Let's take a look at the on-chain situation of leading L1 and L2 public chains such as ETH, Solana, and Base in the first quarter!
Ethereum is still one of the most powerful general-purpose public chains in the current crypto world. In the first quarter of 2024, Ethereum achieved $1.17 billion in revenue and a net profit of $369 million.
Although Solana has a strong ecological development momentum in the past six months, due to its advocacy of ultra-low gas fee concept and lack of dynamic fee mechanism, it only achieved less than $100 million in revenue in the first quarter, while its network operating costs (i.e. token incentives) were as high as $844 million, with a total loss of $796 million.
The Avalanche network had almost no revenue in the first quarter, and lost $179 million after deducting costs.
The operating costs of an L2 include pre-development, execution sorter, and uploading packaged transactions (DA). Although L2's fee income can cover the DA cost, L2 will hardly face the problem of not making ends meet without considering the development cost. With the continuous improvement of the "one-click chain" infrastructure, the cost of L2 entrepreneurship is also gradually decreasing, which is one of the reasons for the recent large-scale development of L2.
As for why these public chains have huge losses, this is usually because they have invested a lot of money in network operations and development to promote the growth and development of the ecosystem. Despite the huge losses, these public chains still insist on investing in the hope of achieving profitability in the future and maintaining the sustainable development of the ecosystem.
