Conduit analysis: Tether dominates the Ethereum ecosystem as the top gas user

Gas usage is still a proxy indicator for economic activity on some of the leading chains. Tether emerges as the top gas burner for Ethereum and leading EVM-compatible chains. 

Conduit Research has tracked the economic activity and gas usage for the past year, profiling some of the leading chains. The Ethereum ecosystem, including the L1 chain, L2 networks and EVM-compatible chains, emerges as the main hub for Tether activity. The Tether smart contract is near the top for most of those chains. 

Conversely, Solana emerges as a chain for DEX trades, with Raydium burning the most gas for the past 12 months. 

The Conduit report tracks gas for Ethereum, Solana, top L2 chains, as well as EVM networks like Avalanche. All those chains use a form of gas calculation, which is an expense for users and a source of income for validators. 

Tether becomes key gas burner for multiple chains

Tether has issued USDT tokens as native assets on multiple chains. On Ethereum, the USDT smart contract burned over $70M worth of gas for the 12 months ended in April 2025. The stablecoin smart contract is only second to the Uniswap router, which burned over $189M worth of gas on Ethereum. 

Uniswap and Tether often swap places as the top gas burner, depending on the time of day, user activity, and the presence of other busy contracts. In the short term, USDT burns around 6.8% of all Ethereum gas, but for the past 12 months, the share increased to 11.75%.

Tether’s contract versions are also the leading gas burners on TRON, OP Mainnet, and are the second most active contract on Avalanche and the BNB Smart Chain. For BNB Chain, the usage of USDT is tied to small-scale transactions for payments and trades. The contract burns over 30% of the chain’s gas for the past 12 months. 

The gas burners use up resources from the client side, reflecting the real sentiment of users. For Ethereum, this also means stablecoins are one of the top use cases, even when the network’s traffic is relatively low. 

The next tier of apps includes DEX router contracts, trading bots, and aggregator apps like 1inch and CowSwap. The selection of gas burner apps is mostly limited to DeFi, with no other use cases such as gaming or NFTs.

Solana turns into a chain for DEX activity

Solana’s top app for the observed period is Raydium, the leading DEX. Raydium burned 41.81% of all Solana gas, for a total of $145.5M in fees going toward validators. 

The Photon trading bot consumed over 20% of Solana’s gas. Pump.Fun and the Jupiter aggregator consumed another 33% of the network’s gas. 

Solana still carries over 87.2% of all trading bot users, up from 86% in the past few weeks. The Solana ecosystem showed its divergence from EVM-compatible chains, turning into the high-speed network for DEX swaps.

KEY Difference Wire: the secret tool crypto projects use to get guaranteed media coverage