With record revenues, the Ethereum, Tron and Solana blockchains dominated the year 2024. But beyond the figures, it is the evolution of their ecosystems and sources of revenue that is intriguing. From DeFi to memecoins, dive into the detailed analysis of their performance and find out what the future holds.
The 3 blockchains that stood out in 2024
As the year 2024 has just ended, the time is right to look back at the blockchains that generated the most revenue over the past year.
Among all the blockchains combined, 3 particularly stand out: Ethereum with 2 billion dollarsTron with $576 million and Solana with $378 million.
Graph representing revenues per week from the Ethereum (gray), Tron (red) and Solana (green) blockchains
During this article we will therefore focus on each of these blockchains, the origin of said revenues as well as their prospects for 2025.
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The Solana blockchain, a real bulldozer of the year 2024
Although Solana is in 3rd position in our ranking representing the blockchains to have generated the most revenue in 2024, it should not lose sight of this performance.
Indeed, Solana is the blockchain to have had the most significant growth in this metric, going from “only” $13 million in 2023 has $378 million of income in 2024, i.e. an exponential increase of 2,808% !
Chart representing Solana blockchain revenues by year
Furthermore, the year 2025 is off to a good start for Solana sincein just 1 week, blockchain generated $16.5 million in revenue, more than in all of 2021, 2022 or even 2023 (not cumulative).
Although the revenue generated by the Solana blockchain comes from multiple sources, some are undeniably dominant in its results.
The most obvious source of this income is memecoins, these humorous cryptocurrencies launched by tens of thousands every day, notably via the Pump.fun protocol.
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In order to establish a clear correlation link between the revenues generated by the Solana blockchain and those of Pump.fun we will look at their on-chain data:
Table representing revenues generated on the Pump.fun protocol, with cumulative revenues in black and daily revenues in green
According to on-chain data from the Dune analytics platform, the Pump.fun protocol has generated $389 million since its launch, including more than $104 million in the month of November alone.
Over this same period, Solana recorded more than $100 million in revenue:
Chart representing Solana blockchain revenue per month – yellow arrow indicates November, red arrow indicates September
While Pump.fun “only” recorded 16 million dollars in revenue in September, Solana recorded less than 12 million dollars.
Although this pattern seems “simplistic” at first glance, even reductive for Solana, it is repeated month after month. We can therefore confirm that memecoins, and more particularly the Pump.fun protocol, have a direct impact on the revenue generated by the blockchain.
However, the Solana blockchain is not just about its memecoin activity. Protocols with interesting fundamentals are developing on this network such as Hivemapper, for example, which is an alternative solution to Google Maps and which remunerates its contributors with its native token, HONEY.
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Other projects, taking advantage of Solana's advantageous technical characteristics, are gradually developing. Whether in decentralized infrastructures (DePIN), Web3 gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi) or even autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents, the Solana blockchain will continue to host innovative projects in 2025.
The price of Solana’s SOL token increased by 87% over the last year.
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The Tron blockchain, the unloved
If there is one blockchain that we underestimate in France, it is certainly the Tron blockchain. Indeed, the sulphurous image of its founder, Justin Sun, sticks to it, so much so that many investors simply do not want to hear about it.
And yet, Tron is literally the 2nd blockchain to generate the most revenue in 2024: $576 million !
Graph representing revenues by year of the Tron blockchain
Since its launch in 2018, the Tron blockchain has generated more and more revenue, year after year. From 2023 to 2024, its revenues increased by 36%.
This can partially be explained by an increasing increase in the number of transactions on the blockchain, coupled with an increase in average fees per transaction:
Graph representing the number of daily transactions (yellow) and average fees per transaction (blue)
The Tron blockchain is particularly known as being a relevant solution, due to its relatively low transaction fees and for exchanges/payments in stablecoins, particularly in Asia and Latin America.
According to DeFiLlama data, approximately 35% of the total market capitalization of stablecoins is on the Tron blockchain.
Tron's sources of income are diverse: staking, transaction fees, burning of TRX tokens, DeFi, memecoins with the Sun pump launcher, and many others.
With the burn mechanisms put in place by the network, the maximum supply of TRX is deflationary, which contributes to creating scarcity on the token, with an average of 2.88% since 2020.
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Thus, although the Tron blockchain is largely criticized due to the sulphurous reputation of its founder, its on-chain data reveals its relevance to us. It will be interesting to observe whether the Tron blockchain will manage to stay the course in 2025.
The price of the TRX token increased by 135% over the past year.
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Could revenues from the Ethereum blockchain be in danger?
The Ethereum blockchain, and in particular its native token, Ether, will have disappointed many investors in 2024. Indeed, unlike the projects mentioned previously, the price of Ether has only recorded an increase. moderate” of 43%.
One of the main reasons for this moderate increase: the FUD on the Ethereum project after the Dencun update with EIP-4844. Indeed, since this update which took place in March, revenues for the Ethereum blockchain have fallen considerably, even restarting its inflation.
However, this update allows Ethereum to offer much lower transaction fees to its users. With an equivalent number of transactions, Ethereum went from $15.6 fees per transaction on average in March to $5.3 in December :
Graph representing the average fees per transaction (in blue) and the number of daily transactions – in monthly data
Let's now look at the revenues of the Ethereum blockchain for the year 2024:
Graph representing revenues from the Ethereum blockchain in quarterly data
During the year 2024, Ethereum recorded $2 billion in revenue including 1 billion dollars in the first trimester, $368 million on the 2nd, $159 million on the 3rd and $427 million in the last quarter.
Thus, we can clearly identify the difference before/after EIP-4844 which took place 2 weeks before the end of the first trimester: Ethereum blockchain revenues divided by 2.7 in the space of 1 quarter.
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In the 3rd quarter, its revenue fell further to its lowest at $159 million. However, a change in dynamics can be observed in the last quarter of 2024. With $427 million in revenue, the latter is larger in this metric than Q3 or Q2.
Looking more at the overall result, Ethereum will have generated as much revenue in 2024 as in 2023, while EIP-4844 was not yet activated.
Thus, everything is not decided in advance for the second most capitalized cryptocurrency. Although the sentiment of FUD around Ethereum has been pervasive for the better part of a year, the health of the network need not be in question as of today.
However, it will be interesting to continue to observe Ethereum's on-chain metrics in 2025, particularly if the supply of Ether becomes deflationary again.
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Sources: Artemis Terminal, Dune
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