highly, you know, the kind of top two most decentralized networks, if you like, being Bitcoin and Ethereum are top two in the market. It's clear that that kind of resilience, long-term, Lindy effect kind of system is valued in the market. However, I do think there's going to be a huge amount of value to moving where the market is to facilitate things like high-frequency trading, sort of low latency,

execution, high-quality execution. Yeah, those are trade-offs that Vatelic and Ethereum at large don't really want to make because that will kill home stakers and it will reduce decentralization on the network to a point where I don't think Vitellic finds tolerable. Yeah, I can only see this really ending where, you know, that there are, say, you know, a handful of, you know, blockchains that really do prioritize decentralization, and that is obviously a scale, because Solana is prioritizing decentralization compared to something like Tempo with its permission validate a set, but at the same time, Ethereum is also to the left of Solana on that scale as well. But at some point, it will become important that we just measure the usage of each individual

chain, perhaps with custom parameters for each network, because, you know, real economic value does make sense for a blockchain that its primary use cases, either payments or settlement for trading and stuff like that. But if there is a quote unquote public's good network that handles very important processes for society in some future network state, but it's not a lot of economic value that's flowing through those changes. It's more a settlement system for smart contract actions in kind of critical worldward contexts like insurance payouts or something like that. You know, I just don't see how this squares with the hyper-financialization of crypto, where we do want these metrics to understand the valuations of things, but

public goods are almost priceless in a way. And at least, that is what the idealistic view of like what Vitalik and kind of the solar punk people want. Yes. So how do we get through that without, you know, devaluing the need for decentralized systems for public goods? So I think the Overton window is shifted in crypto, on decentralization. So decentralization is a continuum. You know, for the first sort of era of crypto, we used to think it was you are decentralized or you're not. But there are degrees of it.

And we're actually just getting to the point where the kind of line of decentralization is being negotiated. Is this a decentralized network or not? And I do think the likes of Tempo who kind of crossed the, for me, have kind of crossed the line into this permission validator set, which we used to call proof of authority chains. That was a kind of previous red line. And we've kind of moved into an era where we are letting go of our previous paradigm of decentralization. And that's pointing a kind of selective pressure across the rest of the industry. So, yeah, we've got this kind of continuum of decentralization. You've got Bitcoin at the most radical end of decentralization.

And with that, it becomes its rigidity and low transaction speeds. And Ethereum is much more closer to that. It's like, for me and my mind, it's a kind of Bitcoin adjacent network. And I think that's its general trajectory is that it's going to be a kind of Bitcoin with smart contracts. and it's programmable money, but it's got the same philosophy of hyper resilience and Vitalik's new angle of it's about simplicity and code minimization

and it's trying to become a kind of base layer, public good-like execution environment, ready for a world where, you know, things get incredibly hostile for crypto. And I think philosophically we have a whole lot of other networks who are moving in a kind of slightly different direction that have much smaller validator sets, they're much more centralized and they're optimizing for pace and institutionalization.

And actually, Solana is not one of those kind of very centralized chains, certainly much, much more decentralized than the likes of tempo and many of the other sort of up-and-coming networks. So, yeah, it will have this kind of choice around where does the validator set live, what's the optimal validator set? And I do think we're likely to see a further contraction of the validator. set in Solana as the requirements. We're pushing towards this kind of notion of IBRL and increasing bandwidth, reducing latency. And necessarily, that's going to push the frontier of hardware.

So that's going to up the requirements further on validators. It's going to get more technical. The likes of GTO's BAM is like, you know, it's using trustless execution environments, that the hardware is changing. And that's the kind of optimization frontier for the likes of Solana. It's pushing both hardware and effectively trying to run at the kind of boundary of physics and hardware on one side and willing to find a kind of optimization around decentralization. It is still very, very decentralized. And, you know, it's a matter of what is the necessary level of, what is the realistic and necessary level of decentralization that achieves a network goal? but continues to stay resilient to like 99.9% of attacks. I think Ethereum is, you know, it's planning for the apocalypse, a bit like Bitcoin is.

And I think Solana's a bit more. Let's go and synthesize with the traditional finance world and see where we end up. And that's about all the time we have for today. Thank you for joining us on the breakdown. And let me know what you think of the modular versus monolithic chain theses in the comments. And if you really disagree, find me on Twitter and yell at me there. I'll see you next time.