Ethereum takes the top spot as the chain with the highest count of…

• Ethereum was the protocol with the highest count of fee-paying users in the last six months.
• It was, however, four places behind Tron in terms of daily active user count.

Ethereum [ETH] takes the lead as the project with the highest count of fee-paying users in the last six months, data from Token Terminal revealed. According to information from the data provider, the cumulative fees paid to use the Layer 1 (L1) blockchain during that period totaled $1.3 billion.

Read Ethereum’s [ETH] Price Prediction 2023-24

Tron [TRX] followed closely behind with cumulative fees of $451.2 million. Not far behind, Uniswap [UNI], a prominent decentralized exchange, secured the third spot with cumulative fees reaching $297.1 million. Lido Finance [LDO], a liquid staking platform, claimed the fourth position, having amassed $290 million in cumulative fees. Bitcoin [BTC], the world’s leading cryptocurrency, rounded out the top five with cumulative fees totaling $239 million.

Source: Token Terminal

Shout out to PEPE

The reason behind the astronomical growth of Ethereum fees was the memecoin frenzy between April and early June. This was driven mainly by the launch of the meme token Pepe [PEPE] on the Ethereum network on 15 April.

Following the memecoin’s launch, it experienced a significant rally in trading volume, which drove up its value within a very short period of time.

According to a 30 April tweet by on-chain data provider Nansen, the number of PEPE holders exceeded 54,000 in just two weeks. Fueled by its addition to Binance’s Innovation Zone, the market capitalization of the meme coin crossed the $1 billion mark.

54,000+ $PEPE holders in just 2 weeks? 🤯

Impressive, but let’s not forget the 1.3 million $SHIB holders out there!

And did you know that over 3,350 wallets hold both memecoins?

Let’s dive into the top holders of these two 👇 pic.twitter.com/VmJPdJZQEY

— Nansen 🧭 (@nansen_ai) April 30, 2023

As PEPE trading intensified, the on-chain activity on the Ethereum chain grew as well. The median transaction fee on the network rose to its highest level since May 2022, per data from Dune Analytics.

On 5 May, a high volume of PEPE trading on Ethereum pushed the median transaction fee to a one-year high of 142 GWEI.

However, as the token’s trading volume waned, gas fees on the Ethereum network also trended downwards. This stood at 23 GWEI at press time, falling by 84% from the 5 May peak.

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Ethereum takes the back seat in this regard

While Ethereum has seen the highest count of fee-paying users in the last six months, data from Token Terminal revealed that four other projects were positioned ahead of Ethereum in terms of daily user activity.

According to the on-chain data provider, Tron leads with a cumulative count of 1.6 million daily active users. It is closely followed by BNB Chain [BNB], with an active user count of 1.4 million. Bitcoin comes with next a daily active user count of 622,000. Layer 2 scaling platform Polygon [MATIC] follows with 366,000 daily active user count, while Ethereum occupies the fifth position with 309,000 daily active users.