BNB Chain outshines Ethereum’s L1 but Shapella reveals that…

• Daily active users on the BNB Chain tripled those on Ethereum
• The Shapella upgrade has contributed to Ethereum’s on-chain outpacing on BNB

The BNB Chain rose to prominence as an alternative to Ethereum’s [ETH] Layer One (L1) blockchain. Although the growth was not without challenges, the chain backed by crypto exchange Binance has been able to cut a significant part of the market share.

How much are 1,10,100 BNBs worth today?

Among both blockchains, Ethereum is the one that has been around longer. But according to Token Terminal, daily active users on the BNB Chain were also three times that of Ethereum. The metric measures users that interact with a protocol during a designated time interval.

Source: Token Terminal

The choice to prefer the faster and cheaper chain only…

While Ethereum’s active users were around 435,200, BNB Chain’s outpaced it with a record of 1.2 million. Although the Ethereum L1 blockchain is less centralized than BNB, this rise implied that users would rather opt for the network with faster transactions and cheaper fees.

However, BNB Chain’s dominance in the aforementioned aspect did not translate to supremacy in every other area. Based on the data from the blockchain financial aggregator, the trading volume of tokens on the Ethereum blockchain was far above those registered on the BNB Chain.

As of 6 April, the volume on the BNB Chain was $601.1 million while Ethereum’s volume was over $11 billion. This large spread means that there have been more tokens traded via the Ethereum network than BNB’s.

Source: Token Terminal

ETH stays ahead of the game in…

Moreover, it seemed that the overall Ethereum ecosystem was hand down beating BNB apart from the user count. According to Santiment, Ethereum’s development activity witnessed a rise and stood at 51.21. The metric tracks the work done in a project’s public GitHub repositories, signaling upgrades on the project’s network.

The Ethereum rise in this regard came as no surprise. Lately, the blockchain had passed the Sepolia and Goerli Testnets, as the Shanghai upgrade aimed at enabling staking withdrawals is only days away. 

For BNB, it was an entirely different situation. At the time of writing, the chain’s development activity was flat out at 0.048. This suggested that developers were not actively contributing, despite its recent announcement to improve the chain’s security.

Source: Santiment

Realistic or not, here’s BNB’s market cap in ETH’s terms

However, several large ETH transactions have been making rounds with whale accumulating, and some moving into exchanges. According to Lookonchain, a whale who held 900ETH in Tornado Cash address sent all of it into a Bitfinex wallet on 5 April.

There was another whale who has been accumulating the altcoin since 15 January.  As of 6 April, this same whale added another $2.4 million bought from Binance, to his bag.

We found a whale that has been buying $ETH from #Binance since Jan 15, with a total of 25,255 $ETH ($46.8M currently), the average buying price is $1,649.

The whale received 1,290 $ETH ($2.4M) from #Binance again 10 hrs ago.https://t.co/IXExQZwAGN pic.twitter.com/kyxcd8GiWe

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) April 7, 2023