Bankless: Ethereum 2022 Q1 Data Report and Ecological Highlights

特邀专栏作者

2022-04-29 08:05

This article is about 5685 words, reading the full article takes about 9 minutes

In the first quarter, the revenue of the Ethereum network increased by 46%, and the amount of ETH pledged increased by 111%.

Original author:BanklessAnalystBen Giove

Compilation of the original text: The Way of DeFi

Compilation of the original text: The Way of DeFiThis article was originally inspired by James Wang'sEthereum Announces First Quarter 2021 Results

Ethereum, the world's leading smart contract platform, has announced its financial results for the first quarter ending March 31, 2022.

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Ethereum protocol

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Network revenues increased 46 percent from $1.6 billion to $2.4 billion. This measures the value of transaction fees paid by network users in ETH. $2.48 billion in revenue (87%) was removed from circulating ETH supply through the burn mechanism implemented by EIP-1559, which went live in August 2021.

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In the first quarter, the ETH inflation rate fell from 1.10% to 0.51%, a drop of 54%. This metric tracks the net change in ETH supply. New ETH is issued via block rewards, which are paid to miners as rewards for confirming network transactions, and are burned via the aforementioned EIP-1559.

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The average daily active addresses rose 4 percent from 507,662 to 529,018. This data tracks the average number of addresses interacting with the network each day during the quarter.

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The average transaction fee dropped by 80% from $14.93 to $2.98. This measures the average fee users pay for Ethereum block space to have their transactions confirmed.

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The amount of ETH pledged rose from 5.2 million to 10.9 million, an increase of 111%. This represents the amount of ETH staked on the Beacon Chain before Ethereum transitioned from using Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Roughly 9.2% of the total ETH supply is staked in anticipation of the "merge".

DeFi ecology

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DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL) increased by 82% from $49.1 billion to $89.5 billion. This measures the value of assets deposited into Ethereum-based DeFi protocols such as decentralized exchanges, money markets, and options vaults.

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Total stablecoin supply; Source: The Block

Note: The chart above includes all on-chain stablecoins, not just Ethereum, as data for this metric has to be drawn from numerous sources. However, it still largely represents the growth of Ethereum).

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Spot and perpetual DEX trading volume; source: Token Terminal

Note: The chart above does not include GMX, which is included in the calculation of Perpetuals DEX volume. Data on this can be found atherehere

NFT ecology

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The transaction volume of the NFT market exploded from $606.3 million to $116.4 billion, an increase of 19290%. This tracks the trading volume of the two largest general-purpose NFT marketplaces, OpenSea and LooksRare. 226,176 unique wallets bought or sold NFTs during the quarter.

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The number of unique wallets holding NFTs increased by 306% from 981,315 to 3.98 million. This measures the number of wallet addresses holding ERC-721 tokens, the token standard used to issue NFTs, at a certain point in time.

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Floor prices for BAYC and CryptoPunks; Source: Dune Analytics

Layer 2 ecology

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L2 Total Value Locked increased 964% from $686.9 million to $7.3 billion. This measures the total value locked in Ethereum's L2 scaling solutions such as optimistic rollups, zkrollups, and validiums. As of press time, more than $23 billion in assets, including $4.2 billion in ETH, have been bridged from Ethereum to these L2s and other L1s.

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Optimism has an average monthly active address of 31,100, while Arbitrum has a cumulative unique address of 483,077. This measures the average number of addresses transacting on Optimism (an optimistic rollup) and the total number of unique addresses on Arbitrum (another optimistic rollup) per month during the quarter. Given that both networks were launched in Q3 2021 and limited data is available for both networks, we are unable to make year-over-year comparisons.

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Arbitrum Daily Network Revenue; Source: Cryptofees.info

Arbitrum's network revenue was $9.4 million, while Optimism's network revenue was $5.7 million. This measures the ETH fees that users pay to trade on two optimistic rollups, Arbitrum and Optimism, respectively.

Ecological highlights

There were many exciting developments for Ethereum in Q1, perhaps the most important of which was the continued rise of stablecoins. As mentioned above, the circulating supply of stablecoins on Ethereum grew by more than 188% year-over-year to over $122 billion. In particular, algorithmic stablecoins like FRAX and UST have seen extraordinary growth relative to their competitors. This growth suggests that despite market weakness, capital may not be fleeing the Ethereum economy in large numbers.

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One of the more noteworthy second-order effects of the boom in the stablecoin space is"Curve war"Curve warcontinuous development. This is a battle between mostly stablecoin DAOs to build liquidity on Curve, i.e.The decentralized exchange with the largest TVL in DeFi". In the first quarter, this"Taking center stage, DAOs increased their holdings of CVX, Convex Finance’s native token, with the protocol controlling a majority supply of CRV (Curve’s governance token) at more than 73%.

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CVX held by The DAO; Source: DAOCVX.comRibbon Finance、Balancer、

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Bribe value paid to CVX holders and dollar earnings per CVX; Source: Llama Airforce

Alchemix V2Several exciting agreements were also announced this quarter:
Aave V3, the second iteration of the self-paying lending protocol, including support for a host of new collateralized assets and yield-generating strategies
Syndicate Protocol, the third version of the multi-chain money market, with a new independent lending function

, allowing the creation of on-chain investment clubs

Taking advantage of the explosive growth momentum in the first two quarters, Ethereum's NFT ecosystem experienced several major turbulences in the first quarter.

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LooksRare protocol income; source: Token Terminal

Another big development in Q1 was the establishment of Yuga Labs as an ecosystem force. Driven by the rising value of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), which has become a celebrity favorite and the most valuable NFT profile picture (PFP) collectible by floor value, Yuga has made several major moves to Strengthen its position in the nascent space of the Ethereum economy.

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First, the companybuybuy Apecoin（APE）IP from Larva Labs' NFT series, including Cryptopunks and Meebits. Soon after, Yuga announced the release of

, in which a portion of the token’s supply was distributed to BAYC holders, with some airdrops exceeding six figures.OthersideAPE, currently priced at an all-time high with a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of over $20 billion, will serve as a governance and utility token in the company's various metaverse ecosystem projects, such as the recently teased game

. These developments have established Yuga as a blue-chip brand and Metaverse media powerhouse in the broader NFT ecosystem.

L2 heat unabated

As mentioned earlier, the TVL locked in Ethereum L2 increased by 964% year-over-year to over $7.3 billion by the end of Q1. Taken together, together with other L1 networks, the TVL of this batch of L2 ranks fifth. Arbitrum is the leader in Value Locked in L2 with a TVL of over $2.1 billion.

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Arbitrum TVL: Source: DeFi Llama

In addition to perpetual contracts, another category of derivatives, options, has begun to see meaningful traction on L2, two decentralized options exchanges, Dopex and Lyra, which are launched on Optimism and Arbitrum, respectively. Together, the two apps currently hold over $119 million in deposits, and each ranks among the top five most-used apps in their network.

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These derivative protocols, along with other L2 native projects such asTracer DAO、Jones DAO andVesta Financeand

, seem poised to see further growth through several favorable factors, such as the increased desire of DeFi-native investors to hedge and find alternative sources of income amid dangerous market conditions, and the imminent launch of their respective rollup tokens (more on that below) More introductions).

Outlook

While the market faces a maelstrom of macro headwinds, Ethereum has several catalysts on the horizon that seem likely to strengthen its fundamentals, competitive positioning, and token economics.

The most important is the upcoming PoW to PoS merger, and this switch will bring many major changes. Ethereum is a network, and ETH is an asset. For the former, the merger can reduce the energy consumption of the blockchain by an order of magnitude, because the energy consumption of PoS is much lower than that of PoW. This helps reduce Ethereum’s environmental impact and increases its appeal among traditional institutional investors who are ESG (environmental, social and governance) conscious when making allocation decisions.

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Forecasting combined ETH issuance; source: Ultrasound.money

The merger will also have a significant impact on ETH's supply plan and value proposition. While EIP-1559 caused its inflation rate to drop significantly, transitioning to PoS seems likely to lead to a deflationary Ethereum. According to the current pledged amount of ETH and the Gas consumption since the activation of EIP-1559, it is expected that ETH will experience deflation, and the estimated issuance is -2.1%.While the staked supply is currently non-transferable, but will gradually unlock and become liquid after the merger, this massive supply shock could have a long-term Bitcoin halving-type effect as it dramatically reduces Selling pressure on ETH. This merger may also establish the pledge rate of ETH, which is expected to reach a Web3 risk-free rate of up to 10%+ after the merger, further increasing Ethereum as a cash flow productive asset andInternet Native Bonds

Appeal.

In addition to changing the ESG profile of Ethereum and ETH as an asset, the merger will help pave the way for future scalability upgrades such as sharding and Danksharding. This will allow Ethereum to better serve the insatiable need to transact in its economy.

Launch of Rollup Token"Another major catalyst for Ethereum's growth is the launch of the L2 token. While L2 has managed to gain meaningful traction without a native token or network-wide incentive scheme, the launch of governance tokens for these networks appears poised to fuel its growth and bring about the long-awaited"。

The first dominoes in this regard fell this week, on April 26th, when Optimism announced the launch of $OP, which will be used for network governance and likely to be used to incentivize investors within its nascent but thriving DeFi ecosystem. Activity.

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OP Token Allocation; Source: Optimism Docs

As with the explosive growth of ecosystems that utilize incentive programs such as Avalanche, Polygon, and Fantom, this strategy has been very effective in channeling usage, liquidity, and developer activity. If this were implemented, Optimism would experience a similar level of growth, which is plausible.

The launch of these rollup tokens and incentive programs should be a major catalyst, helping Ethereum regain market share from other Layer-1 networks (Ethereum’s share of total DeFi TVL has dropped from 80% to 51%), And improve the accessibility for everyday users to participate in the decentralized economy.