Final ultimatum! $BTC, $ETH, and $SOL are about to clash. When transaction fees drop to zero, what’s left of the underlying public chain?

Transaction costs are going to zero. $ETH mainnet fees have fallen to a multi-year low, while $SOL transaction fees have stayed in the low single-digit cents for a long time. L2 networks even offer an almost free execution environment. When the marginal cost of block space is compressed to infinity, the competitive logic of public chains has been completely rewritten.

In the past, we talked about TPS and gas fees. Now, what decides the outcome is the depth of the ecosystem, scenario specialization, and whether you can turn your architectural advantages into irreplaceable value. In this race, $BTC, $ETH, and $SOL are heading down three completely different paths.

First, let’s look at $BTC. This year’s March, the 20 millionth $BTC was mined, meaning that 95% of the total supply is already in circulation. The halving that happens once every four years reduces the block reward to 3.125 $BTC, creating a fundamental challenge for the miners’ income structure. Excluding extreme market conditions, the share of transaction fees in its total revenue has long remained below 1%.

One key question remains unanswered: can naturally generated fee demand fill the safety-budget gap left by the decaying block rewards? This forces $BTC to move from “digital gold” to “programmable assets.”

Currently, about 60% of $BTC hasn’t moved within a year, and more than 2.4 million coins are held on centralized exchanges. A large amount of capital is idle. The market is activating it through two paths: one is expanding underlying programmability, such as Citrea— a BitVM-based ZK Rollup— aiming to enable $BTC on-chain settlement smart contracts while minimizing trust.

The other is assetized applications. The total value of $BTC wrapped on each chain has already exceeded $15 billion. Coinbase’s cbBTC on Morpho has a lending scale above $1 billion. Liquidity staking protocols like Babylon also allow $BTC to provide economic security to external PoS networks. Sleeping capital is being awakened.

Next, let’s look at $ETH. It is still the absolute center of global on-chain liquidity and settlement, holding about 62% of the stablecoin market value, the deepest DeFi liquidity, and tokenized real-world assets such as government bonds and stocks. Recent upgrades further solidify this position.

With more Blob space and higher gas limits, mainnet fees have dropped to the lows. Daily active addresses and transaction volume are nearly doubling year over year. But be wary: some of the growth comes from address poisoning attacks and economic activity below $1, and the share of these noisy data can sometimes be extremely high.

More profound changes are happening in the relationship between L1 and L2. L2 Blob space utilization is below 30%; on average there are only about 3 Blobs per block, and the related fees are negligible. The expansion pace of the $ETH mainnet has already surpassed L2’s settlement demand.

Therefore, L2’s mission is shifting from “scaling solutions” to “specialized execution environments.” Truly successful L2s—such as Base, which has Coinbase distribution as a starting point, or Arbitrum, with deep DeFi liquidity—provide unique value. A new generation of specialized public chains like MegaETH and Robinhood Chain are targeting more granular scenarios.

The upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade plans to raise the gas limit to 200 million and introduce parallel transaction execution, aiming to make the $ETH L1 itself a more competitive execution environment. At the same time, the proposer-builder separation mechanism is being integrated into the protocol to reduce the centralization risk of MEV. The $ETH roadmap clearly points toward a settlement empire that is deeply integrated and clearly divided in responsibilities.

Finally, it’s $SOL. It is trying to shed the label of a “retail Meme chain” and move toward a vision of an “internet capital markets.” Fees below 1 cent and block production times under 400 milliseconds are its sharpest weapons.

Since the end of 2024, its average daily volume of non-vote transactions has broken 120 million, nearly doubling. This gives it a natural advantage in payments and micro-payments: $USDC transfers under $1,000 average about 3 million per day, with the median amount staying consistently below $100. The x402 open payment protocol launched by Coinbase has also seen a large share of transactions happening on $SOL.

High throughput also attracts professional trading infrastructure. Private AMMs built by professional market makers are more like dark pools: they update prices off-chain, complete settlement on $SOL, and have MEV resistance. This creates a differentiated competitive position compared with public DEXs like Uniswap.

The upcoming Alpenglow upgrade targets compressing final confirmation time from 12 seconds down to 100–150 milliseconds using Votor consensus. The block-building market developed by Jito also allows applications to control transaction ordering independently. $SOL is laying the ultimate foundation for high-frequency financial scenarios.

The landscape of the public chain war is already clear. Mainstream public chains rely on architectural advantages for scenario division, while specialized chains like Hyperliquid and Canton make extreme trade-offs in terms of compliance and licensing. But everyone faces two common, deeper challenges.

First is the long-term threat from quantum computing. Research suggests that the number of physical qubits required to break elliptic-curve cryptography might be below 500k—only 1/20 of the earlier estimate. $BTC’s BIP-360 and $ETH’s post-quantum roadmap have begun to address this, but the coordination needed for technical migration will be extremely long.

Second is how to reach consensus and drive voluntary adoption for major upgrades within a decentralized network. This process is slower, harder, and less predictable than any decision made by centralized institutions. When on-chain demand truly explodes at massive scale, whether our infrastructure can evolve in sync remains a huge question mark.

Follow me: get more real-time crypto market analysis and insights! $BTC $ETH $SOL

#Gate Square April Posting Challenge #Crypto Market Rebound #Gold and Silver Rising