growthepie

What it is

A curated metric set for Ethereum Mainnet and 26 live layer twos, covering the economics rather than the security: active addresses, transaction count, throughput, what a transaction costs a user, what the chain earns in fees, what it pays Ethereum in rent, the profit between them, stablecoin supply, value secured, and revenue at the application level. Sixteen chain metrics, five data-availability metrics and seven app metrics, each with its own list of supported chains.

Two things make it worth a card rather than a bookmark. The first is that the numbers come out as data: a keyless public API at a documented base URL, a canonical metadata file that tells you which chains support which metric, a rolling 90-day flat export, CSV downloads, and a docs set that reads like it was written for someone integrating rather than someone browsing. The second is the licence — growthepie publishes its data under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 and says in writing that you may use it in commercial products with credit. In a category where the standard terms forbid republishing anything, that is the single most unusual field on this card.

The third thing is the one the marketing does not lead with, and it belongs in the first screen rather than the last: the chains themselves are the paying customers, and what a chain pays determines how deeply and how prominently it appears. That does not make the numbers wrong — the computation is open — but it does mean the shape of the site is partly a sales artefact, and a reader comparing chains should know which is which.

Pricing

Free to read, with no account, and free to query, with no key. The guidance is ten calls a minute and the docs say plainly that access or authentication requirements may change in future.

The revenue comes from listings sold to chains, in four tiers, and the detail matters. The free Ecosystem tier gives a chain realtime metrics only, on the ecosystem page, "in neutral color", and is available to rollups built on the OP Stack, Arbitrum Nitro or the ZKsync Stack that use Ethereum for data availability. Basic is paid and buys full inclusion on the landing page and the fundamentals pages, a dedicated chain overview page, a colour "inspired by your branding", and inclusion in social posts. Advanced is paid and adds contract labelling through the Open Labels Initiative, the blockspace section, the economics dashboard, application metrics and labels API access. Strategic is paid and adds quarterly insight calls, an "ask an analyst" service, two commissioned Quick Bites a year, alerts-as-a-service, "default selection on metrics pages" and a "permanent spot" in the Meet L2s section.

No figure is published for any paid tier. The project started on an Ethereum Foundation grant in February 2023 and describes itself as a public good; this is how the public good is funded.

Read the last two bullets of the Strategic tier again before you use a metrics page as a ranking. Default selection and permanent placement are presentation, not data — but presentation is what most readers actually consume, and it is for sale.

Data & coverage

Coverage is read from the metadata rather than from a claim: the canonical file lists 30 chain entries, of which two are aggregates and one is not in production, leaving Ethereum Mainnet and 26 live L2s — Arbitrum One and Nova, Base, Celo, Fraxtal, Gravity, Ink, Linea, Lisk, Manta Pacific, Mantle, MegaETH, Metis, Mode, OP Mainnet, Plume, Polygon PoS, Robinhood Chain, Ronin, Scroll, Soneium, Starknet, Taiko Alethia, Unichain, World Chain and ZKsync Era. Solana, Bitcoin and the non-Ethereum L1s are out of scope by design.

Depth is per metric, not per chain, and growthepie documents this properly rather than hiding it: every chain carries a supported_metrics list and every metric carries a supported_chains list, and the docs tell you to check both and to exclude any chain whose deployment status is DEV or ARCHIVED because those can serve stale data. Active addresses, for instance, is supported on 27 entries and not on all of them. The flat export is a rolling 90 days; hourly granularity exists only for the metrics flagged for it; every rich endpoint carries its own last_updated_utc.

Where the numbers come from is stated. growthepie says it indexes most of it itself via RPCs and applies "a rigorous, open-source cleaning process to data aggregated from multiple sources", and the metadata file names those sources outright: L2BEAT, DefiLlama, CoinGecko and Dune alongside its own. That is worth knowing twice over — first because it means some series inherit another provider's methodology, and second because the data terms make you responsible for that provider's licence as well as growthepie's whenever a chart or response names one.

The clearest example is the maturity framework, which is defined as data with thresholds you can read: "Robust" requires a billion dollars secured, Stage 2 and no outstanding risks; "Maturing" requires $150 million, Stage 1 and 180 days of age. The Stage input is L2BEAT's. A chain's maturity badge here is therefore partly somebody else's judgement, wired in explicitly rather than absorbed silently — which is the honest version of a dependency, and still a dependency.

Labels are projects and contracts, not wallets. The project registry downloads without a key and carries the identifier, display name, description, GitHub, website and category for each project; contract-level labelling runs on the Open Labels Initiative and is the thing an Advanced-tier chain is buying. There is no address-to-entity attribution product here, and no claim of one.

Integrations

A public REST-shaped JSON API with no authentication: a master metadata file, a fundamentals export, per-metric exports, per-chain overview and metric-detail files, and the project label files. The docs carry copy-paste recipes for curl, Python, JavaScript and pandas, and are published in Markdown with an llms.txt index. CSV downloads and chart exports come off the site itself. No webhooks, no alerting for readers — alerts-as-a-service exists, but it is a Strategic partner benefit rather than a product feature — and no first-party MCP server; the only MCP strings on the docs site belong to the documentation platform.

Limitations

• The chains are the customers. Paid tiers buy a chain deeper indexing, its own overview page, its brand colour, app-level metrics, and at the top tier "default selection on metrics pages" and a permanent placement slot. Presentation is for sale even though the computation is open.
• A free listing has conditions. OP Stack, Arbitrum Nitro or ZKsync Stack, and Ethereum data availability. A chain outside that set is either paying or absent, which is not the same coverage rule as "every L2".
• "Data is only available for chains that work with growthepie" — the docs say so directly. Absence from the dataset is not evidence of absence from the ecosystem.
• App-level data is a paid package. Chain-level is Basic, application-level is Advanced, so the app metrics you can see for one chain may simply not exist for another.
• Ethereum only, and 26 L2s of the far larger number that exist.
• Not every metric covers every chain, and the only reliable answer is the metadata file rather than the chart you are looking at.
• The API is public today and promises nothing. The docs say access or authentication requirements may change, guide you to 10 calls a minute, and ask you to make contact before relying on it for anything production-critical.
• The CC BY licence has an upstream carve-out. Where a chart or response names another provider, that provider's terms apply on top — which for a series sourced from a commercial vendor is a different and stricter licence than the one on the tin.
• No wallet attribution, no alerting, no intraday depth on most metrics. This is a daily comparison set, not a monitoring tool.
• gtp-dna, the methodology repository, carries no licence file at the root of its default branch, so the MIT statement verified here covers the frontend repository rather than every repository the project publishes.

Alternatives

L2BEAT is the companion rather than the competitor, and the pair is the point: L2BEAT asks what secures a chain, what its trust assumptions are and what it costs the chain to post to Ethereum; growthepie asks what the chain earns, what it costs a user, and which applications are driving it. They overlap on value secured and disagree in presentation, and growthepie consumes L2BEAT's stage labels, so treat them as one stack rather than two opinions. Against a commercial metric platform the trade is the usual one inverted: fewer chains and a narrower question, in exchange for a licence that lets you republish the answer and an API that does not ask who you are.