The giant Ethereum continues to grow – Over the past couple of years, the Ethereum network has been home to thriving innovation. In turn, the phenomena of decentralized finance and NFTs have attracted new users. Unfortunately, not all metrics are green.
More than a million additional users per month
Faced with the enthusiasm encountered by the DeFi and NFT ecosystems, thousands of new users rushed to the Ethereum network.
From now on, the network has passed the mark of 70 million addresses holding ETH, according to data compiled by our colleagues at TheBlock. This reflects an increase of 18.36 million over the year 2021. That is a growth rate of approximately 1.53 million addresses created every month.
Remember, however, that the number of addresses only gives a small indication of the real growth in terms of users. Indeed, a user generally has several addresses. Therefore, the network potentially has far fewer than 70 million users.
Thereby, the number of active addresses oscillates around 1%, with a maximum reached at 1.66% last April. An address is considered active if it performs transactions in the usual way.
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Growth slowed by the new multi-chain paradigm
The Ethereum ecosystem has witnessed significant growth throughout 2020. Indeed, at that time, it was almost the only one offering a DeFi ecosystem.
Subsequently, Ethereum was gradually phased out in favor of more affordable chains. As a consequence of the drastic increase in costs and the multiplication of blockchains to smart contracts.
As a result, several metrics took a hit. According to data compiled by Glassnode, the number of whales on the network is decreasing. A local four-year low was recorded on February 11, 2022, with 6,228 addresses holding more than 1,000 ETH, compared to more than 8,000 in July 2018.
At the same time, network usage is stagnating at just over a million daily transactions. An average that has been maintained since the middle of 2020.
The case of Polygon
For comparison, the blockchain Polygon records an average of 3 million transactions daily. Note, however, that many of these transactions are made by bots. Indeed, the transaction costs being lower, it is much less expensive to operate a bot on Polygon than on Ethereum.
Obviously, this data only reports the on-chain activity of the network. Indeed, for several months, part of Ethereum’s activity has been shifted to second-layer solutions such as Optimism or Arbitrum.
However, these can present risks. Thus, a critical flaw was recently discovered by a developer in the code of Optimism. Fortunately, this one could be corrected before being exploited.
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