Ethereum and Solana Networks Got Busier and Cheaper. The Token Prices Went the Other Way

Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche handled far more transactions in the second quarter of 2026 while users paid much less per transaction. Network revenue fell across all three.

Ethereum transactions rose from 121.1 million to 203.9 million, while network revenue dropped from $131 million to $64 million and average cost per transaction fell from $1.08 to $0.31. Throughput reached about 26 transactions per second, versus roughly 15 a year earlier.

Solana non-vote transactions increased from 8.9 billion to 9.8 billion as revenue fell from $272 million to $51 million and average cost slid from $0.030 to $0.005. Avalanche C-Chain transactions rose from 58.0 million to 235.6 million, while revenue declined from $1.55 million to $0.33 million and average cost dropped from $0.027 to $0.0014.

THE BLOCK: ethereum:native , solana:So11111111111111111111111111111111111111112 and avalanche-2:native prices fell sharply over the past year, even as their networks grew busier and cheaper.

"We've seen a big divergence between network fundamentals and market sentiment," Bitwise… pic.twitter.com/5sWpljrO9V

— The Block (@TheBlockCo) July 27, 2026

That combination breaks the easy story that more use must produce more token value.

Bitwise’s Q2 report frames the data as a divergence between market sentiment and network fundamentals. The firm says protocol design made blockspace cheaper and more abundant, allowing activity to rise even as transaction costs and network revenue moved lower.

Blockspace is the capacity a chain provides for recording transactions. When upgrades or design choices expand that capacity, users and applications can submit more activity at lower prices, much as added supply in another market can reduce the price paid for each unit.

That creates a hurdle for fee revenue. Transaction volume can grow sharply, yet total revenue can still shrink when the average fee falls faster than the number of transactions rises.

The revenue math is multiplication, but the interpretation is less tidy. A large increase in low-cost interactions can represent real utility while producing less protocol income than a smaller set of expensive transactions did in the comparison period.

Counts also flatten important differences in activity. A basic transfer and a complicated decentralized-finance interaction each add to the total, even though they may carry different economic value, computational demands, and relevance to users.

Solana’s nearly 10 billion non-vote transactions exceeded its total in any quarter of 2025, according to Bitwise. Avalanche’s C-Chain activity roughly quadrupled, but those facts describe throughput on those specific networks rather than identical technical behavior across every chain.

Lower prices per transaction can be a product win for developers and users who can afford to do more onchain. For the protocol’s economics, however, cheaper execution means each transaction contributes less revenue unless added volume is large enough to offset the lower charge.

That is why usage and revenue can diverge without either metric being false. One measures how often the chain processed qualifying actions, while the other reflects the money collected under that chain’s fee system during the measured period.

The Block reported that ETH, SOL, and AVAX were each down roughly half or more from a year earlier despite the higher activity and lower transaction costs. Bitwise Head of Onchain Research Kam Benbrik described a wide gap between network fundamentals and market sentiment.

The same report highlighted the fall in network revenue across Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche. That common direction does not mean weak demand was the sole cause; Bitwise says design-driven abundance of cheaper blockspace was the main driver overall, with weaker demand contributing in some cases.

The price comparison sits on a different clock: roughly year over year, versus the report’s Q2 operating comparisons. It shows that market value moved against the direction of transaction activity, but it does not identify a single cause for that performance.

The staking numbers are secondary to the operating data. Ethereum had 40.2 million ETH actively staked, about 33% of supply, with a 2.84% gross yield; Solana’s gross staking yield was 6.25%.

Bitwise estimates that token issuance supplied 93% of Ethereum staking rewards and more than 90% of Solana’s. Issuance-funded rewards can dilute holders who do not stake, and rising participation can spread rewards more thinly, so the quoted yield should not be mistaken for fee-funded income.

The outlet also reported that institutional holders, exchange-traded funds, and corporate treasuries supplied much of the ETH added to the validator pool during the year. That changes who is participating in staking, but it does not create a direct formula from validator deposits to token price.

Blockchains are getting busier and cheaper while their tokens crash

"There's a great report from Bitwise showing this strange phenomenon. Blockchain adoption is increasing massively, but the tokens are dumping to Hades. Eth, Sol and Avax each fell approximately 50% or more over… https://t.co/siOZyWzVFu pic.twitter.com/V4M1Tq7Eff

— The Wolf Of All Streets (@scottmelker) July 28, 2026

Cheaper execution can even make older revenue benchmarks less useful as a standalone scorecard. If a protocol deliberately lowers the price of blockspace, collecting fewer fees may accompany successful capacity expansion rather than operational retreat.

The quarter shows that better infrastructure can distribute benefits away from the protocol’s fee line. Users may keep more of their money, developers may gain room for cheaper applications, and the network may carry more activity even while token holders see weak market performance.

Revenue remains one channel of token economics, not a master switch for price. Blockspace demand, staking, collateral use, issuance policy, liquidity, regulation, leverage, and sentiment can pull in different directions over the same period.

Transaction growth has limits as evidence, too. It establishes that more actions were processed, but it does not by itself prove the quality of adoption, application profitability, decentralization, security, or future demand.

Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche also have different designs and economic paths, so their matching direction on activity, fees, and revenue should not erase those distinctions. The useful comparison is the shared outcome: more transactions, lower average costs, lower network revenue, and weaker year-over-year token prices.

The hard question is value capture. When a network becomes cheaper and busier, some gains can accrue to users and applications without reaching fee revenue or token price during the same window, and the Q2 data leave that allocation open rather than predicting where prices go next.

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