We analyzed 3K+ apps built with Turnkey to understand their onchain needs. Here’s what we found.

Industries that use Turnkey span a range of onchain products, from payments platforms, to high-frequency trading systems and developer infrastructure, to consumer wallets, and emerging AI agents. 

These applications have very different transaction patterns: some sign continuously through automated systems, while others primarily support individual user actions or payment flows. As a result, the types of chains they choose to use vary considerably.

Over five months, from March to July of 2026, we analyzed activity across more than 3,000 distinct applications building on Turnkey. 

Here is what the data shows about which chains builders use, how multichain behavior breaks down, and where sponsored gas, the practice of an app covering users' transaction fees so they don't need to hold a chain's native token, actually flows.

How the different verticals companies are in affect chain usage

Breaking Turnkey’s customer base into verticals reveals two separate questions:

• Which chains does each vertical adopt?
• Which chains carry the actual transaction volume?

Adoption measures who is present on a chain. Volume measures where transactions actually flow. 

Chain adoption by industry

Chain adoption varies meaningfully by industry, reflecting the different technical requirements, user needs, and transaction patterns of each product category. The percentages below represent the share of companies within each vertical. 

• DeFi and trading: 81% EVM, 81% Solana
  
  • The most balanced vertical in the dataset.
  • A majority of companies operate across multiple chains.
  • This reflects the multichain nature of modern trading and liquidity infrastructure.
• Payments: 100% EVM, 33% Solana
  
  • Every payments company in the sample uses EVM.
  • One-third also use Solana, typically as an additional settlement rail.
  • EVM provides the common foundation, while Solana extends payment capacity.
  • Tron is present among a small number of payments companies but too small to represent as a percentage.
• Consumer applications: 67% EVM, 67% Solana
  
  • Adoption is evenly split between the two ecosystems.
  • Supporting both helps wallets and other user-facing products reach a wider audience.
• Developer tooling: 67% EVM, 33% Solana
  
  • This category skews toward EVM.
  • The difference aligns with the maturity of Ethereum’s standards, libraries, networks, and developer infrastructure.
• AI agents: 67% EVM, 44% Solana
  
  • AI agent companies split into two groups: autonomous signers generating high-frequency transactions (active on both EVM and Solana), and wallet provisioners creating and exporting agent wallets ahead of deployment.
  • The signing-active cohort already shows meaningful transaction volume. The provisioning cohort represents a pipeline of future onchain activity as their agents go live.

Takeaway: EVM is the broadest common layer across product categories. Solana adoption is deepest among DeFi, trading, and consumer applications.

Transaction volume by industry

While, in almost every vertical, EVM leads or ties on adoption, most of the volume is carried by Solana. Here’s a breakdown of where the majority of signing volume is happening. 

• DeFi and trading: 86% Solana, 14% EVM
  
  • Company adoption is evenly split, but activity is not.
  • High-frequency trading, automated strategies, and other transaction-intensive products push most of the vertical’s volume onto Solana.
• Payments: 80% Solana, 18% EVM, 2% Tron
  
  • Solana carries most payment volume despite being used by only one-third of payments companies.
  • Its speed and cost profile make it well suited to high-volume settlement.
  • EVM remains a meaningful secondary rail.
  • Tron accounts for 2% of payments volume despite minimal adoption. A small number of companies running high-frequency USDT settlement generate outsized transaction activity.
• Consumer applications: 73% Solana, 27% EVM
  
  • User-facing wallets often generate frequent, relatively small transactions.
  • Those interactions favor fast confirmation and low transaction costs.
• Developer tooling: 90% EVM, 10% Solana
  
  • This is the inverse of every other measured vertical.
  • Developer infrastructure is firmly EVM-oriented by both company count and transaction volume.

• AI agents: 80% EVM, 20% Solana
  
  •  The signing-active cohort skews EVM for autonomous transaction execution, with Solana as a meaningful secondary chain.
  •  Volume is growing as more agents move from wallet provisioning to active execution.
    

Takeaway: Volume concentrates on Solana in every measured vertical except developer tooling. AI agents are an emerging exception, skewing EVM in their early signing activity.

Overall, EVM and Solana split the builder base

Measured by the share of customers signing on each chain, EVM and Solana are both deeply embedded across Turnkey's customer base, with EVM holding a narrow lead. 

• Ethereum and EVM: 59% of customers
• Solana: 54%

EVM shows up across nearly every category Turnkey serves: DeFi, payments, embedded wallets, AI agent signing, institutional and enterprise use, compliance, and card issuing. 

Solana is nearly as widely adopted, with particular concentration in trading, consumer wallets, gaming and NFTs, and yield. 

Solana led signing volume, even at near-equal customer adoption

Solana accounted for ~61% of all signing volume over the period. Ethereum and EVM came second at 38%. That puts Solana ahead by about 1.6X, close to 60% more signatures, despite EVM and Solana being nearly equal in customer adoption.

The gap comes down to what runs on each chain. Solana usage on Turnkey is concentrated in high-frequency automated trading bots and DeFi apps, some of which generate millions of signatures a month on their own. That kind of workload compounds fast.

The takeaway for builders is that raw signing throughput and customer count measure different things. A chain can be widely adopted for wallets and onboarding while another chain quietly carries most of the transaction load.

Multichain is the power-user frontier

Just 14% of customers signed on more than one chain over the period:

• One chain only: 86% of customers
• Two chains: 13%
• Three chains: less than 1%
• All four chain families: less than 1%

Most teams start on a single chain, which is expected. What stands out is the shape of the tail. The small group operating across three or four chain families are among the most sophisticated, highest-volume builders in the base. 

That has a direct implication for infrastructure choices. If a team expects to expand beyond its first chain, the cost of switching signing providers later has to be considered. Building on infrastructure like Turnkey that already signs across EVM, Solana, Bitcoin, and Tron and hundreds of others means you configure your backend and don’t have to go through a difficult migration. 

Gas sponsorship: Base outpaced Ethereum mainnet

Across the chains tracked over the period, Turnkey processed hundreds of thousands of sponsored transactions. 

Base led with 30.6% of sponsored transactions, nearly four times Ethereum mainnet's 7.8%. Solana followed at 20.8%, then Polygon at 12.5% and BNB Chain at 11.2%. Ethereum, despite its adoption lead, sat well down the list for sponsored activity. 

Gas sponsorship is most valuable where transaction costs are already low. On mainnets, like Ethereum, sponsoring gas is expensive enough that most teams leave it off. On Base, Solana, BNB, and Polygon, the economics make sponsorship practical at scale, and builders are taking advantage of it to remove friction for end users entirely.

Distinct organization counts add a second layer. Base carries a large volume concentrated among fewer senders, while Solana and Polygon show broad, thin usage across many organizations, the signature of heavy embedded and consumer wallet activity.

Payments demand is real, and Tron is part of it

Tron is small by customer count, but the demand behind it is concentrated. But payments demand is not limited to Tron. The gas sponsorship spread across Base, Polygon, Solana, and BNB Chain points to the same underlying trend: builders want stablecoin and consumer transactions to feel frictionless to the end user, and they are choosing chains where that economics works.

What this means for builders

Builders are not choosing chains in the abstract. Chain choice follows product needs. EVM spans nearly every category Turnkey serves, and Solana runs close behind — with its heaviest activity in high-frequency trading and consumer applications. Tron and Bitcoin serve narrower use cases, particularly payments and institutional custody.

From this data, several distinct patterns emerge:

• The application determines the chain mix. Trading and consumer applications generate most of their activity on Solana, while developer tooling remains firmly EVM-oriented. Payments companies often use multiple settlement rails, with volume shifting toward chains that offer faster and less expensive transactions.
• Multichain usage tends to come with maturity. Most companies begin on one chain. As their products grow, they add ecosystems to reach new users, assets, and markets. Infrastructure decisions made at launch can either support that expansion or make it more difficult later.
• Sponsored gas shows where teams are investing in user experience. Activity on Base, Solana, Polygon, and BNB Chain suggests that builders are using lower-cost networks to remove transaction friction from payments and consumer applications.
• AI agents are an emerging category with a distinct infrastructure pattern. Some are already signing transactions autonomously at scale, primarily on EVM with Solana as a secondary chain. Others are in a provisioning phase, creating and exporting wallets ahead of active deployment. Both groups signal growing demand for programmable, policy-controlled signing infrastructure.

The data does not point to one chain winning every use case. It points to an increasingly specialized and multichain market, where applications choose different networks for distribution, liquidity, cost, speed, and user experience.

Turnkey: Flexible infrastructure built for where applications go next

By supporting signing across EVM, Solana, Bitcoin, Tron, and hundreds of other chains, Turnkey gives teams a common infrastructure layer as their chain strategy evolves. Builders can start with the network that fits their product today, then expand without replacing the signing infrastructure underneath it.

The clearest lesson from these 3,000-plus applications is simple: start with the needs of the product, prepare for the workload it may generate, and choose infrastructure that will not limit where you can go next.

Get started with Turnkey today.

_{Methodology:‍}

_{This analysis covers signing activity across more than 3,000 distinct applications building on Turnkey between March and July 2026. Data was drawn directly from Turnkey's internal analytics database and reflects completed signing transactions, both structured transactions (EVM, Solana, Tron, Bitcoin) and raw payload signing,  across all customer accounts active during the period.}

_{Chain attribution is based on the transaction type recorded at signing time. Gas sponsorship figures are drawn from paymaster transaction records. Vertical classifications were assigned manually based on each company's primary product category. Companies operating across multiple chains are counted toward each chain they use, so adoption percentages within a vertical can sum to more than 100%.}

_{Activity from test organizations and sandbox accounts is excluded. Customer names are not disclosed. Data reflects observed usage patterns on Turnkey's platform and does not necessarily represent broader market trends.}

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