The Solana ecosystem has emerged as the most popular blockchain ecosystem so far this year, accounting for 49.3% of global crypto investor interest in chain-specific narratives, according to an update from CoinGecko.
The CoinGecko report noted that the Solana ecosystem’s dominant mindshare “has been fueled by Solana’s continued rally back to 2021 highs, alongside the strong performance of key ecosystem project tokens such as Pyth and native meme coins such as dogwifhat.”
Meanwhile, the Ethereum ecosystem has “captured 12.7% of investor interest, ranking it as the second most popular blockchain ecosystem in 2024.”
CoinGecko pointed out in its report that this is likely “because Ethereum is already well-established as an ecosystem and familiar to investors, such that it is no longer considered a new, trending crypto narrative. At the same time, attention towards the Ethereum ecosystem is increasingly dispersed across the layer 2 ecosystems building on top of it.”
CoinGecko’s report also mentioned that the third most popular blockchain ecosystem is crypto exchange Binance’s BNB Smart Chain ecosystem, which “holds a 5.4% share of investor interest year to date (YTD). As with the Solana ecosystem, the BNB Chain ecosystem has continued to capture mindshare on the back of BNB’s price rallying near to its all-time high.”
The report from CoinGecko added that two layer 1 blockchain ecosystems “follow closely behind BNB Chain in popularity, with the Cosmos ecosystem accounting for 4.5% of investor interest and the Avalanche ecosystem accounting for 3.9% YTD.”
For the Cosmos ecosystem, recent successful airdrops “from Celestia and Dymension have helped to drive greater mindshare towards Cosmos Hub’s interchain thesis. Chains built on the Cosmos SDK have also managed to rank among the most popular blockchain ecosystems, namely the Sei ecosystem and Injective ecosystem.”
Whereas for the Avalanche ecosystem, mindshare has “been fueled by native meme coins like Coq Inu and its potential to lead crypto gaming, as demonstrated by its partnership to bring MapleStory on-chain.”
Between the Move programming language blockchains, the Sui ecosystem is “more popular with 2.1% of investor interest, which is four times of the Aptos ecosystem’s 0.5% mindshare.”
The TON ecosystem accounts for 1.9% of ecosystem narrative interest and is “the 11th most popular, benefiting from Toncoin’s affiliation with widely-used messaging app Telegram. Other popular layer 1 ecosystems include Cardano (1.3%) and Polkadot (1.1%), while Fantom, PulseChain and Hedera tied with mindshare around 0.5%.”
Overall, the 20 most popular blockchain ecosystems “represent a combined 97.4% of investor interest towards chain-specific narratives. The remaining 2.6% of interest is spread across another 38 blockchain ecosystems, including the Near Protocol ecosystem which narrowly missed the top 20 ranking.”
The Arbitrum ecosystem and Base ecosystem “have emerged as the most popular among Ethereum layer 2s, capturing 3.3% and 3.2% of investor interest in chain-specific narratives respectively YTD.”
The CoinGecko report further noted that the Arbitrum ecosystem’s mindshare is “likely contributed by Arbitrum being the largest layer 2 in terms of total value locked (TVL), while the popularity of Base ecosystem has been driven by its affiliation with crypto exchange Coinbase and native meme coin activity.”
The Polygon ecosystem (2.0% share of investor interest), zkSync ecosystem (1.3%) and Metis ecosystem (0.9%) have “also captured meaningful albeit smaller mindshare.”
As such, only five Ethereum layer 2 ecosystems “managed to rank in the top 20 most popular. The layer 2 ecosystems that have received relatively less attention so far this year include Optimism, Blast and Starknet, which ranked just outside the top 20.”
In total, all of the Ethereum layer 2s account “for 11.9% of investor interest in blockchain ecosystems YTD. This is comparable to the main Ethereum ecosystem’s 12.7% share of investor interest, perhaps indicating that scaling solutions have as much mindshare as Ethereum itself.”
Methodology
The study examined interest in blockchain ecosystems “based on CoinGecko’s non-botted global web traffic, from January 1 to March 18, 2024.”