In the crypto industry, statistics are often manipulated or presented without proper context. Influencers frequently share inaccurate or deliberately distorted information. For instance, a claim circulated on the X platform yesterday that Solana has 1.6 million daily active users, while Cardano has only 20,000. Some influencers might argue that this means Solana is winning. However, it’s impossible to determine the exact number of daily users for each blockchain. We’ll explain why in this article. Long story short, most transactions on low-fee networks are generated by bots.
Statistics Are Often Falsely Presented
Older projects benefit from a significant network effect and a large base of supporters. The crypto market is somewhat saturated, and during bear markets, blockchain usage tends to decline, leading to an outflow of users. Projects compete for users, which is healthy for the industry as it drives innovation.
However, some projects resort to unfair practices, presenting chain usage data inaccurately or without proper context. They may use bots to inflate the number of daily users or transactions, and capital to artificially boost Total Value Locked (TVL).
This behavior is often driven by a desperate need to attract attention, feeling they are falling behind in the competition for users. Media and distorted statistics can amplify their efforts.
Some influencers, often paid by the project teams, use this distorted data to try and sway the crypto community.
For instance, this tweet claims that Solana has 1.6 million daily active users. Other lesser-known chains or Layer 2 solutions are also reported to be performing well. Meanwhile, Cardano is shown at the bottom of the statistics, as influencers attempt to spread FUD deliberately.
We certainly do not want to suggest that all the project teams mentioned in the tweet are deliberately manipulating data, nor do we claim that Cardano’s data is free from manipulation. However, we will demonstrate that Solana does not have 1.6 million daily active users.
The influencer’s first mistake in the tweet was omitting Bitcoin, the oldest blockchain, and Tron, which leads in daily active user statistics. The following table from the Coinmetrics portal provides data on daily active users for most blockchains. In the chart, you can see the rounded data for the last period.
The influencer’s second mistake is that he presented the number of daily users as the number of daily active addresses. Later in the article, I will explain why this is nonsense.
See the number of daily active addresses on Solana according to TheBlock.
Understanding Daily Active Addresses (DAA) Statistics
DAA refers to the unique public addresses that actively transact on a blockchain each day. It includes both sender and receiver addresses.
For Solana, a reported DAA of 1.6 million would imply that at least one transaction was sent from 800 unique sender addresses to 800 unique recipient addresses.
The ratio between sender and recipient addresses can be different. Solana supports multiple recipients in a single transaction. It is possible to include multiple destination addresses when creating a transaction, allowing users to send assets to several recipients simultaneously.
Multiple transactions could be sent between unique sender and recipient addresses. This fact does not matter in the context of DAA.
The issue is that a single user can own multiple addresses. For instance, if Alice and Bob want to send 10 transactions to each other, they can either reuse a single address for each transaction or generate a new address each time.
Thus, for 10 transactions between 2 users, they could use just 2 addresses or as many as 20.
In the picture, you can see that Alice and Bob each generate only 1 address for 10 transactions. Only 2 addresses get into the DAA statistics.
In the picture, you can see that Alice and Bob generate a new address every time for 10 transactions. 20 addresses will be included in the DAA statistics.
To interpret a DAA of 1.6 million as 1.6 million unique users, we would have to assume that each unique address corresponds to a unique user. This would mean that all users reuse addresses and no one generates new ones, which is an unrealistic assumption in practice.
In some ecosystems, like Ethereum, addresses are often reused. However, in other ecosystems, generating new addresses for each transaction is preferred to enhance user privacy and security. For Solana, it is recommended to generate new addresses for new transactions.
See the number of daily non-vote transactions on Solana according to TheBlock.
Solana processes up to 40M non-vote transactions daily.
According to Dune, roughly 40% of transactions fail and 60% of transactions succeed.
According to Dune, 90% of transactions on Solana are generated by bots. 10% are non-bot transactions.
Bot transactions, like those from real users, require the generation of new addresses. Additionally, bots are typically designed to generate a large number of transactions quickly. Therefore, we can assume that bots generate more addresses than real users.
Given this information, try to estimate how many real users use Solana daily. We need to determine how many addresses are generated by bots versus real users. Additionally, we must consider how failed transactions impact DAA statistics. According to Dune, Solana processes 70 million transactions per day, nearly twice the number reported by TheBlock. As you can see, this is a complex task.
The 1.6 million daily active addresses on Solana are generated not only by real users but also by bots. Since a single entity can create multiple addresses per day by sending multiple transactions, the actual number of real Solana users is likely significantly lower than what the influencer claimed.
Let’s try to estimate the real number of Solana users.
Consider 24 million non-vote successful transactions per day and 1.6 million active addresses. Each transaction requires 2 addresses. For simple transactions with one sender address and one recipient address, we have 800,000 active sender addresses and the same number of recipient addresses. This means approximately 30 transactions are sent from each sender address.
If we assume that bots generate new transactions (and addresses) at the same rate as real users and real users make up only 10% of the total, the actual number of real users would be 10 times less than the DAA suggests, which means only about 160,000 (80K of senders and 80K of recipients). Real users would daily send 2.4M transactions (10%). On average, each sender would send 30 transactions daily. Users can reuse addresses. If all real users (senders and recipients) reused addresses, then 160K would be the maximum of them. However, if every user generated a new address for every transaction, there would only be 5,3K real users. This simplified reasoning led us to the fact that there are only between 5,3K and 160K real users.
Let’s consider another scenario. Suppose bots generate 20 times more addresses than real users. That’s a realistic assumption. This would mean bots create 1.52 million addresses, while real users generate only 76,200. This is the maximum possible number of users (both senders and recipients) in this scenario if everyone were to generate a single address per day and reuse it. Applying the same logic to transactions, bots would send 22.8 million transactions, whereas real users would send only 1.14 million. On average, each sender would send 30 transactions per day (38,100 senders and 38,100 recipients). If every user generated a new address for each transaction, there would be only 2,540 users. Based on this reasoning, the number of real users could range from 2,540 to 76,200.
Let’s consider an optimistic scenario. Assume that real users are as active as bots. Both groups would generate 800K addresses and send 12 million transactions each. We have 400K real senders and 400K real recipients. On average, each user would send 30 transactions per day. If all users reused addresses, the maximum possible number of users (senders and recipients) would be 800K. However, if users generated a new address for each transaction, the minimum number of users would be 26,6K. In this optimistic scenario, the number of real users is 26,6K to 800K.
In practice, users and bots will sometimes generate new addresses and sometimes reuse old ones, depending on the specific case. An average of 30 transactions per sender is quite high, even for active traders, suggesting that most transactions are generated by bots. Therefore, it’s likely that most addresses in the DAA statistics are from bots. Our estimate suggests there may be between 5,000 and 160,000 real users of Solana, but this is a broad range and not very precise. Unfortunately, a more accurate number is difficult to obtain.
Conclusion
For context, it’s important to consider other statistics, such as user activity on social networks. The Solana community is not very active on the X platform. It’s unlikely that Solana would rival older projects like Ethereum or Bitcoin in terms of network effect without significant social media presence. The same applies to projects like Tonchain, Sui, and Aptos. The numbers in the influencer’s tweet do not correlate with user activity on social networks, which is suspicious, to say the least.
When network fees are low, it’s easy to manipulate statistics. A high number of transactions can be executed for minimal cost. For instance, with a transaction fee of $0.001, you can send 1,000 transactions for just $1. Generating 1 million unique addresses for statistical purposes would cost only $500 per day, making it an inexpensive marketing tactic. When it comes to human resources, bots are a very cheap option.
How much would it cost to use bots to manipulate stats like they do on Solana? A typical Cardano transaction currently costs roughly $0.05 (ADA = 0,33 USD). This means you can send 20 transactions for $1. To send 1,000 transactions, it would cost $50. Therefore, generating 1 million unique addresses would cost $25,000 per day. This is the answer to the question of why bots are not used as often on the Cardano network as on Solana.