Etherscan: Ethereum 2020 Data Recap

While 2020 has been a challenging year for all, it has been a year of positive development for Ethereum. In this post, let’s chat about some of the trends we’re seeing on Ethereum, including:

price

price

For many people, price is the most important indicator. ETH has been rising throughout 2020, rising from $129 to $753 at the end of the year, a 4.8-fold increase. At the time of writing this article, ETH has broken its all-time high in 2021!

ETH has outperformed assets like BTC, gold, and the SP 500 over the past year. Its return of +483% at the end of 2020 surpassed BTCs +303%, while golds +24% and SPs +15% returns were dwarfed.

transfer

transfer

In 2020, the number of transfers on Ethereum has skyrocketed, from an all-time high of 250 million in 2018 to 345 million, an increase of 38%. At that time, ERC20 token transfers accounted for only 35% of the total volume, but now they account for 54%. Ethereum is powering a deeper and wider economy!

The monthly transfer data in 2020 has always been on the rise, with the only exception being September when liquidity mining is in full swing.

Could it be that there are fewer liquidity providers?

ERC20 token data of the top 20 transfer rankings:

address

The number of new addresses increased from 84 million in 2019 to 131 million in 2020, a 56% increase.

The number of active addresses is on the rise in 2020, but the correlation with ETH price is not strong. The crash in March was an exception, when many people were fleeing financial assets, while others took advantage of ETHs sharp drop to buy the bottom.

Active addresses also dropped in August and September

gas price

In 2020, due to the high demand for transfers on the Ethereum network, the total transfer fees generated by it will always rank first among all encrypted assets.

smart contract

smart contract

In 2020, developers created a total of 10.7 million smart contracts, a 55% increase from 6.9 million in 2019.

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DeFi

Total Locked Value (TVL)

market value

market value

Decentralized Exchange (DEX)

Decentralized Exchange (DEX)

In December 2019, DEX transactions totaled $166 million. In December 2020, the total transaction volume of DEX reached 19.2 billion US dollars, an increase of 115 times!

In our article in February last year, we wrote that three DEXs in the market: Uniswap, IDEX and Kyber accounted for more than 80% of the total trading volume. Ten months have passed, and the DEX market has undergone tremendous changes. While Uniswap remains at the top of the list, the other two have fallen. Among the Top10 DEXs, Sushiswap, Curve, and Mooniswap do not exist before 2020!

Most of the fourth place 0x transaction volume comes from Tokenlon

stable currency

stable currency

Liquidity mining

Liquidity mining

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Eth2 and Layer2

In 2020, the gas fee on Ethereum soared, making users truly feel the importance of scaling. While the method of scaling has not been finalized, we have indeed seen some early results of scaling.

Eth2 staking

As of January 1, 2021, the number of pledged ETH has reached 2.17 million, worth $1.6 billion, accounting for 1.9% of the total supply of ETH. This number is expected to rise further in the coming months.

Detailed explanation of Eth2

One of the main goals of Eth2 is to ensure more decentralization of validators. So hows it doing so far? Based on the internal labels of addresses, we estimate that 51% of staked ETH is currently controlled by 20 entities, a 9% increase from last months concentration. This data is of great reference value for future monitoring. For those looking to stake on Eth2, remember the community needs more individual validators!

Eth2 Validator

After the launch of the Eth2 beacon chain, the number of validators rapidly increased from the initial 27,500 to 67,000 within a month, which is almost four times the minimum requirement (16,284) for the initial launch of the beacon chain!

Eth2 participation rate

How many of these validators are actually validating? Participation in Eth2 is low due to the fact that ETH on the testnet Medalla is worthless. Community members firmly believe that the mainnet will not face the same difficulties. As it turns out, they were right, with over 96% participation since the token chain went live on mainnet.

Layer2 Deposit

Throughout 2020, Layer 2 is mostly in beta. Some online projects are also in the form of beta versions, while unlaunched projects have gone through multiple iterations. Among the projects that have been launched, the ETH deposited into Loopring and Tornada Cash is the most.

However, for Layer2, it is too early to draw conclusions. Competition will become more intense in 2021, and we look forward to seeing the development of Chain, Rollup, and DApp in the coming year.

secondary titleThe Incomplete Guide to Rollup。

Bitcoin on Ethereum

Total number of tokens

transaction amount

transaction amount

Just like Uniswap is always the king of DEXs, wBTC is still the king of BTC tokens on Ethereum. Throughout 2020, the vast majority of BTC transactions on Ethereum were done through wBTC, with renBTC lagging behind quite a bit. Tokenized BTC volume peaked in September at 1.4 million.

Detailed explanation

As of December 31, 2020, wBTC accounted for 81% of all tokenized BTC. In terms of token holders, wBTC ranks first with 20,000 holders, and imBTC is the second highest with about 2,800 holders.

Non-Fungible Token (NFT)

Non-Fungible Token (NFT)

NFT tokens have also made great progress in 2020. While some projects have moved to Layer2 or other blockchains, there are still close to 5 million ERC721 transfers on Ethereum.

71% of this was done by the top 10 tokens, including gaming tokens (Cryptokitties, Gods Unchained, Axie Infinity, Sorare Dozer ~42%) and domain names (ENS Unstoppable Domains ~19%).

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new year forecast

An annual wrap-up wouldnt be fun without some New Years predictions as an Easter egg!

2020 flies by so fast! With Ethereum kicking off 2021 with a bang, we expect all of these upward trends to continue going forward.

What are your predictions for 2021? Please tell us~