The analytical company Flipside compared the eight largest blockchain networks by number of users. Ethereum took first place last year with 15.4 million active addresses. Polygon nearly caught up with it, but Bitcoin is far behind, coming in at 10.7 million addresses.
Note: Flipside marks them as "engaged users" but does not cut off addresses that were active in previous years. Only addresses that have had at least two transactions are included in the statistics.
Networks that support smart contracts continue to top the ranking since one of the key activity sources is transactions on decentralised exchanges (DEX). For example, in Ethereum, 2.3 million users or 15%, participated in transactions on DEXs, while that figure was 1.3 million or 52% for Avalanche.
For most, 2023 ended with a positive result; Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism and Base (launched in 2023) all saw an increase in active users. Ethereum, Solana and Bitcoin, on the other hand, experienced a decrease. Ethereum's audience has declined for the second year in a row, dropping from 24.6 million in 2021 to 15.4 million.
And while Bitcoin had a successful 2023 in anticipation of the approval of spot ETFs, Ethereum was under pressure from the SEC and complaints against cryptocurrency exchanges for participating in staking. It lost 26% against Bitcoin in 2023.
The best growth is demonstrated by Arbitrum, whose user base increased 5.7 times.
The main spike came in mid-December when a record-high 5 million transactions were processed in a single day. This was caused by the hype around ordinals, and the overload led to a network shutdown for several hours.
Despite the significant growth in active users, the ARB token will continue to correct if interest drops in ordinals and Ethereum, for which Arbitrum is a layer-2 network.
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