On-chain data review of Ethereum's 2020

Original title: "Viewpoint | On-Chain Data Review of Ethereum's 2020"

Original text Author: Harith Kamarul

Original compilation: Ethereum enthusiasts

< /p>

2020 is a challenging year for the whole world. At the same time, it is also a positive year for Ethereum - the entire ecology remains thriving in all aspects, and the overall market value has increased significantly. In this article, we will analyze several major trends on the Ethereum blockchain, including:

• Basic layer
• DeFi
  < /li>
• Eth3 & L2
• BTC on Ethereum
• NFT
  
  

Basic Layer

Price

For many people, this is the most important indicator! The price of ETH recovered rapidly in 2020. By the end of 2020, the price of ETH has risen from $129 to $753, an increase of 4.8 times. At the time of writing, Ethereum is already hitting new highs in 2021! Here’s a popular benchmark: In January 2020, the cost of becoming an Ethereum 2.0 validator (32 ETH) was $4128. As of the end of December 2020, that cost was $24,064.

Despite the surge, the price of ETH at the end of 2020 is still only its highest historical record (1448 52% of that in U.S. dollars).

< /p>

ETH outperformed major assets like BTC, gold and the S&P 500. At the end of 2020, ETH has gained 483%, not only beating BTC (+303%), but also leaving gold (+24%) and the S&P 500 index (+15%) in the dust.

Note: Although it is generally believed that cryptocurrency is an independent market asset (non-correlated asset) , but the slump of the above four assets in March was highly correlated. At the end of 2020, ETH and BTC moved higher along with the S&P 500 index, while gold (living up to the name of independent market assets) remained sideways.

- Normally, 24% and 15% yields are already very high-

Transfer

In 2020, the number of transfers has increased sharply, from a record high of 250 million (2018) to 345 million, an increase of 38%. ERC 20 tokens also accounted for 54% of transfers, up from 35% previously. The Ethereum economy has grown in breadth and depth!

Focusing on 2020, we see an upward trend almost every month. The only exception was a drop in September, during the period of the “yield farming” boom.

< blockquote style="text-align: center;">- Could it be because the number of "farmers" has decreased? -

By observing the 20 most transferred ERC 20 tokens, we can find that:< /section>

• USDT  ranks first again with a share of 28%
• In general, stable coins account for 35% % above. 4 of them entered the top 6 (USDT, USDC, DAI, and PAX)
• 6 of the top 20 tokens have no update information. These 6 tokens account for a total of 2.8%
• DEX tokens are one level lower than stablecoins in terms of usage. There are 4 DEX tokens (UNI, BNT, KNC, ZRX) in the top 20, accounting for a total of 1.3%.
• 
  

Address

New addresses increased 56% from 84 million in 2019 to 131 million in 2020.

- Source: Etherscan.io -

The number of active addresses will generally show an upward trend in 2020 as the price of ETH rises. One exception is the crash in March, when many people were selling financial assets and another group took the opportunity to buy ETH at a low price.

August-September, the number of active addresses also saw a similar decline as the number of transfers chart .

gas price

In 2020, Ethereum will continue to experience gas price peaks due to high usage.

In June 2020, as a large number of users (including myself) rushed to receive the UNI airdrop, the average daily gas price reached 710 Gwei peak. In USD terms, however, transaction fees were higher in September as the price of ETH doubled. At the time, the transaction fee for a standard ETH transfer (up to 21,000 gas) was $4.80.

As the liquidity mining boom gradually recedes at the end of 2020, the gas price has been hovering at 100 Gwei about. At the same time, Ethereum’s transaction fees are also climbing due to the rising price of ETH. In early 2021, as the price of ETH surged, transaction fees hit record highs.

- Click here to view diagram-

Contract

2020 A large number of newly created contracts emerged in the year. Their total increased by 55% to 10.7 million from 6.9 million in 2019.

< /p>

During the first half of 2020, the number of newly validated contracts on Etherscan has plateaued. In the third quarter, with the development of DeFi and liquidity mining, the number of new contracts also increased significantly, peaked in November, and then decreased with the increase of ETH price (and gas price) at the end of the year.

- Source: Etherscan.io -

DeFi

Total Locked Value (TVL)

2020 is a year of rapid progress for DeFi. The total value locked in these dApps increased 24x from $600 million at the beginning of 2020 to $15 billion at the end of 2020.

- Source: DeFiPulse.com -

Market Cap

Top 100 DeFi tokens rallied accordingly, with their market capitalization increasing 11-fold from $1.6 billion to $19.8 billion. During the liquidity mining boom, the total market value of DeFi tokens reached as high as 40% of ETH’s market value, and then gradually declined as ETH prices soared.

- DeFi market capitalization (source: CoinGecko's DeFi token top 100 list) -

Decentralized Exchange (DEX)

In our 2019 Year in Review and DEX article published last year, we highlighted the development of the overall DEX market and analyzed the development of Uniswap separately. We didn't expect these two to make such a huge development in 2020.

In December 2019, DEXs had a total transaction volume of $166 million. As of December 2020, its total transaction volume reached $19.2 billion, a 115-fold increase.

- Huge increments are messing up my Y axis-

< section>Our article in February showed how three DEXs, Uniswap, IDEX and Kyber, accounted for more than 80% of the total transaction volume. In the past 10 months, the proportion of DEX's transaction volume has changed dramatically. Although Uniswap still ranks first, the rankings of the other two DEXs have fallen severely. In the top 10 list, Sushiswap, Curve, and Mooniswap are all rookies born in 2020!

< span>- Source: Dune Analytics' DEX Metrics Panel -

A look at the DEX market and The explosive growth of Uniswap. At the beginning, the monthly transaction volume of the entire DEX market was only 166 million US dollars. Now it has only been 8 months, and the daily transaction volume of Uniswap has surpassed Coinbase.

- 2020 taught us what it means to be "crazy" -

< br>

Stable Coin

< br>

As mentioned above, the number of transfers of stablecoins accounts for 35% of the total number of transfers on Ethereum. Its turnover is even more staggering. The transaction volume of USDT alone on the Ethereum blockchain exceeds that of ETH. In 2020, the total transaction volume of stablecoins reached more than 1.2 trillion US dollars.

< br>

Compared to 170 billion US dollars in 2019, 1.2 trillion US dollars has increased by 6 times.

Liquidity mining

At the beginning of August, Etherscan provided a list of liquidity mining projects to meet user needs. To date, almost 500 tokens have been listed. The number of transfers of these tokens peaked in September. However, also in September, both the overall number of transfers and the number of active addresses declined. It can be inferred from this that only a small number of Ethereum users continue to participate in liquidity mining.

ETh3 & L2

In 2020, the ultra-high gas fee makes Ethereum users really feel that improving scalability is imminent. While there is no final solution yet, we do see some scalability projects bearing fruit.

Participate in Eth3 staking

< p>

Last month, we wrote an article about Eth3 staking, mentioning that Eth3 barely reached its staking goal before the deadline. Since then, more and more collateral has poured into Eth3. On December 1, 2020, ETH pledged on Eth3 has reached 905,000, accounting for 0.76% of the total ETH supply, which is about 554 million US dollars. As of January 1, 2021, stakes have grown to 2.17 million ETH, or 1.9% of total ETH supply, or roughly $1.6 billion. This number is expected to grow further in the coming months.

Eth3 staker analysis

One of the main goals of Eth3 is to ensure decentralization of its validators. What is the current situation? Based on the internal tokenization of addresses, we estimate that 51% of the total ETH stake is currently controlled by 20 entities. This was up 9% compared to the previous month. We can use this ratio to monitor the subsequent development. If you want to participate in Eth3 staking, remember that the community needs more individual validators!

- Click here for more details -

Eth3 Validator

< section>After the launch of the Eth3 beacon chain, the number of validators rapidly increased from 27,500 to 67,000 within a month, which is 4 times the original minimum staker target (16,284)!

- Source: BeaconScan.com -< /blockquote>

Eth3 Participation Rate

How many of these validators actually participated in creating attestations? “Nothing at stake” issue. Community members insist that the mainnet launch will not face the same issues. So far, they are right. Since the launch of the token chain, the participation rate has reached more than 96%.

- Source: BeaconScan.com -

Note: You can find statistics at beaconscan.com/statistics Check out other charts tracking Eth3 here!

L2 staking< /span>

Layer 2 scalability solutions are mostly in beta in 2020. Some projects have released beta versions , and some projects have gone through several iterations. Among the projects that have been launched, Loopring and Tornado Cash have the largest amount of pledge in the system.

- the closer to the end of 2020 , the richer the color -

Still, L2 is still in early development. In 2021, fierce competition will break out in this field. We will see blockchain, rollups, dApps and users co-evolving.

- Vitalik just posted a related article-

< span>BTC on Ethereum

total amount of tokens

Another trend in 2020 is the tokenization of BTC on the Ethereum blockchain. When we analyzed this topic in our June 1st article, we expected a wave of BTC tokenization, with 5,000 BTC being tokenized afterward. Over the past 6 months, this number has grown 27 times to 140,000 BTC.

- Source: BTC on Ethereum -

< /p>

Volume

As Uniswap is the king of DEX, wBTC is also the king of ERC 20 tokenized BTC. In 2020, the vast majority of BTC transactions on Ethereum were done through wBTC, with renBTC lagging behind by a large margin. In September, the transaction volume of BTC on Ethereum reached a peak of 14 million BTC.

Analysis

< section>As of December 31, 2020, wBTC accounted for 81% of all ERC 20 tokenized BTC. Even in terms of the number of token holders, wBTC is far ahead of other ERC 20 tokenized BTC, as high as 20,000 or so. imBTC is in second place at around 2800.

In the fourth quarter of 2020, tokenized BTC liquidity mining is on the rise. oBTC, vBTC, anyBTC require users to lock BTC on the Bitcoin blockchain, and then earn liquidity mining income. So far, these three tokens are worth only $25 million, accounting for less than 1% of all tokenized BTC. However, it should be interesting to see how such experimental projects will increase the volume of BTC transactions on Ethereum.

NFT (Non-Fungible Token)

NFT The field has also made significant progress in 2020. While some projects have moved to Layer 2 or other blockchains, there have been close to 5 million ERC 721 token transactions on the Ethereum mainchain.

71% of the trading volume came from the top 10 ERC 721 tokens. These tokens are mainly composed of game tokens (Cryptokitties, Gods Unchained, Axie Infinity, Sorare, and Dozer account for about 42%), domain names (ENS and Unstoppable Domains account for about 19%). Collectibles and liquidity mining rank near the top ten.

While digital artwork Didn't make the list, but was a big hit this year. Beeple, for example, raised $3.5 million for his NFT artwork at a weekend auction. There are also some projects that attract liquidity for NFT through DeFi, such as Rarible introducing liquidity mining and launching the governance token RARI.

- Somnium Space VR  Beeple's presentation effect of 2020 works-

Other trends

2020 has a lot to see Mentioned trends:

• Governance/DAO: Probably not what many expected. With liquidity mining of governance tokens playing a major role in this DeFi bull market, DAOs and governance are back in vogue. Maker, Yearn, Compound are good examples.
• Grants: Fundraising for public goods on Ethereum has also made huge strides, thanks in large part to Gitcoin’s secondary party financing. There are also Ethereum Foundation, clr.fund and Open Grants.
• Private Transactions / Miner Extractable Value (MEV) Transactions: Following the release of Ethereum Dark Forest about frontrunning transactions, this The topic led to a wider discussion. Many projects have begun to provide private transaction services on the main network, such as SparkPool, 1inch, and Flashbots.
• Prediction markets: This type of dApp has seen a lot of new users, especially in the run-up to the US presidential election. The prediction market must obtain resolutions through on-chain voting. For example, Catnip and Omen.
• Algorithmic stablecoins: Algorithmic stablecoins have experienced several times in 2020 as liquidity mining brings in additional liquidity and capital iterate. For example, YAM Finance’s rebasing mechanism, Mithril Cash’s seigniorage share, and Reflexer Labs’ reflex bond.
• Virtual conference: Affected by the new crown epidemic, the community has changed the original offline conferences and gatherings into a series of virtual events, such as ETHGlobal’s Hack Money and ETH Online. According to Etherscan records, there are more than 200 such activities.
• Adoption: Globally, the adoption rate of Ethereum continues to increase in various industries, such as PayPal, Visa, SAP, Baseline Protocol, CME and Reddit. Even Google Trends is showing a lot of interest in Ethereum!
  
  

Forecast

No year in review without a forecast! Check out our predictions now:

• EIP1559 and Eth3 Phase 1 will start in the third quarter of 2021
• More than 50 dApps will be migrated to L2 and merged into 3 rollup/chains at the end of the year
• < section>The value of the NFT market will increase by 10 times
• MEV transactions will exceed 100 million US dollars
  < /li>
• Liquidity mining algorithm stablecoins will turn from prosperity to decline in the first quarter of 2021

< /p>

2020 is like a fleeting moment, fleeting! As Ethereum takes off in 2021, we will see these trends expand further.

Original link

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia