Degen Chain, a recently launched layer-3 network on the Ethereum blockchain, has achieved the highest transaction per second (TPS) count in the Ethereum ecosystem in the past 24 hours. According to L2BEAT, Degen’s TPS count has increased by 62% in the last day, reaching 35.7 TPS. This surpasses the TPS count of the blockchain it was built on, Base, which stands at 29.7 TPS. The other top-ranking Ethereum-based blockchains in terms of TPS are Arbitrum One, Ethereum, and zkSync Era.
Degen Chain has processed a total of 3.08 million transactions in the past 24 hours, considering its TPS count. However, despite this high transaction volume, the trading volume on Degen Chain has only reached $819,600 in the same period. This places Degen Chain in the 35th position out of the 44 blockchains tracked by CoinGecko. The average value per transaction on Degen Chain is a mere $0.27, which is significantly lower compared to Ethereum’s $1,867 and Base’s $170.
While TPS is commonly used to measure a blockchain’s scalability, industry experts argue that it is a flawed metric as it fails to consider the computational size of each transaction. Steven Goldfeder, a founder at Offchain Labs, explained that TPS is similar to counting the number of bills in a wallet without considering their denominations.
Degen Chain is powered by the Degen (DEGEN) token, which initially served as a tipping token on Degen’s channel on Farcaster, a decentralized social media platform. The token has gained social value and popularity through tipping and holding activities. The creation of Degen Chain as a layer 3 blockchain was a natural progression from this tipping token.
Degen Chain currently has $4.1 million locked in total value, and the DEGEN token, which is three months old, has a market capitalization of $326 million. It is considered an ultra-low-cost, application-specific layer 3 blockchain that utilizes Arbitrum Orbit and the settlement layer of Base.
The success of Degen Chain is seen as a step forward for layer 3 applications, according to Ian Lee from Syndicate, a blockchain infrastructure firm.
The article raises the question of whether measuring TPS is still relevant in 2024, suggesting that it may be an outdated metric for evaluating blockchain performance.