Letter From The Editor
Today I am thrilled to unveil OurNetwork’s new brand, completed by renowned independent creative studio Regrets Only. Check out this Medium post from the team which breaks down its major elements.
As the world of crypto gets increasingly complex, OurNetwork is doubling down on our mission of community-owned analytics. We are starting with a new identity but there is much more to come, stay tuned.
— Spencer Noon
🕛 About the editor: Spencer Noon is an early-stage VC at Variant
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Network Coverage: L1 Networks
This week our contributor analysts cover L1s: Terra, Bitcoin, Ethereum, NEAR, and Celo.
â‘ NEAR
👥 Tiffany Gao
📈 NEAR tops 1M accounts & 182% monthly growth
👉 Community Chat 📌 Job Board 🔎 Dashboard
The NEAR ecosystem is exploding — having grown by 182% from August, NEAR has reached 1M total addresses. The increase is the result of multiple factors. There have been a series of high-quality project launches and partnership initiatives over the past few months, including Metapool, grants with Filecoin, Vorto Games partnerships. NEAR reached a new ATH price and ranked 1st for top gainer in mid-September. MetaBUIDL hackathon reached a successful end with hundreds of participants and 76 project submissions.
TVL on NEAR is increasing with momentum gained by all projects. Rainbow bridge TVL experienced 10x growth in September, ranked as one of the top growth among bridges. In addition to the record on DeFi Llama, Cheddar.farm has over $7M, and Skyward has $15M, in total surpassing 100M TVL on NEAR.
More and more developers are actively building and engaging on NEAR. Monthly Active Developer reached almost 1000 with an average MoM growth of 30% from May. NEAR also launched simple nightshade, announced a plan for private shards, and will be hosting NEARCON in October.
â‘¡ Celo
👥 Will Leas
📈 TVL on Celo has surpassed $865M, up 139% in Q3'21
👉 Community Discord 📌 Job Board 🔎 Dashboard
TVL on Celo has surpassed $865M, up 139% in Q3 2021. Around 74% of that TVL is in Mento, an AMM native to Celo which is responsible for helping cUSD maintain its peg to USD. Ubeswap (DEX) and Moola (Lending) are the second largest protocols by TVL on Celo with ~$81M and ~$79M in TVL, respectively. Celo’s TVL is likely to continue to see strong growth on the back of the announcement of a $100m DeFi incentive program and the launch of Optics, a cross-chain interoperability solution.
The total number of Celo addresses has grown to over 1.3M, up 629% from 180,439 addresses at the end of Q1 2021.
Over the past 30 days, there has been an average of 457K transactions per day on Celo. This is significantly higher than the daily average of transactions on Avalanche, Near, and Polkadot over the same period, per each L1’s respective block explorer.
â‘¢ Ethereum
👥 Alex Gedevani
📈 Ethereum tx fees surpassed $1B in September
👉 Community Page
Demand for Ethereum blockspace has rebounded, leading to $1B in network fees in September and average transaction fees of $28. Since EIP-1559 go-live, there’s been a 55% net reduction in ETH issuance with 474K ETH ($1.7B) burned. Sustained high fees on Ethereum hamper the user experience and can serve as a tailwind for more user adoption of cheaper L2s and alternative L1s. Active Ethereum addresses are at 577K, down ~27% since May highs.
The thriving NFT markets have led to a shift in the makeup of network usage by asset type when it comes to transfers. NFT growth alongside DeFi enables a more robust Ethereum ecosystem. The % of ERC-721 NFT token transfers relative to ERC-20 transfers has risen as high as 29% in October.
HODL waves track how active the current ETH supply is based on last on-chain movement. 76% of the supply hasn’t moved in over 6 months and 46% of the supply is in age bands of greater than 1 year. A few factors impacting HODL waves are ETH in DeFi, ETH staking, and CEX ETH reserves in cold storage.
â‘£ Bitcoin
👥 Nate Maddrey
📈 Lightning Network Capacity Tops 3000 BTC
👉 Bitcoin Resources 📌 Job Board 🔎 Dashboard
Bitcoin Layer 2 usage exploded over the summer with the launch of Lightning tips on Twitter and the continued rollout in El Salvador. As of October 6th, the Lightning Network has over 77K open channels and a capacity of over 3.01K BTC (about $160M), up from 1.66K BTC on July 1st.
Bitcoin Layer 1 usage has also been increasing since July 1st. Monthly unique active BTC addresses has rebounded back to about 17M after a drop-off following the May crypto crash.
The amount of new BTC addresses has also been trending upwards over the last three months. There were 479.13K new BTC addresses created on October 5th, the highest number since May 13th.