Onchain analytics firm Nansen ranked Solana, BNB Chain, Base, Tron and NEAR Protocol as the busiest blockchains in 2025.
Solana led the pack with 23.01 billion transactions, while BNB Chain followed with 3.89 billion. Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 Base handled 3.29 billion for third, as Tron trailed with 3.22 billion and NEAR came in fifth with 1.89 billion.
Even as 2025 was marked by institutional adoption, retail-focused use cases continued to dominate transaction volumes, particularly on blockchains with low fees and high throughput.
Solana’s DEX boom and memecoin craze
Solana’s dominance came on the back of a trading boom that pushed it to the top of decentralized exchange (DEX) rankings in early 2025.
CoinGecko reported that Solana DEX trading dominated 40% of the industry’s market share by recording $293.7 billion in the first quarter of 2025. It was driven in part by a memecoin frenzy around celebrity and political tokens like $TRUMP, a Solana-based token launched on Jan. 18 tied to US President Donald Trump.
DefiLlama data showed that Solana remained among the top chains by DEX volume throughout the year, with monthly volumes around or above the $100 billion mark.
Related: Solana enters 2026 with last-minute boost in RWA momentum
BNB Chain’s roughly 3.89 billion transactions, per Nansen, coincided with the rise of its own memecoin scene.
Base ranked third by 2025 transaction count as it leveraged direct distribution from Coinbase’s user base. A 2026 outlook by Messari researcher AJC said that Base’s protocol revenue grew by about 30 times in 2025, capturing 62% of total L2 revenue. The same research noted that Base’s ecosystem now spans DEXs, AI‑linked apps and prediction platforms.
Related: Base’s creator coin experiment meets resistance after Nick Shirley launch
Tron and NEAR round out the top 5
Tron’s 3.22 billion transactions reflected its role as a backbone for the stablecoin economy. In June 2025, TRON DAO said that more than half of circulating USDt (USDT) is issued on its blockchain. Its stablecoin supply grew about 40% year‑to‑date with daily transfer volumes in the tens of billions of dollars.
NEAR Protocol rounded out the top five, with 1.89 billion transactions in 2025 according to Nansen’s ranking.
NEAR reported about 46 million users in May, placing it alongside Solana and Tron in activity metrics. Beyond numbers, a key part of NEAR’s 2025 story was its role in the privacy narrative via Zcash (ZEC), whose comeback was driven in part by the Electric Coin Company’s Zashi wallet integrating with NEAR’s Intents system. It allowed users to move in and out of ZEC’s shielded pool without going through centralized exchanges.
This integration helped push Zcash’s shielded supply to record levels and drove a spike in activity on NEAR Intents, including a day with over $17 million in Zcash-related volume.
