Alex Svanevik - What The Hell Are People Doing Onchain in 2025? - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Now I will be talking about what the hell are people actually doing on chain in 2025. And before we get into that, I do want to talk a little bit about the why. Why do I get up in the morning, go to work? Why does our team work so hard to build an amazing product? And the mission that we have at Nunson is to surface the signal and create winners.

The grand master plan behind this is that if we help you as onchain investors invest in the right things, then you will continue to invest in crypto. You'll fund great infrastructure. You'll fund great products and together we make the future of finance become a reality. That is our role. That is the vision that we are working towards.

I believe in a world where every asset is on chain including uranium as you just saw now where billions of people are owners. Not like the World Economic Forum says by the way that you will own nothing and be happy. you will own something and be happy. And in this future, blockchains are the financial fabric of the world. Now, what are we going to look at today?

A couple of topics. You know, I have a short slot. I can't talk about everything that people are doing on chain, but I want to talk a little bit about stable coins. I want to talk about the chain wars. How are the different chains doing against each other?

Who's winning? Who's falling behind? and so on. Then I want to touch on what I describe as the memecoin industrial complex. I'll touch on tokenized securities for a moment and then finally hyperlquid.

This is a slide that is going to make some people very angry. It shows chains and how they are doing. And it is based on two very simple metrics. How big are the chains and how fast are they growing. So up to the left you will find chains that are emerging.

These are chains that maybe are not that big yet, but they're growing very fast. We saw an example with Ronin. Actually, Ronin has fantastic retention of their addresses. And so, it is still kind of what you might consider a niche chain focused on gaming, but it has an incredibly engaged user base. And you can verify this on chain.

In the bottom right, maybe this is a quadrant that makes some people upset. You see chains that are big, but they have not grown or they maybe have even had negative growth. There's a bit of nuance in the case of Ethereum. We will get into that. But in the top right, you have the current leaders.

These are chains that have lots of activity. They are big and they are growing very fast. I think it's probably worth pointing out chains like Solana in this context. And we'll see a couple of examples as we go. Why don't we start with stable coins?

I think this isn't news to people, but stable coins are very, very popular. They are arguably the number one use case for blockchains at the moment. And if you look over the last two years, it's been almost up only. If we zoom out even more, it's been pretty much up only even with bad market conditions in crypto. And you can see that we're now well above $200 billion worth of stable coins on chain.

People really like stable coins. They are actually useful. They have a purpose and it's a great way to bring mostly the US dollar around the world and 2thirds of all stable coins are Tether. There are a lot of stable coins out there but Tether is very very dominant. And so I saw this meme just earlier in Alex's presentation.

Wait, it's all Tether? Always has been. You could even say that Tether is the number one app on Ethereum L1 in the sense that it has a lot of addresses using it. You might not think of a crypto dollar as an app, but I I would argue that it is. And if you looked at this about 6 months ago, unis swap would have been sitting on top, but now tether has more active addresses that are actually using it.

Now, if we look at the capital side of things, because it's not all about active addresses, you also want to look at dollars. Where do these dollars actually go? And one interesting development over the last six months or so is that a has become the number one capital product and I would measure that through TVL total value locked. How much capital is actually sitting in this protocol and it has overtaken Lido which used to be the number one capital product. It used to have the highest TVL, but now it's A.

And if we contrast these these two products, it's interesting because A has a multi-chain strategy and of course a multi-asset strategy, whereas Lido is one chain and a one asset. And that's not so good if the asset is not doing too well. So it's not that a has grown so much to overtake Lido. It's more that Lido has contracted and a has been more resilient. Now, let's talk about this point on Ethereum because many Ethereum fans will say, well, you know, you're just looking at the L1.

If you're looking at onchain metrics, you need to look at the whole ecosystem of Ethereum and that includes L2s. And I would say you're absolutely right. And in the last two years, we have seen L2s actually grow the PI. Shout out to the website growthe.xyz.

They have great metrics on L2s. But you can see here that the number of daily active addresses has been going up. And the colored section is basically the L2s. It's been quite stagnant in the last couple of months, but I would say that's largely because the market has been quite slow as well. But it is a fact that you can see on chain that L2s are indeed growing the pie.

And among these L2s base has grown the most, right? And especially from this is the teal line that you see there from about May to October, November, Base had an incredible run in growth of daily active addresses, which is what this chart is showing. If you go back to a year ago, it was much more of a close race with Arbitrum, Bass, ZKSync, and so on. But Bass has really, you know, uh, run ahead. Now you see a little cute pink line here at the end, and that's Unichain that has started their incentives, which means more people are now actively using Uni Chain.

They had a bit of a slow start, but they're now picking up the pace now. If we look at revenues or gas fees, I'm going to say something which might be very obvious to people, but L2s are not actually generating that much revenues. If you compare them with Tron and BNB chain, two chains that are arguably EVMs, BNB chain is an EVM. Tron is kind of an EVM. They are generating a lot more revenues.

And then I hear you say, well, the revenues are actually generated at Ethereum L1. That's where the fees are generated, right? Right. Well, it turns out that in the last couple of months, Ethereum L1 is no longer the chain that generates the most revenues. And to me, this is actually pretty important when you think about the leadership of Ethereum among chains.

And there was an interesting talk by Kyle Samani at token 249 in Singapore where he talked about how soul will flee flip ETH. And I think if you get out of your kind of tribalist Twitter filter bubble and you just look at onchain data, you have to acknowledge that Ethereum has lost a lot of ground to Salana and other chains. And so in 2025, Ethereum no longer generates the most revenues. I think this is actually quite a significant development. I used to be an ETH maxi.

I thought no one's going to use all these other chains. It's only going to be Ethereum, but the data shows that that's not how it has played out. Now, speaking of revenues, let's look at memecoins real quick. How many people here have uh lost money on memecoins? Raise of hands.

All right, couple of you. How many have made money? All right, I think you guys have a better rate than the average actually because most people lose money trading meme coins. In fact, if we look at one notable example, Libra with Javier Malay, 86% of traders lost money and they lost $250 million worth of money trading Libra. But someone is making a lot of money and that is the products that allow you to trade neecoins.

Pump do fun, radium, photon, these products make a lot of money. So while you might be losing money on memecoins, they are making a lot of money building products that help you trade meme coins. So collectively, might not be that easy to read. Collectively, these three products alone have made more than a billion dollars in revenues in the last year. More than most blockchains, so much for the fat protocol thesis.

And no crying in the casino, please. People really like memecoins, by the way. She enu has 1.2 million holders. Trump has half a million holders onchain addresses.

Pudgy Penguins or Pangu I should say has almost 400,000 and Pepe has about 350,000. Now let's pivot quickly from something very fun memecoins to something very boring. Tokenized securities or tokenized treasuries more specifically. They have crossed more than $6 billion uh issued. I think of this as kind of an extension of the stable coin growth.

And so this is great. Lots of products, very diversified, you know, lots of capital. And interestingly, only 1,200 addresses on chain hold tokenized treasuries. So this is the exact kind of opposite of memecoins. um retail are completely uninterested and in many cases not actually they don't have the access to hold these tokens or at least not get the primary issuance.

So there's a lot of capital here but there's very few people and so I'll sneak in a quick prediction here. I feel like the thing that's going to appeal to both institutions and both and retail investors is going to be tokenized equity. And so with the new administration in the US, I believe that this is now going to be possible and we're gonna have enough liquidity and trading venues to actually trade tokenized equity quite soon. All right, I'll end with Hyperlquid. Hyperlid is dominant among DEX pers.

It has about 60% of the market. That's after they've launched their token, right? Sometimes people launch a token and then usage collapses. Not the case with Hyperlid because they built an actual good product. They have 60% market share and they are 10 times larger than the number two competitor.

In fact, Hyperlid does 10% of Binance's PES volume. So this is meaningful and to me it represents another trade trend that trading will increasingly go to Dexus and Dexes are going to eventually overtake centralized exchanges. All right, let me wrap this up before the heat knocks me out here. The key takeaways, stable coins up only. People love stable coins.

Everybody loves stable coins. Takeaway number two, chain wars are really heating up and Ethereum no longer is the clear leader. If you look at onchain metrics, the only one I think remaining is TVL. You will make more money building memecoin products than you will by trading memecoins. So that's a pro tip.

Tokenized treasuries are growing exponentially and I believe the tokenized equity is the next big thing. And then finally, hyperlquid. Thank you very much. I would encourage you all to go to nonsen if you want more onchain analytics. You can also stake with nunson.

We run validators for a lot of these networks. And enjoy the conference and enjoy Dubai. Thank you very much.