TON flips ETH in daily active users, but that’s not the full picture

Telegram’s “The Open Network” (TON) blockchain has recorded more daily active addresses than Ethereum nearly every day this month.

One firm suggests it could be a quiet “flippening” fueled by a massive user base. Though, one could argue the data doesn’t show the full picture either.

“TON’s quiet growth, fueled by Telegram’s 900M user base, has driven its daily active addresses above Ethereum,” Delphi Digital posted to X on June 10, calling it “The Flippening CT ignores.”

“TON is a bet on Telegram’s distribution,” Delphi Digital added, before pondering whether its promising growth can be sustained over the long term to surpass Ethereum for good.

Source: Delphi Digital

Data from Artemis — which defines DAA as the number of unique wallets making a daily transaction on a blockchain — shows TON and Ethereum have fought neck and neck since May 17 when Ton first surpassed Ethereum with . TON has gained a foothold near the start of June, beating Ethereum on 10 out of 11 days so far.

TON gained a foothold since the start of the month, beating Ethereum on 10 out of 11 days in June so far, including a record 568,300 DAAs on June 3.

To put that into perspective, Ethereum hasn’t reached those heights since Sept. 13, 2023, Artemis data shows.

Daily active addresses on Ethereum and TON since March 12. Source: Artemis

However, there’s a missing part of the picture. As a result of pushing Ethereum transactions to L2s, much of the the ecosystem's user activity is on layer 2 scaling solutions — arguably making it a not-so-fair comparison.

For example, three of the top Ethereum layer 2s, Arbitrum, Base and Optimism, saw a combined 1.3 million daily active addresses on June 11 alone.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has supported using L2s to scale the main blockchain, which is part of the roadmap.

TON’s uptick in network activity may have been attributed to Telegram recently integrating the Tether (USDT) stablecoin on TON and the 35 million users that have signed up to Notcoin since it launched five months ago. Notcoin is a “tap-to-earn” token which can be earned by completing various social challenges.

Telegram also launched Telegram Stars — an in-app currency used to make digital purchases on June 6.

Telegram trading bots have also been a popular crypto use case on the messaging platform.