Ethereum holds $49.5B in capital. Solana holds $5.9B. Over the last 30 days Ethereum collected $345.6M in fees. Solana collected $445.1M. Per $1,000 parked on the chain, that’s $6.98 for Ethereum and $75.76 for Solana. Eleven times the work out of the same dollar. Across the 18 chains I pulled: Hyperliquid · $164.14 Solana · $75.76 Polygon · $53.71 BSC · $14.04 Base · $8.79 Ethereum · $6.98 Tron · $1.47 Hyperliquid squeezes 111x out of a dollar that Tron does. This is where people argue past each other. “Biggest chain” has three answers. By TVL it’s Ethereum with 64% of all capital measured. By fees it’s Solana at 36%. By DEX volume it’s Solana again, with Base third at 15% while paying 4% of the fees, because Base made its blockspace cheap on purpose. None of those three is wrong. They measure different things, and a chain built for one will read as weak on another. Worth knowing which one someone picked before you accept their league table. Fees and DEX volume are 30-day totals, TVL is as of today, all from DeFiLlama and all checkable.

Two privacy projects ran airdrops in the same month this year. ethereum:0xa27ec0006e59f245217ff08cd52a7e8b169e62d2 distributed to 21,479 addresses in February. $ZAMA distributed to 21,762. Within 300 of each other. Eight months on, 28.5% of Aztec’s recipients still hold. Zama’s is 11.2%. Same month, same market, same size giveaway, two and a half times the gap in who stayed. The number that convinced me it’s real: Aztec’s airdrop cohort retained better than Zama’s non-airdrop cohort. The people who claimed AZTEC in a February free-for-all held on tighter than the people who turned up to ZAMA later by choice. That kills the easy explanation, which is that Aztec simply drew fewer farmers. Aztec has its own hole. December 2025 brought 12,740 addresses, a quarter of everyone who has ever held it, and 12.7% are still there. That month is most of what pulls Aztec’s overall figure down to 30%. Measured by reading every transfer since each contract was deployed and joining it to who holds today. First receipt gives every address an arrival date, so cohorts get compared at the same age rather than raw. Five tokens in now, and the thing that predicts retention is how concentrated the arrival was. 61% of Zama’s holders showed up in one month. For Aztec it was 43%. For STRK, Wormhole and APE, between 12% and 22%, and all three retain around 40%.

Pulled a week of Polymarket off Polygon to see who actually trades there. 68,174 addresses, $310M of trader-to-trader volume between them. The median address did $92 across 10 trades. That is the real user, risking pocket change on a handful of questions. The top 100 addresses did 41% of everything, and they are not people with opinions. One took 72,220 fills across 9,159 different outcome tokens without posting a single quote. Another touched 11,680 tokens in seven days. Nobody holds views on nine thousand questions. That is inventory management, and it is most of what the volume is.