Solana Overtakes Ethereum By Active Users After 70% Spike

The number of daily active users on Solana overtook the Ethereum mainnet on Nov. 11 following a sharp uptick in activity.

According to data to Artemix, Solana hosted 356,300 unique users on Saturday, surpassing Ethereum’s nearly 330,000 by 10%. The milestone was driven by a sharp uptick in activity on Solana, with the network hosting only 208,000 active addresses on Nov. 7.

For comparison, Ethereum consistently hosted between 290,000 and 350,000 users daily over the majority of the past three months, with two brief spikes above 400,000 and a surge to more than 1M wallets.

The milestone is the latest sign of Solana’s recovery following last year’s brutal bear and the fallout from the collapse of its major investor, FTX.

The price of SOL plummeted more than 96% from its November 2021 all-time high of $250 to less than $10 in January, according to CoinGecko. Active addresses on the network shrank 85% from 1.28M in May 2022 to around 200,000 this September, according to The Block.

But Solana refused to stay down, with the network outperforming the broader markets amid the recent cryptocurrency rally as evidenced by the recent surge in active addresses.

The price of SOL is up 145% in four weeks, beating out many rival digital assets by at least double. The total value locked in Solana-based DeFi protocols is up 62% over the same period, according to DeFi Llama, while NFT sales volume grew 35% in the past 30 days, according to Crypto Slam.

The move followed progress towards Solana's firedancer upgrade in the form of a testnet, and dissipating expectations that the FTX bankruptcy estate would soon offload large sums of SOL on the markets.

Ethereum’s Layer 2s

While some analysts have been quick to pronounce that Solana has flipped Ethereum by active users in response to the recent uptick in activity. However, the Ethereum ecosystem has expanded beyond its base-layer, with the majority of activity now taking place on Layer 2.

According to data from Token Terminal, more than 800,000 users were active on the top seven Layer 2 networks over the past day combined. Coupled with the Ethereum mainnet, the data suggests more than 1M wallets were active across the Ethereum ecosystem. However, said data does not account for users operating the same wallet across multiple networks.

According to L2beat, Layer 2 networks are driving 80% of activity in Ethereum’s broader ecosystem, which is driving roughly 60 transactions per second.