📝 Editor’s Note:

After covering six of the most dynamic Layer 1s in the space last week, we’re back again with another six.

Leading off we have Nitin of Top Ledger, reporting on Solana’s app ecosystem, where applications are out-earning the base protocol. Sam checked in with TRON's deepening dominance with USDT transfers. Pavel examined at TON's surprising NFT volume and Jordan covered SKALE's continuous momentum in gaming. Peter looked at Ronin's surging active addresses and Alex took on Sonic's novel, app-fee-sharing model.

Let's get into it.

– ON Editorial Team

Solana | TRON | TON | SKALE | Ronin | Sonic

• The Solana ecosystem is on the uptrend after the brief lull in February and March. Active and new wallets are now up around 84M after hitting mid 60M in February and March.

• Real transactions-per-second (TPS), which is non-vote successful transactions, have doubled to 1.2k from the lows of 600 TPS last year. With further technical improvements and increased block space, TPS is likely to continue its uptrend, making Solana one of the chains suitable to replace TradFi use cases.

• A healthy sign of a blockchain ecosystem is applications earning more revenue than the underlying protocol. In the case of Solana, the applications are constantly earning over 2.5 times the Real Economic Value (REV) of the Solana blockchain, with June closing at $116M in revenue for applications and $47M in REV for the network.

• The total circulating supply of USDT on TRON has exceeded $80B, further cementing TRON as the top blockchain for USDT, which holds over 63% of the global stablecoin market and has over $155 B in circulation. Over 50% of that supply is issued on TRON and has grown by approximately $20B year-to-date. TRON accounts for over 28% of all peer-to-peer stablecoin transaction volume, more than any other Layer 1 included in the chart below.

• Since 2021, TRON has increasingly dominated USDT issuance and circulation, facilitating an average of $21.8B in daily USDT transfers. The chart above shows a persistent trend in daily liquidity shifting to TRON. As of July 2025, TRON processes over 8.9M daily transactions.

• TRON’s greater defi ecosystem has seen increased activity on JustLend. Average daily deposits have tripled since January and included a $740M daily spike in April, and a $350M spike in June. Daily borrowing values often exceeds $10M, and peaked at $47M.

• Introduced in January 2025, Telegram Gifts have emerged as a significant catalyst for the NFT market on TON. The digital collectibles can be used inside the Telegram ecosystem and traded both onchain and off via Telegram mini-apps. This approach enhances flexibility and user experience. As of May, over 260,000 wallets have traded gifts, with approximately 2,000 new users joining daily. Daily trading volume surpassed $1M in May and has seen peaks as high as $9.3M.

• Telegram Gifts, and later Stickers, have sparked a unique phenomenon: offchain NFT marketplaces that enable users to trade NFTs in a manner similar to centralized exchanges (CEXs). As a result, TON became the leading blockchain in terms of daily NFT trading volume.

• The TON ecosystem is mature enough to support applications across multiple verticals, including DeFi, GameFi, payments, and merchant services. The network is sufficiently scalable to handle these diverse workloads.

• Started in 2019 as a solution to Ethereum's scalability issues, SKALE is a multichain network of gasless blockchains built for speed, scalability, and zero-cost user experiences. In Q2 2025, SKALE processed over 320M transactions, a 24.5% increase from Q1. This growth reflects rising adoption across gaming and AI-powered applications, driven by SKALE’s scalable blockchain infrastructure.

• SKALE has now saved users over $12B in gas fees, thanks to its unique zero-gas architecture. By removing the financial barrier of gas, SKALE is enabling mass adoption across blockchain-based games, AI, and onchain consumer apps.

• According to DappRadar, SKALE is home to three of the top 10 blockchain games by unique active wallets (UAW), underscoring its dominance in Web3 gaming. With zero gas fees and lightning-fast finality, SKALE provides the ideal infrastructure for high-volume, onchain gameplay.

• Ronin is an EVM blockchain crafted for developers building games with player-owned economies. Ronin is seeing a major comeback — active players surged 193% month-over-month, hitting the second-highest level this year, thanks to Lumiterra's launch with 626k players. Since the Cerastes upgrade on Mar, 17 (which redirected part of RON gas fees to the treasury), 5,097 RON have been collected for the treasury from 42.5M EIP-1559 transactions.

• Fishing Frenzy, a cozy RPG on Ronin, has logged over 1.1M transactions from 40k wallets, with over 5k daily transactions from over 3k players. Its in-game assets—rods, chests, and fishes—now hold a combined market cap close to $100k, reflecting strong onchain player activity and value.

• Jin’s Fortune Spin is a game on Ronin Market where players can experiment with collecting rare NFTs with instant liquidity options. Excluding Pokémon cards, it has processed over $800k—$470k on spins and $330k on resales. Players made 59k pulls and completed 51k sellbacks, cashing out NFTs they won.

• Sonic is a high-performance EVM-compatible Layer 1 built by the Fantom team, designed for sub-second finality and developer-first economics. Its Fee Monetization model returns gas fees to app creators, incentivizing ecosystem growth. Following its launch in late 2024, Sonic’s TVL rapidly climbed to $1.2B by March 2025, driven by DeFi adoption and launch incentives. Since then, TVL retraced ~50%, stabilizing near $550–600M, reflecting a transition from bootstrapping to organic growth.

• Since launch, Sonic-based apps have claimed over 1.3M  S tokens in gas fee rewards. Sonic's Fee Monetization redistributes 90% of transaction fees to developers through oracle-tracked claims, creating a sustainable app-driven economy where growth is fueled by real usage rather than grants or core team rewards.

• Sonic processes hundreds of thousands of transactions daily, with peaks above 1.5M. In one block, it handled 1,873 transactions, reaching 3,746 TPS. This reflects real user demand, while the network’s technical limits remain far higher.