How is the Ethereum network doing these days? The bear is still ongoing with no significant price actions. The projects build on Ethereum like defi and NFTs app are all down a lot. How is this impacting the network?
Since the PoS update the inflation was reduced for 90%, from 4.3% to 0.43%. Additionally, part of the ETH for transactions is burned, that pushed Ethereum into the deflationary territory. Meanwhile, the share of staked ETH kept on growing drying up the liquid ETH supply.
Let’s take a look.
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Here we e will be looking at:
- Overall Supply
- Number Of Wallets
- Active Wallets
- Transactions
- Fees
- Staked ETH
- Contracts
The data presented here is mostly gathered from the etherscan charts and Dune Analytics.
Supply
The overall supply now looks like this:
A steady increase in the supply from just above 70M in 2015 to 120M where we are now.
We can see that in the last period after the merge the supply has been almost stagnant, and even drop a little.
Ethereum Supply After the Merge
The chart for the new ETH issued after the merge looks like this.
Overall, ETH has been deflationary in the period. But for how much? In absolute numbers it’s around -275k ETH, while in relative number it is -0.23%.
We can see that while small, 0.23% is a visible number and the ETH supply tends to be deflationary now. Depending on the market and the overall transactions on the network this number can go up or down.
We can notice that in the last months, the ETH supply has increased a bit, due to the low network activity and no burns.
The table for the yearly inflation looks like this.
From more than 10% down to negative -0.23% in 2023. Note that 2023 is not over yet, but it will most likely end negative, and it will be the first year for Ethereum with negative inflation.
Number of Wallets
Now for the general network numbers.
Here is the chart for the total number of Ethereum wallets created.
Ethereum now has more than 246M wallets! The numbers of wallets keeps growing at a steady pace.
When we look at the number of new daily wallets created we get this chart.
This is starting from 2022.
A steady number of new wallets created and then a spike after October 2022. From 70k up to 230k per day. After December 2022 the numbers went down again and up again in May 2023 to 200k. In the last period we have around 100k new wallets per day.
Active Wallets
How many of them are being used?
Here is the chart.
We can see that there was an overall uptrend up until 2021, reaching around 700k active wallets. Since then, there has been a downtrend and we are now around 400k active daily wallets, with some occasional spikes up to 1M.
Transactions
How about the number of transactions? Is the Ethereum network now more active after the merge? Here is the chart.
There was a spike in the transactions back in the bull market of 2017, up to 1.4M, then a drop to around 500k per day. In the previous bull market in 2021 the ATH was somewhere around 1.8M transactions per day, a steady drop since then and we are now somewhere around 1M transactions per day on the Ethereum network.
Fees
There was misunderstandings that the merge will make the fees on Ethereum smaller. But this is not the case. The merge is a consensus upgrade, not a scalability upgrade. That should come later with Sharding. Here is the chart for the fees in 2022 - 2023.
We can see that there was a small spike in the fees in May 2023, after a period of a downtrend dating back from 2022. The fees reached $25 for a short period of time and are now back at around $4.
Staking Ethereum
Staking a big topic in the Ethereum network since the PoS upgrade. Here in short will just check the share of ETH staked from the overall supply. Here is the pie.
A 23% staked ETH from all the supply. The trend for the staked ETH has been constantly up in the last period. For a token of this size and market cap this is quite a big share.
Number of Contracts
Here is the chart for the number of smart contracts deployed daily.
Interesting this number is up a lot in the last years compared to the previous period. On average there are around 800 contracts daily, up from the 200 back in 2021.
In summary the most noticeable change in the last period is that after a period of constant deflationary pressure on the supply, it has increased, but slowly. The number of new addresses remains constant, while the number of transactions and active accounts has dropped. The fees are also down.
The next steps for ETH are in terms of scaling. It will be interesting to see how this will be implemented and how will the network act in a next bull cycle.
All the best
@dalz