What is the #1 Blockchain?
It's probably not what you think
👋 Welcome to the 36th issue of The Syllabus from Invisible College — a weekly(ish) newsletter that helps you navigate the fast-moving world of web3. To get this newsletter delivered to your inbox, subscribe here:
During one of our Invisible College Office Hours events recently, Rockwell asked me a simple question:
Can you guess the #1 blockchain by daily active wallet addresses?
Judging by Rockwell’s tone, I knew the answer would be a surprising one. After a few wrong guesses—Ethereum, Flow, and Polygon—I gave up.
We’ll get to the answer in a bit. But first, let’s look at the top 16 blockchains ranked by the number of daily active wallet addresses. In reverse order, just to build up some suspense:
16. Polkadot - 1,100
15. NEAR - 10,200
14. Harmony - 12,000
13. Algorand - 24,800
12. Avalanche - 36,065
11. Cosmos - 36,362
10. FTM - 39,000
9. Tezos - 46,126
8. Cardano - 58,000
7. Flow - 206,000
6. Polygon - 259,000
5. Ethereum - 533,000
4. Solana - 640,000
3. Binance Smart Chain - 667,000
2. Bitcoin - 912,958
Oh, there’s our friend Bitcoin with just under one million daily active wallet addresses.
Which chain could possibly be next? It seems like all the ones that top the market cap charts are there.
The answer is…wait for it…
1. Tron - 2,680,000
WAIT, WHAT?! TRON? TRON IS #1?!
Tron is not only in the top spot, but it’s ahead by a wide margin—by 1,767,042 addresses, to be exact. And it could be even higher now since it has been growing month over month and this data is from September.
So what's going on here?
Let’s dig into it.
A fact most people find surprising is that Tron has the 2nd highest stablecoin market cap, behind only Ethereum. There's $32B+ worth of stablecoins on the network, making up a whopping 22.2% of the entire stablecoin market cap.
How has Tron grown so big?
By building a sizable user base that’s doing low-cost stablecoin transfers.
If you pull up the network transfer volume you can see the vast majority of network activity is people trading USDT, the Tether stablecoin.
This begs the question: Why are so many people transferring USDT?
Quick story time.
A friend of Rockwell’s recently came back from a trip to Argentina. He learned that it was common for people to call someone who then meets them at their exact location and does a currency transfer on demand. They send USDT to this person over Tron and receive local Argentine pesos (ARS) in return.
There could be any number of reasons why people might want what amounts to a human ATM, but one of the most likely reasons is Argentina’s rampant inflation. The inflation rate rose to a staggering 83% over the prior year in September 2022. With all that taken into account, it’s no wonder that a large driver of the adoption of USDT is to retain the value of their savings. Even though the US Dollar has also experienced high inflation this year, it pales in comparison to ARS.
At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, but there are stablecoins on basically every other blockchain. What makes Tron so special?”
The answer lies within this sentence we wrote earlier in this piece: By building a sizable user base that’s doing low-cost stablecoin transfers.
Tron’s fees are essentially negligible. They can vary based on a number of factors, but they’re typically a fraction of a penny. This is incredibly important for small total dollar-amount transfers for spending cash.
It remains to be seen if Tron can continue to outpace competing blockchains. Now that the Ethereum Merge has been implemented, various scaling solutions such as the Layer 2 chains Arbitrum and Optimism may gain more adoption. And many blockchain developers like building on Ethereum and Ethereum-based chains due to their interoperability and security.
For now, Tron is solving a pressing issue that affects ordinary people’s daily lives. And ultimately, solving problems with real, scalable use cases is what will onboard billions of people to web3.
Important note: we are not Tron maxis, we just find this data interesting. Also, none of this should be construed as financial advice.
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