EVM Chains Show Dramatic Shifts in Swap Trends, With BNB Chain and Base Emerging Strong

The landscape of embedded swaps across Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains has experienced a dramatic makeover in recent years, according to the latest data from @Dune. While Ethereum once ruled the roost, new contenders like BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base are making noticeable gains. Each chain seems to have enjoyed its own distinct set of growth spurts, periods of stagnation, and brush with market leadership, giving us a good picture of an evolving DeFi and crypto ecosystem. In this environment that’s changing with great rapidity, Ethereum remains in many ways a commanding presence in the market, even if it’s lost a little bit of dominance. Meanwhile, chains like BNB Chain and Base have emerged to challenge Ethereum in the embedded swap space, to some degree. Here’s a closer look at how each of these chains is performing in that market. Ethereum: From Dominance to a Resilient Core Player For a long time, the DeFi ecosystem has hinged on Ethereum. DeFi accounted for nearly 100% of all the sockets in Ethereum until March 2021, but that was never a totally comfortable situation. For one thing, Ethereum is expensive. Those sockets don’t come cheap, and the actual interface implementations are rarely simple or straightforward. Gas fees on Ethereum can change dramatically from hour to hour or even minute to minute, making it a really bad time to be doing a swap when you’ll be basically swapping in order to pay for the swap. Notably, even though its share of the market has decreased to about 20%, Ethereum is still a key player when it comes to trading and settlement inside the network. Its trading volume hit a peak of $10 billion in 2021, but by 2023 it had dropped down to only $200 million weekly. Still, Ethereum is rallying again in 2025, with its trading volume recovering to $2 billion per week. All this adds up to about a 40% share of all trading activity happening inside the network right now. BNB Chain: Unstoppable Growth with a Surge in Market Share The last few years have been quite consistent and impressive for BNB Chain, as they have brought consistent and impressive growth. In 2021, BNB Chain was doing solidly, with an impressive swap count of 2 million weekly swaps. By 2025, however, we had surged to an impressive 15 million swaps per week on BNB Chain. When audits are included, we had exceeded 15 million weekly swaps in 2025. This growth has also led to considerable fluctuations in our market share. In 2021 and 2022, BNB Chain’s market share of embedded swaps reached its zenith at 70% , clearly in the commanding position of this emerging space. Although this share dipped slightly in 2023, its recovery since that year has been remarkable; by 2025, it had swelled to an even better-than-before share of greater than 60%. BNB Chain’s overall share of trading volume, though, has remained relatively modest; what can we ascribe its absence from the top of that leaderboard to? This trajectory—bumping past the Peg and aha moment and headed for the Pragma Si milestone—positions BNB Chain as a legit contender in the EVM space. Its rise to this moment in time, backed by increasing average daily users and total value locked in, suggests that decentralized finance investors are leaning heavily toward this chain. Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base: Shifting Dynamics Among Emerging Players Arbitrum and Optimism have also played important parts in the growth of decentralized finance, though they have seen different levels of success. Arbitrum, a top DeFi chain, seized 20% of swap share in early 2023, with its peak weekly volume hitting $600 million in April 2024. Although its swap count has since dropped to somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million weekly swaps, Arbitrum has remained in the top three for capital inflow in the DeFi space. On the contrary, swap shares have felt the direct impact of optimism to a much lesser degree. A modest number of 10,000 weekly swaps in 2022 had a more direct impact on Impressions, but from there, the swaps only grew in count. By April of 2025, that figure had swelled to a number in and around 70,000. Even at those much-improved counts, the influence of this layer on the swap market is still, at best, minimal. The peak (of either Impressions or swaps) reaches only a rounding-error number of $50 million Paxos dollars. To speak of Base is to speak of one of the most promising emerging chains. Having launched only in 2024, Base has already made a splash, with a weekly swaps count that reached 4.5 million by April 2025. Those numbers position Base at the center of the activity in the EVM space—that is, among chains compatible with Ethereum’s virtual machine—and with what’s happening on Ethereum itself, accounting for approximately 20% of total swap counts and from 10-25% of total trading volumes. Base has itself become a playground for swaps, and what’s driving those swaps is largely the activity surrounding memecoins, asset tokenization, and new, innovative DeFi-CeFi lending integrations, including the integration between Base and the Coinbase-Morpho protocol. So if there’s anything that’s a true breakout development in the Ethereum space in 2025, it’s gotta be Base. Conclusion: A Fragmented Yet Thriving Ecosystem The swap trends seen across Ethereum and other EVM Chains are a clear indicator of how fast the blockchain and DeFi markets are moving at the moment. Even though it has shown a steady decline in its market share, Ethereum is still a top contender in this space. Meanwhile, BNB Chain has been showing an impressive and steady growth trajectory, with its own ecosystem expanding very nicely. At the same time, newer players in this segment—like Base, for instance—are catching up pretty quickly, while Arbitrum and Optimism are also doing their part to maintain this diverse market landscape. The blockchain arena keeps moving forward. Intense competition now exists among EVM chains. New chains are capturing market share—sometimes through the innovative solutions they offer. In this environment, Ethereum itself is under challenge, both from new competitors and from new technological developments in its own ecosystem. If this competition is happening at the level of chains, what about at the level of Layer 2s? Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services. 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Source: NullTx