In October 2024, Bitcoin’s price surged by 15.9%, leading the market once again and sparking discussions even outside the crypto community. Meanwhile, Layer 2 solutions continued to develop, and emerging public chains like Sui showed strong growth. This article explores current trends in the public chain market.
16 years after Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper on October 31, 2008, Bitcoin once again demonstrated its revolutionary impact on the financial world. In October 2024, driven by institutional investors, Bitcoin approached historical highs, while the entire blockchain ecosystem continued to grow rapidly.
This month highlighted a significant differentiation in the market, with Bitcoin leading the way with a 15.9% increase, while Ethereum showed a more moderate growth. At the same time, the Layer 2 solutions for both networks continued to improve and expand. Additionally, emerging public chains like Sui displayed strong momentum, poised to enter the top ten public chains.
The data in this report is sourced from Footprint Analytics’ public chain research page, which provides an easy-to-use dashboard containing key statistics and indicators for the public chain sector, continuously updated.
In October 2024, the cryptocurrency market witnessed a notable divergence, with Bitcoin leading the gains while other cryptocurrencies saw relatively mild increases. Bitcoin performed exceptionally well, rising from $60,764 to $70,398, a 15.9% increase, and reaching a recent high of $72,751 on October 29, close to its all-time high in March. In comparison, Ethereum showed a more subdued trend with a monthly increase of 2.7%, closing at $2,519.
The market growth was primarily driven by the strong performance of mature tokens, with Bitcoin leading the way. Bitcoin Cash (12.9%) and Litecoin (9.5%) also saw significant gains. Solana maintained its position as one of the top-performing altcoins, rising by 17.6%. Meanwhile, the emerging blockchain Sui continued its upward trajectory with a 11.5% increase.
Sui’s market capitalization rose to 11th place. By seizing the meme coin trend and Telegram-based gaming opportunities, Sui significantly expanded its DeFi ecosystem. In October, Circle launched native USDC on Sui, marking another milestone in its development. However, this growth was not without controversy—accusations of “$400 million token sale by Sui insiders” in October, although denied by the Sui Foundation, sparked community discussions.
The DeFi sector faced resistance in October, with total TVL decreasing by 6.8% to $63.5 billion. While the Bitcoin ecosystem performed strongly, the DeFi sector of the Ethereum ecosystem underperformed. Notably, Polygon was an exception, with a 30.3% increase in TVL, driven by increased activity due to the upcoming U.S. presidential election, setting new records for Polymarket.
Stablecoins continued to demonstrate their critical role in the crypto ecosystem. Bitwise Research’s review of the crypto market in the third quarter of 2024 showed that global stablecoin trading volume exceeded $5.1 trillion in the first half of the year, close to Visa’s $6.5 trillion transaction volume. Tether’s profitability surpassing BlackRock highlighted the financial influence of stablecoins in the industry, intensifying competition among public chains for stablecoin integrations.
In October 2024, Bitcoin Layer 2 and sidechains continued to experience strong growth, with a total TVL reaching $1.8 billion, a 22.2% increase from September.
Core maintained its industry-leading position, with TVL growing by 29.8% to $570 million, capturing a market share of 32.4%. Bitlayer consolidated its position, with a 36.1% increase in TVL to $530 million, occupying 29.9% of the market share. Rootstock ranked third with a TVL of $180 million and a market share of 10.1%, while BSquared emerged as a rising star, reaching a TVL of $170 million, a monthly increase of 54.4%, surpassing Merlin to rise to the fourth position.
October witnessed significant technological breakthroughs in the Bitcoin Layer 2 ecosystem. BEVM introduced the innovative “Super Bitcoin” framework, proposing a comprehensive solution to expand its functionality while maintaining Bitcoin’s fundamental security.
This framework presented a five-layer architecture based on the Bitcoin network, utilizing its proven PoW consensus to ensure security. Building upwards, it integrated Lightning Network technology for efficient communication, Taproot consensus for standardization, and a multi-chain fusion layer supporting various virtual machines. This architecture ultimately formed an application layer, enabling developers to build DApps while leveraging Bitcoin’s security.
In a crucial initiative to connect the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems, BOB Network announced integration with Optimism’s “Superchain.” As a self-proclaimed “hybrid layer-2” solution, BOB aims to establish seamless connectivity between Bitcoin and Ethereum, placing Bitcoin at the center of DeFi.
Cross-chain capabilities saw further development with the integration of Cardano and BitcoinOS (BOS). This collaboration aims to provide direct, trustless Bitcoin liquidity access for users of the established public chain Cardano.
Additionally, BTCFi continued its impressive growth, particularly with Babylon’s Bitcoin collateralization program Cap-2. The program showcased significant efficiency, attracting 23,000 Bitcoins while generating only 1.56 BTC in minimum fees. This successful deployment demonstrated the market’s strong demand for Bitcoin-based financial products.
In October 2024, Ethereum Layer 2 solutions achieved moderate growth, with a total TVL of $19.8 billion in bridged solutions, a 1.2% increase from September, significantly lagging behind the growth rate of Bitcoin’s scaling solutions. The competitive landscape continued to evolve, with established leaders maintaining dominance but losing market share, while newcomers showed promising developments.
Market leaders Arbitrum One and Optimism maintained their positions with market shares of 45.3% and 17.8%, respectively, despite slight declines. Base showed significant growth, expanding its market share from 8.1% to 13.4%, with a 28.5% increase in TVL. This growth was primarily attributed to Coinbase’s smart wallet, simplifying dApp interactions and attracting significant capital inflows into lending, derivatives, and DEX protocols. Base’s native DEX, Aerodrome, performed exceptionally well in this expansion.
Several newcomers made a significant impact. Fuel Ignition and World Chain witnessed substantial TVL growth after their mainnet launches, while Taiko saw a 20.8% increase in TVL driven by the success of Panko Finance and Avalon Finance.
However, Scroll experienced a 39.6% decrease in TVL after its airdrop. Its airdrop activities faced community controversy due to distribution plans, similar to previous cases like zkSync and Starknet, leading to a significant drop in activity post-airdrop, with its token price falling over 50% from the issuance price.
Apart from market indicators, the industry also intensified its focus on fundamental challenges in the ecosystem, particularly in user experience and interoperability.
Vitalik Buterin actively engaged in addressing community concerns, releasing a series of comprehensive articles exploring the future direction of Ethereum. He shared multiple articles on social media, emphasizing cross Layer 2 interoperability as a key priority for development.
His submitted roadmap outlined improvements to unify the Ethereum ecosystem through standardized chain-specific addresses, a unified payment request system, and cross Layer 2 integrated key storage wallets. These enhancements aim to simplify cross-chain asset transfers while reducing gas fees for cross Layer 2 transactions.
Despite facing ongoing challenges, Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem continues to attract significant projects and developments. October witnessed several notable mainnet launches, with World Network (formerly Worldcoin) going live, bringing its privacy-focused identity solution to the mainnet.
Yuga Labs’ ApeChain debuted, leveraging Ethereum’s security to develop NFT applications, while Eclipse and Fuel Ignition completed mainnet deployments, introducing new scaling solutions to the ecosystem.
Another significant development came from Uniswap Labs, announcing the Unichain project, a new Layer 2 network built on Optimism’s OP Stack. Given Uniswap’s leading position in DeFi, this announcement sparked extensive industry discussions.
Following major participants like Coinbase’s Base and Sony’s Soniem, the testnet launch of Unichain heralds a potential shift in Layer 2 competitive dynamics, intensifying competition in liquidity and gas fees in the future.
In October 2024, the blockchain gaming sector had 1,606 active games, with BNB Chain, Polygon, and Ethereum dominating game distribution. OpBNB led user engagement with an average of 1.2 million daily active users (DAU), followed by Ronin (886,000 DAU) and Matchain (548,000 DAU).
Matchain achieved a significant breakthrough in October, with its Telegram-based game jumping from 78 average DAU in September to 548,000 DAU. The chain reached a peak of 3.3 million users on October 12, stabilizing at around 615,000 users by the end of the month, showcasing the potential and volatility of user acquisition strategies based on Telegram.
Sui and Core showed strong growth, with DAU increasing by 105.1% to 190,000 and 75.7% to 109,000, respectively, leveraging Telegram-based initiatives. Meanwhile, TON saw a 27.7% decrease in DAU to 195,000, despite its groundbreaking Telegram-based strategy inspiring multiple public chains’ adoptions, including Sei, Ancient8, and Viction, user retention remains a common challenge in the industry.
In October 2024, the blockchain sector recorded 12 fundraising events with a total amount of $104 million, a 40.1% decrease from September’s $174 million. Three events did not disclose specific funding amounts.
The privacy-focused blockchain project Nillion became the largest funding recipient in October, raising $25 million in a round led by Hack VC. The project’s innovative “blind computing” method allows data processing without exposing content, enabling applications to collaborate while maintaining data privacy.
TON continued its fundraising momentum after securing $30 million investments from Bitget and Foresight Ventures in September, receiving funding support from Gate.io in October.
Layer 2 solutions continued to attract investor attention across the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems. Bitcoin Layer 2 platforms Bitlayer and B2 Network successfully completed new funding rounds, while the Ethereum Layer 2 sector saw fund flows into innovative projects like Ithaca, Semantic Layer, Sophon, and LAYER.