On-chain data review of Ethereum's 2020

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特邀专栏作者

2021-01-17 12:19 (UTC+8)

This article is about 5236 words, reading the full article takes about 8 minutes

As Ethereum takes off in 2021, we will see these trends expand further.

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As Ethereum takes off in 2021, we will see these trends expand further.

Editor's Note: This article comes fromEthereum enthusiasts (ID: ethfans)Editor's Note: This article comes from

base layer

base layer
DeFi
Eth2 & L2
BTC on Ethereum
NFT

base layer

price

BTC on Ethereum

price

For many people, this is the most important metric! 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 is 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 52% of its all-time high ($1448).

- Click here to view the animation -

Note: Although it is generally believed that cryptocurrencies are independent market assets (non-correlated assets), 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, while gold (living up to the name of independent market assets) remained sideways.

transfer

- Usually, 24% and 15% yields are already high -

transfer

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- Click here to view more charts -

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

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- Could it be because the number of "farmers" has decreased? -
Looking at the 20 most transferred ERC 20 tokens, we can find:
In general, stable coins accounted for more than 35%. 4 of these stablecoins entered the top 6 (USDT, USDC, DAI, and PAX)

address

One tier below stablecoins in terms of usage are DEX tokens. 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.

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- Source: Etherscan.io -

The number of active addresses generally shows an upward trend in 2020 as the price of ETH increases. 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.

The number of active addresses also saw a similar drop in the number of transfers graph between August and September.

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

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

contract

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contract

During the first half of 2020, the number of newly validated contracts on Etherscan 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 as the ETH price (and gas price) rose at the end of the year.

DeFi

Total Locked Value (TVL)

- Source: Etherscan.io -

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

market value

- Source: DeFiPulse.com -

The top 100 DeFi tokens also rose accordingly, with their market capitalization increasing 11x 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 the ETH market value, and then gradually declined as the price of ETH soared.

Decentralized Exchange (DEX)

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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.

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- Huge increments are messing up my Y axis -

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

stable currency

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stable currency

Liquidity mining

As mentioned above, stablecoin transfers accounted for 35% of the total 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.

ETH2 & L2

Compared with 2019's 170 billion US dollars, 1.2 trillion US dollars increased by 6 times.

Liquidity mining

In early 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.

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

Last month, we wrote an article on Eth2 staking, mentioning that Eth2 barely met its staking goal by the deadline. Since then, more and more collateral has poured into Eth2. On December 1, 2020, the number of ETH pledged on Eth2 reached 905,000, accounting for 0.76% of the total ETH supply, or about $554 million. As of January 1, 2021, the pledged amount has increased to 2.17 million ETH, accounting for 1.9% of the total ETH supply, which is approximately $1.6 billion. This number is expected to grow further in the coming months.

Eth2 staker analysis

One of the main goals of Eth2 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 Eth2 staking, remember that the community needs more individual validators!

- Click here for more details -

After the launch of the Eth2 beacon chain, the number of validators quickly increased from 27,500 to 67,000 within a month, which is 4 times the original minimum staker target (16,284)!

Eth2 participation rate

- Source: BeaconScan.com -

Eth2 participation rate

How many of these validators are actually involved in creating attestations? The Medalla testnet once faced a “nothing at stake” problem due to low participation rates. Community members insist that the mainnet launch will not face the same problems. So far, they appear to be right. Since the launch of the token chain, the participation rate has reached more than 96%.

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Note: You can check out other charts tracking Eth2 at beaconscan.com/statistics!

L2 pledge status

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Nonetheless, 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.

BTC on Ethereum

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BTC on Ethereum

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.

Trading volume

- Source: BTC on Ethereum -

analyze

Trading volume

Just as Uniswap is the king of DEXs, wBTC is also the king of ERC 20 tokenized BTC. In 2020, the vast majority of BTC transactions on Ethereum are 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.

analyze

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 BTCs, reaching around 20,000. imBTC is in second place at around 2800.

In the fourth quarter of 2020, tokenized BTC liquidity mining took off. oBTC, vBTC, and 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.

The NFT space 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 main chain.

71% of this 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%) and 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, it's 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.

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- A rendering of Beeple's 2020 entry on Somnium Space VR -
other trends
There are plenty of other trends worth mentioning in 2020:
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 quadratic funding on Gitcoin. There are also Ethereum Foundation, clr.fund and Open Grants.
Private Transactions / Miner Extractable Value (MEV) Transactions: Following the release of the Ethereum Dark Forest on frontrunning transactions, this topic has been discussed more broadly. Many projects have begun to provide private transaction services on the main network, such as SparkPool, 1inch, and Flashbots.
Algorithmic stablecoins: Algorithmic stablecoins have undergone several iterations in 2020 due to the additional liquidity and capital brought in by liquidity mining. For example, YAM Finance's rebasing mechanism, Mithril Cash's seigniorage share, and Reflexer Labs' reflex bond.

predict

Virtual conferences: 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 ETHOnline. According to Etherscan records, there are more than 200 such activities.

Adoption: Globally, adoption of Ethereum continues to increase across industries such as PayPal, Visa, SAP, Baseline Protocol, CME, and Reddit. Even Google Trends shows a lot of interest in Ethereum!
predict
A year in review without forecasts would be boring! Check out our predictions now:
EIP1559 and Eth2 Phase 1 will be launched in the third quarter of 2021 (Translator's Note: Unlikely at present)
More than 50 dApps will be migrated to L2 and merged into 3 rollups/chains by the end of the year

The value of the NFT market will increase by 10 times

MEV transactions to exceed $100 million

ETH

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