Ethereum retained its position as the highest-earning blockchain in 2024, collecting $2.48 billion in fees, nearly triple Solana’s earning.
Despite undergoing the Dencun upgrade, facilitating low-cost transactions, the Ethereum blockchain emerged as the highest-earning network in 2024 and generated nearly 3x of what its Layer-1 competitor Solana managed to earn.
The Ethereum blockchain came at the top spot fee revenue in 2024, collecting $2.48 billion, according to a January 21 report by CoinGecko. Tron secured the second spot with $2.15 billion, while the Bitcoin network came third generating $922 million in fees. Interestingly, despite the heavy meme coin frenzy, Solana stood fourth generating $755 million in fee revenue.
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Source: CoinGecko
Ethereum’s 2024 fee earnings marked a 3% increase compared to the $2.41 billion collected in 2023, maintaining its position as the leading blockchain for revenue generation. Speaking on the development, CoinGecko research analyst Lim Yu Qian said:
“This suggests that Ethereum has continued to lead in fee earnings despite the Dencun upgrade in March 2024 that reduced L2 transaction costs and the ongoing user migration from the L1 chain to its L2 scaling solutions. Ethereum’s resilient fee earnings also comes in contrast to the price performance of ETH, which fell below expectations last year.”
Ethereum vs Tron vs Solana
As per the data from CoinGecko, a total of $6.60 billion in fees was collected across 21 layer-1 protocols in 2024, with layer-2 blockchains contributing an additional $294 million.
On the other hand, Tron experienced a significant surge in fee earnings, recording a 116.7% increase from $922.08 million in 2023 to $2.15 billion in 2024. Similarly, the Bitcoin network clocked a 16% growth in annual fee revenue in comparison to the previous year.
However, the most dramatic increase came from Solana, which reported a staggering 2,838% jump in annual fees, from $25 million in 2023 to $750 million in 2024. This explosive growth was driven by the memecoin boom, which also pushed Solana’s network to a record 100 million active wallets in October 2024.
Has Dencun Upgrade Put a Dent to ETH Revenue?
The Ethereum blockchain successfully conducted the Dencun upgrade last March, aimed at reducing transaction fees for layer-2 networks. Following this upgrade, crypto analysts raised concerns that this could negatively impact the mainnet revenue along with the ETH price ETH $2 550 24h volatility: 1.4% Market cap: $307.96 B Vol. 24h: $10.41 B .
Despite these concerns, Ethereum reported strong financial performance in early 2024. A CoinGecko report revealed the blockchain earned $1.17 billion in fees during Q1 2024, nearly half of its total earnings for the previous year. CoinGecko representative said:
“This was also Ethereum’s highest earning quarter in the last two years, driven by increased onchain activity amid widespread airdrop programs”.
Meanwhile, internal turbulence has surfaced within the Ethereum Foundation. On January 18, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced significant leadership changes to improve communication between the foundation and the broader ecosystem.
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