Review of the 2024 performance of 22 mainstream public chains: half of the data declined, and Hyperliquid ranked first in many data

Author: Frank, PANews

2024 is destined to be a colorful year in the development of cryptocurrency. From the official adoption of ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum, to US President-elect Trump proposing plans to use Bitcoin as a national strategic reserve, cryptocurrency has gradually become an internationally recognized emerging asset type. Bitcoin has exceeded the $100,000 mark, MEME coins on Solana are emerging one after another, all the original star projects have been eclipsed, and the encryption market is in a state of ice and fire. Behind these changes, public chains have always been the core battlefield in the encryption market, and all these competitions are also reflected in the competition of public chains.

So from a data perspective, which public chains will really rise in 2024? Which public chains’ loss of power may not be due to underestimation, but real decline? PANews conducted a review and summary of this.

Data description: The objects of this inventory are the more popular Layer 1 and Layer 2, focusing on the TVL, token price, market value, number of active addresses, number of transactions and other dimensions throughout the year, starting from January 1, 2024 By December 29, 2024, some public chains that will be launched on the mainnet in mid-2024 will use the starting data and year-end data when these public chain tokens were launched. TVL data uses Defillama, daily activity and daily trading volume data from Tokenterminal and official browsers, and price data from Coingecko.

The public chains reviewed this time include:

Layer1: Solana, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Sui, Aptos, TON, Avalanche, Cardano, Hyperliquid, Fantom (Sonic), Tron, Near

Layer 2: Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, Polygon, Blast, Scroll, StarkNet, Taiko, Linea.

Layer1 TVL increased by an average of 7 times, with Hyperliquid and TON

experiencing the highest increases

In terms of TVL data, overall, the overall TVL data of these public chains analyzed increased by 117.7% during the year. Among them, the TVL of Layer 1 will increase by 707.69% on average in 2024, and the TVL of Layer 2 projects will increase by 8515.22% on average. However, this is mainly due to the low TVL of the L2 public chain Taiko when it was first launched, resulting in a holding increase of 825 times. Except for Taiko, the average growth rate of other Layer 2 this year is 294.69%.

Among Layer 1, the ones with the highest TVL growth are Hyperliquid, TON, and Aptos, all with growth rates of more than 10 times. Among them, Hyperliquid’s TVL has increased by 4407% since its launch. Among Layer 2, Taiko and Base are both the kings of growth this year. Taiko’s TVL volume increased by 82,500% from its launch to the end of the year, while Base’s TVL increased by approximately 721.51% throughout the year.

In addition to growth, some public chain data not only failed to grow significantly after one year, but also experienced a certain degree of decline. Among them, zkSync suffered the most serious decline, with TVL falling by 41.25% during the year, followed by Optimism (-16.69%), Fantom (-13.95%), Tron (-9.17%), and Polygon (-1.67%).

The daily activity of half of the public chains has declined, and Solana

has the highest daily activity.

In terms of network activity, the number of daily active addresses of Hyperliquid, Sui, and TON will increase the highest in 2024, with increases of 13381.48%, 3350.55%, and 2409.43% respectively. In addition to these three public chains, the daily active data of several public chains such as Base, Aptos, and Solana also increased by more than 10 times during the year.

What is surprising is that among the 22 public chains analyzed, the daily activity data of 9 public chains have declined to varying degrees this year. Among them, the daily active users of zkSync and StarkNet chains will decline the most in 2024, exceeding 90%. In addition, the daily activity levels of Near, Blast, Polygon, Avalanche, Cardano, Optimism, and Tron have all declined to varying degrees compared to the beginning of the year.

At the beginning of the year, Tron’s daily active addresses were 2.2 million, ranking first among all public chains. After a year of changes, Solana has become the public chain with the highest number of daily active addresses with 4 million daily active addresses. In addition, among the highest daily active data statistics, Solana has also become the public chain with the largest number of users with the highest daily active data of 8.8 million.

In terms of the number of daily transactions, Hyperliquid once again became the public chain with the largest growth. The number of transactions during the year increased by approximately 248,900%, Taiko increased by 4,471.43%, and Base’s transaction number was 1,948.78%. They are all public chains that have increased by more than 10 times. chain. The number of transactions on the Avalanche (C-Chain) network has declined the most, from 2.8 million at the beginning of the year to 260,000, a drop of 90.71%. However, the main reason for this decline is that January 1, 2024 happens to be in Avalanche During the peak period of abnormal fluctuations in the number of transactions, excluding such abnormal fluctuations, Avalanche's average daily number of transactions has basically remained at hundreds of thousands per day, without any major fluctuations.

In addition, the decline of zkSync has also reached 90%. In comparison, the decline of zkSync is indeed more obvious. Since the end of the airdrop, the number of transactions on the chain has dropped rapidly, from the original millions to hundreds of thousands per day.

The performance of currency prices was mixed, with HYPE taking the lead.

Some are happy and some are sad. In terms of token performance, half of the tokens rose and half fell throughout the year. Hyperliquid token performed the best, with an increase of approximately 1272.30% during the year, and the maximum increase reached 1648.00%. Becoming the only public chain token with an increase of more than 10 times. However, it needs to be taken into consideration that Hyperliquid’s token HYPE was just issued at the end of November. Compared with other public chains, it does have a certain advantage in terms of increase based on the opening price. However, there were also some other public chain tokens issued during the year, many of which did not increase much, and many even fell.

In addition, public chains with better token performance include Sui, TON, Tron, and BNB Chain, with their token prices more than doubling. Solana has been very popular in the market this year, but in fact, compared with January 1, 2024, the price of its token SOL has only increased by 92.26%.

Compared with the beginning of the year, the token prices of 10 public chains have dropped to varying degrees. Excluding two unissued coins, Base and Linea, this ratio is exactly 50%. Among the tokens that fell, StarkNet and Blast tokens fell the most, reaching 75% and 65% respectively.

In terms of market value, Ethereum still occupies the position of the big brother of the public chain. The market value at the beginning of the year was approximately 274.2 billion US dollars, and the market value at the end of the year reached 409.4 billion US dollars. The market value growth during the year was approximately 49.28%. The market value of BNB has always ranked first. In second place, the increase is slightly higher than SOL.

Ethereum is the dullest, Solana is full of firepower

In addition to horizontal comparison, the development of the following public chains may need to be explained separately. The description in one sentence is half fireworks and half joy.

Solana is a public chain that must be mentioned in 2024. During this year, Solana's data changes have been remarkable. It has completely emerged from the haze of FTX's collapse. Not only has it made a major breakthrough in terms of size, it has even competed with Ethereum. momentum. In the past year, Solana has led the MEME trend and relied on MEME's popularity to become the public chain with the most users.

At the beginning of the year, Solana’s TVL volume ranked fourth, and it improved to second at the end of the year. At the beginning of the year, the number of daily active users ranked only eighth, but at the end of the year, it became the public chain with the highest daily active users.

As the big brother of the public chain, Ethereum seems to be calm in this lively year of 2024. Many data at the end of the year are almost the same as at the beginning of the year. Daily activity has increased by 9% over the past few years, and daily transactions have almost remained the same over the past few years. Only the volume of TVL increased by 127%. If you ignore the 49% increase in the price of ETH itself, it seems that this data has not changed much. The stagnation of the TVL currency standard itself is also the reason why the currency price performance is not outstanding enough.

The main reason for this change may be the diversion from Layer 2. For Ethereum, whether it will maintain this stable state in the new year or there will be more ups and downs, may require more innovative content to lead.

The competition between Sui and Hyperliquid, rising stars and supernovas?

Hyperliquid is undoubtedly the supernova in the public chain track this year. It has given the market a lot of surprises. It ranks first in the growth rate of almost all data, such as daily activity growth, transaction number growth, TVL growth (ranked second), and token growth. Price growth. However, there are some objective factors that need to be considered in Hyperliquid’s rapid rise. First, it was born in the shortest time and is almost the youngest among the public chains analyzed. Second, although the growth rate is high, in terms of overall volume, it is still far behind public chains such as Ethereum or Solana. Especially for data like the number of active users, the current total number of Hyperliquid users is only 286,500, which is not as high as Solana’s daily active users at the beginning of the year. Other data, such as TVL’s size, is about US$1.7 billion, one-fifth of Solana’s.

However, Hyperliquid is approaching Solana in terms of daily transactions, ranking second. In terms of market value, it lags behind several public chains that performed far worse than it this year. From this perspective, the development potential of Hyperliquid in 2025 is still huge, but this development may require stronger and sustained data support.

Sui is considered to be Solana's main competitor in the future. Judging from the performance of the data, the Sui network's performance this year is also relatively impressive. TVL volume increased nearly 7 times during the year, daily activity increased 33.5 times during the year, and the highest number of transactions in a single day exceeded 300 million. The price of the token is also the public chain with the largest increase except Hyperliquid. It has increased by approximately 441.13% during the year, with the highest increase exceeding 520.25%. Judging from the growth level, Sui's growth rate in 2024 has exceeded Solana in some places, but another problem it faces now is the catching up from projects such as Hyperliquid or Aptos. Whether Sui ecology can explode in 2025 may require finding some new explosive points.

In addition to the above-mentioned representative public chains, in fact, other public chains will not be content with the corpse meal in 2024. Some are transforming to AI, represented by Near, and some are upgrading their brands by issuing new public chains. For example, Fantom is changed to Sonic. In addition, on the Layer 2 track, it is also one of the most popular public chain narratives in 2024. After several Layer 2 stars issued airdrops this year, the chain generally performed poorly. The best performers are Layer 2 companies like Base, which have no token plans yet. In addition, Taiko is also a Layer 2 that is not very popular in the market but performs well on the chain. However, the current overall data volume is not large, and subsequent development remains to be seen.

Finally, when comparing the relationship between the data of these 22 public chains, we can see that the tokens with the largest increase in 2024 are basically the public chains with the best growth in active users. From this perspective, perhaps the most important indicator for the development of public chains is users. For investors, the secrets behind how to judge the future expectations of a project may also be hidden under these simple data.