The world is believable when there are more facts in your mind than opinions.
There are a lot of retrospective series in 2020. There are 26 articles to be read in my list. It is clear if you listen to it. The meaning of reading a single article is limited, but when viewed together, even if you don’t take notes of any word, it is very useful. Valuable, it is more time-efficient than usual to read opinion articles, because each article is a series of facts that the next-line witnesses of this topic find the most meaningful. Reading one by one is too boring, I will sort it out in the future and then share it.
This article is from Etherscan. The final prediction does not constitute a logical relationship with the previous statistics, so just look at the review. After all, as a blockchain browser, the statistics of etherscan are still credible.
There have been some major changes in the world of Ethereum in 2020:
- The price of ETH increases 4.8 times in 2020
- On-chain transfers increased by 58%, new addresses increased by 56%, and the number of smart contracts increased by 55%
- DeFi TVL increased by 24 times from 600 million US dollars to 15 billion US dollars, and the market value of the top 100 DeFi tokens increased from 1.6 billion US dollars to 19.8 billion US dollars.
- Eth2.0 validators reached 67,000, which is 4 times the minimum number of validators (16,284) of the initial target
- BTC on Ethereum increased 27 times from 5000 to 140,000 in 6 months
- 2021 predictions worth thinking about:
- By the end of the year, more than 50 dApps will be migrated to L2
2020 will be a challenging year for the entire world. At the same time, it turns out that it has had a relatively positive impact on Ethereum-the ecosystem of Ethereum has not weakened in many ways, and it has taken a big step toward our market value. In this article, we will focus on some trends on the Ethereum blockchain, including:
- Grassroots
- DeFi
- Eth2 and L2
- BTC on Ethereum
- NFT
Grassroots
price
For many people, this is the most important metric! The price of ETH has increased 4.8 times in 2020, from $129 to $753. At the time of writing this article, it has reached new heights in 2021! Using a popular benchmark, an Eth2 validator (32 ETH) in January will cost $4128. By the end of December last year, this figure had soared to 24,064 US dollars.
Despite the rebound, the price of ETH at the end of the year was still only 52% of its historical high of $1,448.
ETH outperformed major assets such as BTC, gold and the S&P 500 index. As of the end of this year, ETH's gain was +483%, surpassing BTC's +303%, dwarfing the +24% and +15% returns of gold and S&P.
Side note: Although it is widely believed that cryptocurrency is an unrelated asset, the sharp drop in March is highly correlated with all four assets. By the end of the year, both ETH and BTC have risen with S&P, while gold (which maintains its uncorrelated reputation) remains sideways.
24% and 15% are generally considered good returns!
Transfer
In 2020, the number of transfers has increased significantly, increasing by 38% from 250 million (2018) to 345 million. ERC20 tokens only accounted for 35% of transfers at the time, but now account for 54% of all transfers. Ethereum is driving a deeper and broader economy!
By 2020, we see monthly data also show an upward trend. A strange exception is the fall in production in the middle of the "traffic mining" season in September.
Could it be that the actual number of "farmers" has fallen?
Looking at the 20 most transferred ERC20 tokens, we see:
- USDT topped the list again, with 28% of transfers made using it
- The overall proportion of stablecoins exceeds 35%, including 4 of the top 6 tokens (USDT, USDC, DAI, PAX)
- 6 tokens without updated information entered the top 20, totaling 2.8%
- DEX tokens are ranked below stablecoins, 4 tokens in the top 20, accounting for 1.3% (UNI, BNT, KNC, ZRX)
address
The number of new addresses increased from 84 million in 2019 to 131 million in 2020, an increase of 56%.
Source: Etherscan.io
Active addresses are on the rise in 2020, roughly tracking ETH prices. One exception was the sharp decline in March, when many people fleeing financial assets as a whole, while others were buying the ETH dip.
From August to September, it suffered a decline similar to the monthly shift chart above.
Handling fee
In 2020, due to the high usage rate of Ethereum, its total cost in the crypto field has been the highest.
As users (including myself) rushed to apply for our UNI airdrop, the daily handling fee in June soared to 710 Gwei ATH. However, in dollar terms, the exchange rate eclipsed in September as the price of Ethereum doubled. At that time, the standard (21,000 handling fee limit) ETH transfer fee was $4.80.
As the mining season slowed to the end of the year, the handling fee has been hovering around 100 Gwei. At the same time, in U.S. dollars, due to the increase in the price of ETH, it has also been slowly rising. Since the beginning of 2021, as the price of Ethereum has skyrocketed, USD fees have once again broken the new ATH.
contract
A large number of contracts were generated in 2020. From 6.9 million in 2019 to 10.7 million, an increase of 55%.
In the first half of 2020, Etherscan's new certification contract remains stable. In the third quarter, with the growth of DeFi and liquidity mining, it grew significantly. It peaked in November and fell at the end of the year as the price of ETH (and the subsequent fee) rose.
Source: Etherscan.io.
DeFi
Total value lock (TVL)
2020 is a breakthrough year for DeFi. The TVL in these dApps increased from USD 600 million at the beginning of 2020 to USD 15 billion at the end of the year, an increase of 24 times.
Source: DeFiPulse.com
Market value
The market value of the top 100 DeFi tokens also reacted accordingly, rising 11 times from $1.6 billion to $19.8 billion. During the mining season, the index once reached 40% of the market value of ETH, and as ETH began to rise, it gradually declined towards the end of the year.
The market value of DeFi comes from CoinGecko's top 100 DeFi token page
Decentralized Exchange (DEX)
Going back to the 2019 review and DEX article at the beginning of last year, we emphasized the overall growth of the DEX market, especially the growth of Uniswap. Even we can't imagine what amazing growth these two approaches will experience in 2020. As of the end of 2019, the total monthly trading volume of DEX was US$166 million. By the end of 2020, their transaction volume reached 19.2 billion US dollars, an increase of 115 times!
It grew too big and messed up my y-axis!
Our February article showed how three DEXs: Uniswap, IDEX and Kyber constitute more than 80% of the total trading volume. Ten months later, the composition of the DEX market has changed dramatically. Although Uniswap consolidated its position at the top of the list, the other two fell in the rankings. Among the top 10 listed, Sushiswap, Curve and Mooniswap will not even exist before 2020!
In order to understand the rapid growth of the DEX market and Uniswap, we went from the monthly transaction volume reported by the entire market of US$166 million to Uniswap defeating Coinbase's daily trading volume, and it took only 8 months!
"Crazy" is something we have learned to expect from 2020.
Stablecoin
Earlier, we saw how stablecoins constitute 35% of Ethereum's total transfers. Their transaction volume is even more impressive. The transaction value of USDT on the Ethereum blockchain alone exceeds that of ETH. By 2020, stablecoin transactions will total more than 1.2 trillion US dollars.
USD 1.2 trillion is a 7-fold increase from USD 170 billion in 2019
Liquidity mining
Etherscan satisfied users' requests for flow mining in early August. Since then, nearly 500 tokens have been listed on this page. Tracking the transfer of these tokens shows that there was a significant increase in September. Despite the decrease in overall transfers and active addresses in the same month, this happened, which provides some credible insights that continuous liquidity mining is performed by a small number of Ethereum users.
Eth2 and L2
2020 is a year when Ethereum users really feel the need to expand with record high fees. Although there is no final form yet, we do see the earliest results of efforts to expand on the chain.
Deposit to Eth2
Last month, we reported that Eth2’s deposits barely reached the target before the deadline. Since then, deposits have increased. As of December 1, a total of 905,000 ETH has been delivered and used, which is equivalent to $554 million, accounting for 0.76% of the ETH supply. As of January 1, the figures have risen to 2.17 million ETH, 1.6 billion USD and 1.9% respectively! It is expected that this figure will rise further in the coming months.
Eth2 depositor details
A key goal of Eth2 is to ensure the decentralization of its validators. What is the current situation? Based on the internal markings of the addresses, we estimate that 51% of the deposited ETH is currently controlled by 20 entities. This is an increase of 9% from last month. This ratio will help future monitoring. For those who wish to participate in Eth2, please remember that the entire community needs more individual validators!
Eth2 validator
After launching the Eth2 Beacon chain with 27,500 validators, this number quickly increased to 67,000 within a month. This is almost 4 times the minimum number of validators (16,284) of the original target!
Source: BeaconScan.com
Eth2 participation rate
How many of these validators are verifying? The participation rate of the Medalla testnet is low because the network faces a "risk-free" problem. Community members firmly insist that the real-time network will not face such problems-they have been proven to be correct, with a participation rate of more than 96% so far since Beacon Chain went online.
Source: BeaconScan.com
L2 deposit
Throughout 2020, the second layer of expansion is mainly in the testing phase. Some projects were in beta when they went live, while others went through multiple iterations. Among the online projects, Loopring and Tornado Cash have deposited the most deposits into the system.
At the end of the year, more colorful!
But L2 is still in its early stages. This special battlefield will become more intense in 2021, and we look forward to seeing the composition of chains, Rollups, dapps and users.
As always, Vitalik posted this topic in time
BTC on Ethereum
Total number of tokens
Another trend in 2020 is the tokenization of BTC on the Ethereum blockchain. When we discussed this topic on June 1, we predicted that there would be 5,000 BTC tokenized at that time. Fast forward 6 months-this number has increased 27 times to 140,000 BTC!
Source: BTC on Ethereum
the amount
Just like Uniswap is still the king of DEXs, wBTC is still the king of BTC tokens. The vast majority of BTC traded on Ethereum in 2020 will be completed through wBTC, while renBTC is far behind. The trading volume peaked in September, reaching 1.4 million BTC.
break down
As of December 31, wBTC accounted for 81% of all tokenized BTC. Even in terms of token holders, it is far ahead of others with approximately 20,000. Followed by imBTC, about 2,800.
One trend that began in the fourth quarter was tokenized Bitcoin mining. The three tokens (oBTC, vBTC, anyBTC) added to the list require users to lock BTC on the Bitcoin chain to obtain reward mining tokens. So far, they only hold $25 million worth of value, which is less than 1% of the total, but it will be interesting to see how these and other experiments bring the amount of Bitcoin into Ethereum.
Non-fungible token (NFT)
NFT has also made considerable progress in 2020. Although some projects have moved to layer 2 or other blockchains, there are still nearly 5 million ERC721 transfers on the Ethereum main chain.
71% of these are provided by the 10 largest tokens. These are mainly composed of game tokens (Cryptokitty, Unchained Gods, Axie Infinity, Sorare & Dozer, accounting for about 42%) and domain names (ENS and Unstoppable Domains, accounting for about 19%). Collectible sources and (of course) flow mining are in the top 10.
Digital art did not appear on it, but it was very popular this year. Beeple raised $3.5 million through weekend auctions of his NFT-related art and projects. These projects provided funds that flowed into NFT from DeFi, such as Rarible, which added liquidity mining to its governance token RARI.
Honor Award
Other trends emerging in 2020 include:
- Governance/DAO: Maybe not what people expected. DAO and governance are back in fashion. The liquidity mining of governance tokens has played a huge role in the DeFi bull market. For example: Maker, desire, Compound.
- Grants: Ethereum's public product funding has made significant progress, which is largely due to the secondary financing of Gitcoin. Other donations include the Ethereum Foundation, clr.fund and Open Grants.
- Private/miner extractable value (MEV) transactions: After the "Dark Forest" published an article on preemptive transactions, it triggered a wider discussion, and the project has begun to implement these transactions on the mainnet. Examples: SparkPool, 1inch, Flashbots.
- Prediction markets: The number of users of these dApps has increased dramatically, especially on the eve of the US presidential election, because one of the markets must be resolved by voting on the chain. For example: Catnip, Omen.
- Algorithmic stable assets: As liquidity mining brings additional liquidity and capital, new iterative methods are being explored throughout the year. Examples include asset restructuring by YAM Finance, seigniorage shares by Mithril Cash, and reflex bonds by Reflexer Labs.
- Virtual events: As the COVID made it impossible to hold meetings and face-to-face gatherings, the community responded by hosting a large number of virtual events. Highlights include ETHGlobal's "Hack Money" (Hack Money) and ETHOnline. Etherscan tracked more than 200 of them.
- Adoption rate: Because industries all over the world continue to adopt Ethereum, the number of Ethereum is too large to cover. Highlights include PayPal, Visa, SAP, Baseline Agreement, CME and Reddit. Even Google Trends has shown record interest in Ethereum!
prediction
An annual roundup without some predictions is no fun at all!
Without further ado, some of us:
- Both EIP1559 and Eth2 Phase 1 will be put into use in the third quarter
- By the end of the year, more than 50 dApps will be migrated to L2 and merged into 3 aggregate/chain NFT markets, the value will increase 10 times
- We will see more than $100 million in transaction volume through MEV
- The liquidity mining algorithm stablecoin will be hot, and the first quarter will be the hottest
2020 is passing so fast! With the explosion of Ethereum in early 2021, we expect all these trends to continue to rise for the foreseeable future.