Ranking The Top Smart Contract Chains | Wallets, Transactions, Fees and Contracts | Apr 2026
The competition for smart contract chains has already been established! This is obviously an attractive sector as it positions itself as a sort of banking 2.0. Ethereum the OG is leading here, but there are now more and more competitors with few big ones and countless small ones. There are attempts to bring smart contracts to Bitcoin as well via some sort of L2s. The noise is extreme in the sector! This shows that the smart contract market obviously has a high value, and big players are competing for it. In the last bull run in 2021 there was an explosion in the smart contracts platforms. More and more kept coming online and a lot of them did well. A lot of them are EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible and users can switch between them using the same wallet as Metamask. Some are unique and have their own wallets like Solana, Cardano, Aptos, Sui, etc. When we thought we have enough, there is now x10 more 😊.
Let’s see how things are standing during the current market conditions.
We will be looking at: - Number of Addresses - Active Addresses - Daily Transactions - Fees - Contracts
The period that we will be looking is the latest data from September 2023.
We will be looking into the following blockchains: - Ethereum - Solana - BSC - Base - Sui - Arbitrum - Polygon - Cardano - Avalanche - Aptos
As said, more and more smart contract chain are popping up. This list is now extended and Sui, Aptos, Base are new additions. Furthermore, there are now chains like Aptos, Injective, Selestia, Sei, Berachian the Cosmos ecosystem as well, etc. As said, there is no shortage of smart contract chains these days. Even with these more are on the way: Scroll, Linea, zkSync, Manta, etc.
The data for the chains will be extracted from their blockexplorers or some other data providers.
Number of Addresses
One of the key metrics for crypto projects is the number of wallets. Here is the chart.
In the past Ethereum dominated this chart, but that is no longer the case. Ethereum is now in middle of the chart. The Binance Smart Chain is in the first spot with more than 800M wallets, followed by Base with close to 700M. Ethereum has 400M wallets. The Solana chain is also at the top, although the way new addresses are generated on Solana doesn’t leave clear data on chain to be counted on. Some estimates are that there are even above 1B wallets, but here the estimate is around 550M and this is an approximated data.
One thing to note about these types of wallets is that they are free and there is no cost for creating a wallet, like for example on Hive. Because of this there can be a lot of wallets created and even spammed.
Active Addresses
What’s more interesting in times like this is how many wallets are transacting. How many of those addresses are actually active?
Averages from the last days.
BSC is at the top here with 2.8M DAUs. Next is Solana and then Aptos on the third spot. Interesting that BSC is on the top now, becouse in the past Solana was the leader here and by a lot. Aptos is also ranking high now, closing on 1M DAUs.
Daily Transactions
The activity on the networks is mostly represented by the number of daily transactions. Here is the chart.
Solana is holding the number one spot by far here. It has around 80M daily tx in the recent period. That is what the blockchain is known for. Its speed. BSC in the second spot and Polygon on the third spot. Up to recently there was around 10M tx per day. Base is also in the top with close to 10M as well.
When looking at the transactions, the cost of them should be kept in mind. Solana has lower fees per tx and is on top. In the case of Base and BSC it is interesting there are cheaper options but obviously this is not the one thing to push them higher.
Ethereum is obviously the highest fees, and it comes lower in the ranks.
Fees
Fees are quite the unpopular topic and one of the main reasons for the new EVM chains, as users are trying to find a way to escape ETH high fees.
Here is the chart.
The fees here are in dollars. While ETH is on the top here, these fees of half a dollar are nothing compared to the fees in the bull run. At times ETH fees were going up to 200$ per transaction especially if it was a smart contract transaction. The other blockchains now have low fees, with BSC on the second spot. All the other chains have fees under 1 cent, in some cases even under one cent. For example, Solana has 0.005 fees per transaction. During the meme crazy back in December 2024 the fees on Solana were slightly higher reaching 0.02 at times.
There are a lot of options now for chains with low fees.
Contracts
These three are smart contract platforms so here is the chart for verified contracts per day.
Base is on the top here, with 1500 contracts, followed by the BSC chain and then Avalanche.
Marketcap
At the end the most important metric the market cap.
When it comes to market cap Ethereum is dominating the market, followed by BSC and Solana. The other coins are much smaller. Solana was in front of BNB, for a while as well.
One thing is for sure. The market for smart contracts has been very attractive and a lot of chains have been created in the past. But as for the industries, only a few will dominate it, while the others will be insignificant. The market cap for now separates Ethereum, Solana and BSC. Will these three continue to grow and eat all the rest remains to be seen. Also, in crypto even if the projects don’t grow, killing them completely is a hard thing.
All the best @dalz