On-chain activity swung wildly across major blockchains over the past year, with some networks collapsing after viral booms and others showing steady, more resilient growth — according to on-chain analytics from Nansen. Big drops, big drivers - Nansen found 11 blockchains with year-over-year declines in active addresses. Ronin led the falls, plunging roughly 70%, while Bitcoin’s active addresses were down about 7.2%. - Transaction activity mirrored many of those declines: zkSync, for example, saw transactions collapse by about 90%. Rollups, airdrops and the base-layer countertrend - Despite the noise around rollups and concerns about liquidity fragmentation across Layer‑2s, Ethereum’s base layer registered a roughly 25% increase in active addresses and more than a 20% rise in transactions over the past year. - Several Layer‑2s, however, cooled after airdrop-driven surges. zkSync opened its token claim in June 2024 with nearly 700,000 eligible wallets, but faced criticism over Sybil‑filtering and saw more than 40% of top airdrop wallets immediately sell allocations. Scroll’s activity also slowed after its October 2024 airdrop. Winners and mixed results among L2s and app-driven chains - Arbitrum’s active addresses ticked down about 3% but still totaled roughly 31 million users, keeping it in the top 10 by activity. Its transaction volume rose about 36% to ~734.5 million — outpacing Ethereum’s ~507 million — driven in part by tokenized assets (including 500 U.S. stocks stamped on the network by Robinhood). - Base and Optimism stood out positively: both posted increases in active addresses and transaction volumes. Base — which has no native token and never ran an airdrop — benefited from activity in memecoins, AI-related apps and decentralized exchanges. Games, viral moments and the volatility they bring - Ronin’s collapse illustrates how dependent some chains are on a single hit application. The game Pixels migrated from Polygon to Ronin in H2 2023 and briefly turned Ronin into one of the most active chains; Ronin had only ~20,000 daily active users before Pixels’ arrival. By December 2024, DappRadar reported Pixels drew roughly 300,000 daily users. As the game cooled, Ronin’s on-chain activity dropped sharply. - Telegram’s Open Network (TON) showed a similar pattern. TON’s active addresses fell about 47% and transactions by 51% after outsized 2024 growth driven by Telegram mini-games. Hamster Kombat — a tapping game that lowered the entry barrier and sparked airdrop speculation — was particularly explosive: Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said it attracted 239 million users in three months, with more than 130 million qualifying for an airdrop. TON’s active addresses peaked near 2.5 million per day on Sept. 30 and have since fallen back. Scale versus sustainability - At the top end of raw activity, Solana recorded the most active addresses in the industry with more than 1 billion (followed by Tron and Ethereum). BNB Chain posted a 159% increase in active addresses. Notably, Bitcoin was the only network in the top five to record declines in both active addresses and transactions — with a ~22% drop in transactions as well as the ~7.2% fall in active addresses. - There’s little consistent correlation between on-chain usage and token prices. Solana’s token price slipped over the year even as active addresses rose ~66%, while BNB’s token price rose alongside its bigger on-chain footprint. What this means going forward - Year‑over‑year declines do not necessarily mean a network is failing. On-chain metrics can swing sharply when applications migrate, incentive programs end, airdrop excitement fades, or users chase short-term profits. Newer networks that relied heavily on a small number of apps or viral moments showed the steepest reversals. - Some ecosystems — Solana, BNB Chain and Base among them — appear to have retained more sustained usage after their surges, bringing lasting users, liquidity and applications even as hype subsided. Others reverted quickly to lower baselines once incentives and viral mechanics cooled. Bottom line: the on-chain landscape remains highly dynamic. Short-lived booms driven by airdrops, games and memecoin frenzies can dramatically reshape activity charts, but durable adoption still emerges where networks attract a broader set of use cases beyond momentary hype. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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