Ethereum has been the dominant smart contract and decentralized application (DApp) network since its inception. An analysis of Ether’s price (ETH) and market capitalization shows indisputable evidence that the blockchain has been gaining market share.
Ether market capitalization dominance (%). Source: TradingView
As shown above, Ether’s dominance in market capitalization terms has grown over the past couple of years, from an 18% average in July 2021 to the current 20%. Excluding Bitcoin (BTC) from the analysis, Ether’s market share presently stands at 40.6%, while its next competitor, BNB (BNB), holds a 7.2% share.
The disparity between Ethereum and others is also evident when analyzing the total value locked (TVL) on each network’s smart contracts. Ethereum is the absolute leader with $24.6 billion in TVL, followed by Tron’s $5.4 billion and BNB Chain’s $3.3 billion.
Total value locked market share (%). Source: DefiLlama
The above chart depicts how Ethereum’s TVL market share declining from 70.5% in June 2021 to 49.5% in May 2022 as Terra and Avalanche gained a combined 20% market share. However, following the Terra ecosystem collapse in May 2022 — which culminated in developers halting network activity — Ethereum quickly regained a 58% market share.
Despite the emergence of DApps on the BNB and Tron blockchains, Ethereum’s leadership has remained uncontested over the past 12 months. This data shows the irrelevance of the total number of unique active wallets (UAW) interacting with smart contracts per chain.
For instance, according to DappRadar, WAX has 363,600 active users, followed by BNB Chain’s 517,300 30-day UAW. These figures are way higher than the Ethereum network’s 66,300 unique active addresses, but they reflect much lower transaction fee, opening room for manipulation.
Decentralization matters, and Ethereum stands out among its competitors
The Ethereum ecosystem has the highest number of active developers, surpassing 1,870, which is more than the next three competitors — Polkadot (752), Cosmos (511) and Solana (383) — combined.
Currently, the Ethereum network has over…
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