- After adjusting for this year's rally in crypto prices, TON, Aptos, and Sui have grown faster than other blockchains in terms of TVL since January.
- Arbitrum and Optimism, meanwhile, have seen outflows despite a jump in active addresses.
A trio of blockchains born in the post-Terra “crypto winter” have been the fastest risers of 2024.
After adjusting for this year’s rally in crypto prices, The Open Network associated with messaging app Telegram, or TON, along with Aptos and Sui, a pair of blockchains based on the Facebook-built Move programming language, have grown faster than rivals.
That’s according to Coinbase analyst David Han, who compared the boom to competitors including Solana, Ethereum, and major Ethereum rollups.
Adjusting for price “helps to isolate how much TVL growth arises from net new value creation instead of pure price appreciation,” Han wrote in a mid-year review on the industry.
Total value locked is a metric that tracks the value of crypto deposited in blockchains’ myriad DeFi applications.
TON launched in December 2022. Aptos and Sui went live in October 2022 and May 2023, respectively.
Base was the lone Ethereum-based rollup to outperform aggregate TVL growth, said Han. Crypto deposited in Arbitrum and Optimism, two of the longest-running rollups, has declined since the start of the year.
Nevertheless, these blockchains have benefitted from Ethereum’s March upgrade, dubbed Dencun. That upgrade made it far cheaper to use rollups.
Even as the dollar value of crypto deposited in rollups hits all-time highs, total transaction fees they have collected has plummeted since the upgrade, according to Han.
Moreover, rollup users “have grown tremendously … as fees have dropped post [Dencun],” Han notes — particularly on Arbitrum.
TON’s growth
TON’s massive rally this year coincides with the deployment of Tether’s USDT stablecoin on the blockchain in April.
The TON blockchain has a crypto wallet integrated into the Telegram messaging app, allowing users to send USDT to their contacts worldwide directly from the app.
That’s not the only incentive the TON team introduced to promote USDT adoption on the network.
Users who store USDT on their Telegram mobile wallets can earn up to 50% annualised yields ― much higher than the average DeFi interest rate offered by lending protocols.
The yield comes from TON token rewards for providing liquidity on major decentralised exchanges on the blockchain.
But the network hasn’t been able to attract established DeFi projects to deploy their protocols on the chain.
Aleks Gilbert is a DeFi Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at aleks@dlnews.com.
