TRON Hauls the Volume, BNB Chain Does the Laps: NOWPayments Spills the Receipts 🧾

NOWPayments on September 21st, 2026, released six months of cross-chain payout data benchmarking TRON, BNB Smart Chain, Solana, Bitcoin, and Ethereum across speed, volume, and transaction share. The Tallinn-based payments processor published the figures to give enterprises an empirical basis for selecting blockchain rails, with TRON, BNB Smart Chain, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana together accounting for 94.04% of payout volume and 77.84% of payout transactions during the period.

TRON carried the largest share of monetary volume at 43.69%, more than double BNB Smart Chain's 21.75%, despite handling only 15.73% of transactions. By those shares, the average TRON payout was roughly 6.2 times larger than the average BNB Smart Chain payout, a pattern the dataset attributes to higher-value, lower-frequency transfers on TRON and higher-frequency, lower-value payouts on BNB Smart Chain. Ethereum ranked third by volume at 18.84% and 7.42% of transactions, Bitcoin held 6.68% of volume and 2.60% of transactions, and Solana represented 3.08% of volume and 3.86% of transactions. BNB Smart Chain dominated individual transfer counts at 48.23% of all payout transactions in the dataset.

Speed rankings diverged from volume leadership. Solana posted the fastest average payout time at 1 minute and 45 seconds, followed by Bitcoin at 2:53, TRON at 3:08, BNB Smart Chain at 3:13, and Ethereum at 5:56. The gap between the fastest and slowest networks measured 4 minutes and 11 seconds, and TRON and BNB Smart Chain were separated by only five seconds. Every network in the comparison averaged under six minutes, yet the fastest rail was not the most heavily used, a divergence NOWPayments frames as evidence that crypto infrastructure should be assessed across the full movement of funds rather than a single headline metric.

Kate Lifshits, Commercial Director at NOWPayments, has applied the same data-first methodology in her Cryptopolitan column "Crypto That Works for Business," with the inaugural entry "The 22% Sales Boost Hiding in Your Crypto Checkout" examining checkout conversion effects. The payout benchmark follows that commercial framing, positioning the dataset as a starting point for matching networks to specific payout flows rather than a universal recommendation.