Activity in the chain is slowing down, despite the movements of significant volumes. Major L1 exchanges saw an outflow of active wallets.
Major L1 chains, including Solana, BNB Chain and Ethereum, are showing a slowdown in overall activity. The slowdown is clearly visible compared to the last months of 2024, when enthusiasm brought users onto the chain. Solana still has between 2.3 million and 1.7 million daily active wallets, after peaking at almost 32M active wallets in September 2024.
Intra-chain activity slowed for the major chains, although value transfers remained robust for the most liquid networks. | Source: Token terminal
BNB Chain got a boost from PancakeSwap and Aster, as well as curated meme interest, with approximately 4.7 million daily active users based on facts by Tokenterminal.
Ethereum maintains approximately 600,000 active addresses every day. L2 chain Polygon remains around 86K wallets, with a higher baseline thanks to its use of Polymarket. Basic locks in 600,000 to 800,000 active users, but with higher trading volumes.
L1 activity slowed the most on Solana
Solana lost most of its business last year. The slowdown in low-cost activities such as NFT, DEX swaps, and meme creation and trading led to a further decline in activity.
Solana remains a leader in fee production and still has sufficient liquidity. However, the chain has seen an outflow of retail users and a smaller community. Solana’s activity is now offset by whales, large-scale investors and, more recently, ETFs.
The slowdown in on-chain transactions and active wallets also reflects the lack of user-facing technologies with a low-cost entry point into crypto.
L1 activity also depends on short-term incentives, including point farming. The slowing of specific air droplets based on activity also affected L1 chains.
L1 chains retain their value
L1 chains maintain their value transfers and economic activity despite wallet outflows. Ethereum, for example, transfers more than $6 billion in daily value transfers, up from $3.8 billion in November 2024.
Solana also increased the value of its DEX volume, from approximately $4 billion at the end of 2024 to $14 billion in November 2025. The recent outflow of low-value transactions has been replaced by paying users and increased value activity. Solana saw $1.8 billion in stablecoin transfers in October, down from the abnormal range of $233 billion December 2024.
The decrease in traffic also indicates that some of the traffic from the L1 chains was not entirely organic. Current L1 activity reflects usage of the most active apps, with no signs of intentional volume inflation.
As of November 2025, BNB Chain maintains the largest number of daily active users. PancakeSwap is the main driving force behind fees and paid activities. As with BTC and other chains, raw activity is meaningless and replaced by value-driven transfers, whaling activity and the use of apps with available liquidity.