Solana (SOL) and Base are leading interest in chain-specific narratives this year, according to an update from CoinGecko.
The Solana ecosystem has maintained its lead as the “most popular” blockchain ecosystem this year, accounting for “38.8% of global crypto investor interest in chain-specific narratives.” CoinGecko further noted that the Solana ecosystem had a strong start to the year with Solana rallying back to 2021 levels, alongside the “outperformance of key ecosystem project tokens and native meme coins.”
Solana ecosystem’s “popularity” continued to strengthen amid the resurgence of meme coin speculation, with traders preferring the chain’s “speed and low gas fees,” and fueled by the virality of meme coin generator Pump.fun.
While the Solana ecosystem’s top ranking is “unchanged” compared to when the study was first carried out in Q1, CoinGecko pointed out in its report that its share of investor interest has “shrunk by 10.5 percentage points, as other ecosystems ramp up efforts to capture more mindshare.”
The next most “popular” blockchain ecosystem is crypto exchange Coinbase’s Base ecosystem, with “16.8% of investor interest in 2024 to date.”
CoinGecko added in its report that the Base ecosystem has seen its share of investor interest “increase by over 5 times since Q1, raising the layer 2 ecosystem’s ranking from seventh to second, and overtaking its layer 1 Ethereum ecosystem.”
The research report from CoinGecko also mentioned that this means that the Base ecosystem now captures “9 times more interest than the next most popular layer 2 ecosystem Arbitrum.”
Similar to the Solana ecosystem, the Base ecosystem narrative “benefited from the chain becoming another favored market for meme coin trading.”
Notably, the Ethereum ecosystem “moved down one rank to become the third most popular blockchain ecosystem at “a 10.8% share of investor interest.”
Compared to Q1, the Ethereum ecosystem’s mindshare “has lost 1.9 percentage points.”
According to the CoinGecko report, 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.”
Meanwhile, attention towards the Ethereum ecosystem “is increasingly dispersed across the layer 2 ecosystems building on top of it.”
Overall, the 20 most popular blockchain ecosystems “represent a combined 97.0% of investor interest towards chain-specific narratives.”
CoinGecko further revealed that the remaining “3.0% of interest is spread across another 47 blockchain ecosystems.”
Other blockchain ecosystems that have experienced “rising popularity in 2024 are TON and Sui, which rank just behind the Ethereum ecosystem.”
The CoinGecko report pointed out that the TON ecosystem now holds “a 6.2% share of global investor interest, marking a 4.3 percentage point increase since Q1, while the Sui ecosystem recorded a smaller 2.7 percentage point increase to reach a 4.8% share of investor interest.”
As a result, the up-and-coming TON and Sui ecosystems have “overtaken the BNB Smart Chain, Cosmos and Avalanche ecosystems in rankings and market share.”
The CoinGecko report further noted that when compared to their popularity in Q1, all 3 established blockchain ecosystems “have suffered a decline in mindshare: the BNB Smart Chain ecosystem market share fell 1.3 percentage points to 4.1%, while the Cosmos ecosystem lost 2.0 percentage points to a 2.5% share and the Avalanche ecosystem lost 1.8 percentage points to reach a 2.1% share.”
Since Q1, the Bitcoin, Tron and Blast ecosystems have “seen an increase in investor interest that raised their rankings into the top 20.”
During this period, the Bitcoin ecosystem’s “share of investor interest grew from 0.01% to 1.07%, as the narrative of building on Bitcoin strengthened and the Runes standard enabled native meme coins.”
Similarly, the Tron ecosystem market share “grew from 0.02% to 1.02%, and the Blast ecosystem from 0.30% to 0.75%.”
These 3 blockchain ecosystems “replaced the Injective, PulseChain and Hedera ecosystems, which saw their share of investor interest dip by 0.21 to 0.34 percentage points.”
Methodology
The study examined interest in blockchain ecosystems based on CoinGecko’s non-botted global “web traffic, from January 1 to November 11, 2024.”
For the purpose of the study, only ecosystems with “active listed coins and a non-zero percentage share of traffic were included.”
