OurNetwork #148

Dec 02, 2022

About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund. Web3 founder looking to connect? Reply back to this email.

🔗 Members Club is live for NFT holders! Everyone who participated in our November NFT mint now has access to Members Club, which this week features special bonus content on Ethereum.
🔗 December NFT mint is now live on Mirror. Claim a December NFT (it’s free to mint) and gain access to Members Club starting next week.
🔗 The Long View: Web3 and User Ownership. Flagging a new and especially timely blog post from my partners Li Jin and Jesse Walden, outlining our long view on web3 and user ownership.

Coverage on Ethereum, Flashbots, Stablecoins, Optimism, and the NFT Market.

① Ethereum

Over two months have passed since the Merge and demand for staking on Ethereum has remained robust. There are currently around 481k active validators with 15.4m ETH staked. After the network surpassed 458k active validators in early November, a constant known as the churn limit was raised to seven, increasing the rate that limits daily new validators from 1,350 to 1,575/day.

Two years have passed since the launch of the Beacon Chain, and with it 33% of ETH supply has now been inactive for over 2 years. This is apparent in ETH’s active supply bands (aka HODL Waves), which illustrate the “age” of unmoved ETH.

Although staking rewards are locked on the Beacon Chain until the activation of withdrawals (likely with the Shanghai hard fork), validators now receive priority fees (i.e., tips) on the execution layer. Since the Merge, validators have received a total of 40k ETH (~$54m) in tips.

The Flashbots MEV-Boost transparency dashboard is a public dashboard showing metrics of the Flashbots MEV-Boost relay since the Ethereum Merge. It is a part of Flashbots' efforts to provide transparency to the MEV ecosystem. The dashboard shows the Ethereum mainnet data post-Merge from block #15537940, which is when the first MEV-Boost block was included on-chain. The weekly ETH paid to validators reached all-time-high post-Merge in the week of November 7, reaching 13k ETH.

The weekly average block reward chart compares the revenue per block from Flashbots MEV-Boost Relay and other blocks. "Other" includes blocks proposed from other relays or regular mempool blocks. Flashbots’ relay has consistently provided a higher revenue to proposers since the Merge.

This chart shows the percentage of blocks proposed by Flashbots MEV-Boost Relay and others within a given week. The first 8 weeks since the Merge show a steady increase in the percentage of blocks proposed by MEV-Boost Relay. The pace is slowing down after reaching 60% in the first week of November.

Looking for more coverage? Head over to Members Club for a bonus insight authored by this contributor.

Stablecoin use is climbing ever higher through the bear market. Stablecoins’ daily on-chain transfer volume is near an all-time high of $25b per day (90-day moving average). About $20b of this is sourced from USDC (on Ethereum) and Tether (Ethereum and Tron) transfers.

Adoption is rising as users withdraw funds from exchanges to reduce their risk. The number of addresses holding an excess of $10k denominated in various stablecoins has increased in the last few months. USDC has seen a significant increase since the beginning of November, from 76k to 86k addresses.

Active addresses are also breaching new highs, crossing 1m per day. Much of this increase is attributable to Tether on Tron, likely due to users’ sensitivity to fees. However, stablecoins on Ethereum have also seen higher adoption: USDC active addresses hit an all-time high of 91k on November 9.