Written by: Tanay Ved, Coin Metrics

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

TL;DR

As blockchain scales up and transaction costs decrease, the differentiation among public blockchains is shifting from cost competition to scenario-based professional specialization.
Bitcoin mined its 20 millionth token in March, and the wrapped token and ZK Rollup ecosystem continues to grow, gradually unlocking Bitcoin's programmability and asset utility.
Ethereum has solidified its position as an on-chain liquidity and settlement hub, with L1 fees hitting record lows and L2 evolving from a scaling solution into a specialized execution environment.
Solana continues to advance its vision of an "Internet Capital Market," with increasing payment adoption and a maturing on-chain transaction infrastructure. The Alpenglow upgrade aims to achieve sub-second final confirmation.

As blockchain block space continues to expand, on-chain transaction costs have decreased significantly. Ethereum's mainnet saw a substantial reduction in fees after its recent upgrade, while Solana's transaction fees remain below a few cents, and the L2 network also provides a similarly low-cost execution environment. With costs constantly shrinking, the differentiation of block space increasingly depends on ecosystem liquidity, throughput, and scenario specialization, rather than simply marginal cost advantages.

This article will explore how mainstream public blockchains are evolving around their respective positioning: Bitcoin is expanding programmability and asset utility; Ethereum is consolidating its position as a liquidity and settlement center for stablecoins, real-world assets (RWA), and DeFi; while Solana is focusing on high-frequency payment and trading scenarios.

Bitcoin

In March 2026, the 20 millionth Bitcoin was mined, meaning that only 1 million Bitcoins remained to be issued. With over 95% of the total Bitcoin supply already in circulation, the block reward decreased to 3.125 BTC after the April 2024 halving, and the issuance rate slowed as planned.

Bitcoin mining speed, data source: Coin Metrics

As block rewards decrease, transaction fees are becoming increasingly important in miners' revenue. Excluding periods of surge, transaction fees account for less than 1% of total miners' revenue. Since all Bitcoin transaction fees go to miners, the core long-term issue of its security model is whether the naturally generated demand for transaction fees can sustainably fill the gap caused by the decline in block rewards.

Making Bitcoin Programmable and Asset-Based

Despite Bitcoin's market capitalization of approximately $1.3 trillion, about 60% of BTC has not moved in a year; approximately 2.4 million BTC (11% of the supply) are held on centralized exchanges, and another approximately 243,000 BTC are circulating on other public chains in the form of packaged tokens.

Most of the funds in Bitcoin remain idle, and the vast majority of related activities and transaction fees occur outside the main chain.

Bitcoin's functional role is evolving along two main lines: expanding its underlying programmability and enhancing its asset utility. The continuous development of L2 blockchains such as sidechains and the Lightning Network, along with the encapsulation of Bitcoin and liquidity staking protocols, has increased Bitcoin's usability, but has also introduced varying degrees of trust assumptions, ranging from full custody to smart contracts.

Bitcoin's market capitalization, source: Coin Metrics

In the area of minimal trust, Citrea stands out as a ZK Rollup that settles directly on Bitcoin L1. It leverages the BitVM framework to verify procedures within Bitcoin's existing scripting system, enabling EVM-compatible applications, and is secured by Bitcoin's proof-of-work. Unlike sidechains, it completes settlement directly on Bitcoin using zero-knowledge proofs, while withdrawals rely on a non-custodial bridge.

Meanwhile, the assetization of BTC as collateral continues to grow. The total value of packaged Bitcoin across various chains exceeds $15 billion, and the lending market size of Coinbase's cbBTC on Morpho has surpassed $1 billion. Liquidity staking protocols such as Babylon further expand this scenario, allowing BTC to provide economic security for external proof-of-stake networks. These developments are gradually unlocking the assetization potential of long-term idle capital.

Ethereum

Ethereum remains the global on-chain liquidity and settlement hub. It accounts for approximately 62% of the total stablecoin market capitalization, boasts the deepest DeFi liquidity of all public chains, and is also a crucial platform for the circulation of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), encompassing money market funds, tokenized government bonds, and stocks.

Recent upgrades have further strengthened Ethereum's position as the core of economic activity. PeerDAS, larger Blob space, and increased gas limits from Pectra and Fusaka upgrades have driven L1 fees to multi-year lows and expanded the scope of activities that can be settled directly on the mainnet.

Ethereum transaction volume and number of active addresses, data source: Coin Metrics

Ethereum's mainnet daily active addresses and transaction volume have nearly doubled year-on-year, exceeding 1 million and 2.4 million respectively. However, as we previously discovered, some of this growth comes from address poisoning attacks and addresses with low economic activity (transactions less than $1), which sometimes constitute a very high percentage of daily active addresses.

The shift in the relationship between L1 and L2

With L1 transaction costs significantly reduced, the role of the Ethereum L2 network is being redefined. L2 was initially designed as Ethereum's core scaling solution, reducing costs by stripping away the execution layer. This positioning is now shifting.

According to a recent blog post from the Ethereum Foundation, the core mission of L2 has shifted to providing differentiated features, customization capabilities, and a professional execution environment, with scaling becoming a secondary function.

L2 blobs used for submitting transaction data to Ethereum have a utilization rate of less than 30%, with an average of about 3 blobs per block after scaling. Blob utilization is concentrated in a small number of L2 blocks, and the related fees account for a negligible percentage of total transaction fees. L1 scaling speed has outpaced L2 settlement needs, and Ethereum settlement costs no longer pose a barrier for most L2 blocks.

The average number of blobs per Ethereum block. Data source: Coin Metrics

The L2 blockchains that have truly achieved sustained growth are those projects with unique value: Base leverages Coinbase to build its distribution advantage, while Arbitrum stands out with its deep DeFi liquidity. New-generation specialized public chains such as MegaETH, Lighter, Robinhood Chain, and Ink target specific scenarios, offering entirely new business models and distribution channels.

Ethereum's roadmap further promotes deep integration of L1 and L2 through interoperability such as native Rollups and a least-trust architecture, consolidating its position as the core of ecosystem liquidity and settlement.

Glamsterdam and other upgrades

The Glamsterdam upgrade, scheduled for release in the first half of 2026, will continue this trend. By increasing the gas cap to 200 million and introducing parallel transaction execution, this upgrade aims to significantly improve L1 throughput while reducing fees for complex smart contract interactions. Furthermore, the proposer-builder separation mechanism (ePBS) integrates block building into the protocol, reducing the centralization of the MEV and increasing the transparency of transaction ordering. These changes aim to make Ethereum L1 a more competitive execution environment, maintaining its position as a trusted platform for high-value settlement and DeFi.

Solana

Solana is shedding its early label as a "retail investor and meme blockchain" and moving towards its vision of entering the internet capital market. With transaction fees of less than 1 cent and block times of less than 400 milliseconds, it becomes a natural platform for high-frequency applications such as payments, micropayments, and high-frequency trading. This characteristic has attracted a number of professional applications that require large-scale, low-latency execution.

Since the end of 2024, Solana's non-voting transactions have nearly doubled, averaging over 120 million transactions per day.

Solana network non-voting transaction volume, data source: Coin Metrics

Payment and high-frequency micropayments

Solana's low-cost environment makes it a leading public blockchain for payments and personal value transfers. USDC transfers under $1,000 are consistently around 3 million per day, with the median transaction amount remaining below $100.

An emerging development is the x402 protocol, an open HTTP payment protocol launched by Coinbase that allows any API or digital service to charge stablecoin fees on request. Despite fierce competition from chains like Base and Stripe's Tempo, Solana still holds a significant share of x402 transactions, becoming an early implementation layer for smart agent micropayments.

Trading infrastructure

Solana's high throughput has also attracted professional on-chain trading infrastructure. Proprietary AMMs (propAMMs) developed by professional market makers employ private off-chain pricing models, resembling dark pools rather than public DEXs. Unlike AMMs like Uniswap, which are susceptible to front-running and arbitrage, propAMMs update prices off-chain and settle on Solana, exhibiting MEV resistance.

Alpenglow and other upgrades

Upcoming infrastructure upgrades will further enhance Solana's advantages. Alpenglow replaced the original consensus with the lightweight voting aggregation protocol Votor, aiming to reduce block final confirmation time from approximately 12 seconds to 100–150 milliseconds. Jito's block assembly market allows transaction applications to autonomously control transaction ordering, supports features such as canceling priorities, and improves execution fairness.

in conclusion

With the expansion of blockchain space and the reduction of costs, the core competition in the public blockchain industry is shifting from cost to specialization. Mainstream public blockchains leverage their architectural advantages to meet diverse scenario needs; while dedicated blockchains such as Hyperliquid, Canton, Arc, and Tempo are optimized around application requirements, making clear trade-offs in permissioned accessibility, compliance, and execution design. The key question for the future is how the industry landscape will evolve when on-chain demand truly explodes on a large scale.

The entire on-chain infrastructure still faces shared risks. A paper published by Google Quantum AI on March 31st indicated that breaking the elliptic curve cryptography relied upon by mainstream blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum may require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, only 1/20th of the previous estimate of 20 million. Early solutions such as Bitcoin BIP-360 and Ethereum's post-quantum roadmap have begun to take shape. A deeper challenge lies in how to coordinate community consensus and voluntary adoption in decentralized networks, a process that may be slower and more unpredictable than with centralized institutions.

Blockchain Association CEO is leaving to become director of the newly established Solana Policy Institute

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