Ethereum reclaims its title as the leading smart contract blockchain for DEX trading

Last month, Ethereum reclaimed its title as the leading smart contract blockchain for decentralized exchange (DEX) trading

Last month, Ethereum reclaimed its title as the leading smart contract blockchain for decentralized exchange (DEX) trading, as the market downturn reduced activity on Solana, the preferred platform for memecoin traders.

Ethereum-based DEXs achieved an industry-leading cumulative trading volume of $64.616 billion in March, surpassing Solana's total of $52.62 billion by 22%, according to cryptocurrency data source DefiLlama. This marks the first time since September that Ethereum has topped the charts, pushing Solana to the number two spot.

The change in leadership occurred as the total cryptocurrency market capitalization decreased by 4.2% to $2.63 trillion, continuing February's 20% decline. This was driven by macroeconomic uncertainty and disappointment over the lack of new BTC purchases in the U.S. strategic reserve, which caused bitcoin to fall below $80,000.

The bearish market sentiment dampened speculation across the broader cryptocurrency landscape, particularly within the memecoin sector, which was evident in the significant reduction in activity on Raydium, the leading Solana-based DEX and a hotspot for meme trading in late 2024.

Throughout March, Raydium did not report a single day with trading volume exceeding $1 billion, highlighting a considerable decrease from its record-high of $13 billion on January 18, as displayed by DefiLlama data.

Furthermore, daily volume on the Solana-based memecoin launch pad averaged less than $100 million in March, a significant decline from the peak of $390 million in mid-January. Activity on Solana-based DEXs reached its peak with the launch of President Donald Trump's TRUMP token in January.

In contrast, Ethereum's outperformance can be attributed to Uniswap, which achieved over $30 billion in trading volume, while Fluid took the distant second spot with $9 billion in activity.

Despite this, ether fell by over 18% to $1,822 in March, registering larger losses compared to Solana's SOL token, which declined by 15.8%, according to data from TradingView and CoinDesk.

According to analysts, ether's inflationary tokenomics and the increasing popularity of Layer 2 solutions, which are said to be diverting activity from the main chain, are contributing to ether's poorer performance.