Exploring the Parabolic Growth of Ethereum

May 01, 2021

Written by William Peaster

Ethereum’s blooming in more ways than one, and in that regard the numbers don’t lie.

Indeed, in so many different categories you can dive into the data and see remarkable growth across the board. So in this post, we’ll be doing exactly that. Here are some areas around Ethereum we’re seeing considerable advances in lately.

ETH Price

The obvious place to start is the ETH price, which reached a new all-time high of ~$1,825 today, Feb. 10th. It’s impossible to say what happens next with any degree of certainty, but anecdotally speaking, I think there are more people around who think a +$2k ETH is possible than there ever have been before. The community optimism and underlying activity has ETH in uncharted bullish waters.

On-Chain Transfer Value

Ethereum’s now decisively the most used blockchain in the cryptoeconomy, even moreso than Bitcoin. Don’t take my word for it, just check out the latest adjusted daily on-chain value transfer stats out of CoinMetrics. They show that Ethereum’s settling over $10B in transactions daily now compared to Bitcoin’s $9B. It’s the internet of value, baby.

Unique Addresses

Ethereum addresses can be created for lots of reasons and by lots of different parties, but their numbers are certainly going parabolic lately. That’s according to Ethereum block explorer and analytics site Etherscan, which shows the number of unique Ethereum addresses has surged to ~$140M.

DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL)

DeFi, or decentralized finance, is an ecosystem of financial applications that can be used by anyone, anywhere, anytime. In being powerful in unprecedented ways and vastly more permissive and open than mainstream finance, DeFi is really starting to gain considerable adoption in recent months. According to DeFi Pulse, the DeFi’s total value locked (TVL) -- i.e. the assets under management (AUM) across the whole DeFi ecosystem -- is now just shy of $40B. That’s stunning, considering DeFi’s TVL only crossed $1B for the first time in January 2020.

OpenSea NFT Volume

Like DeFi, NFTs (i.e. tokenized media on Ethereum, like virtual land or art) are exploding in popularity right now, and for the same reasons: NFTs open up digital ownership like never before and empower creators in ways that weren’t possible before. All that said, OpenSea is among Ethereum’s most popular NFT marketplaces, and it’s gaining traction fast if its stats are any indication. We’re not even halfway through February yet and this month has easily been OpenSea’s busiest ever. As of Feb. 10th, the marketplace had already facilitated over $22.5M in sales.

Zooming Out

The aforementioned advancements are but a taste of the interesting growth areas on Ethereum right now. For example, stablecoin supplies are booming, the volume facilitated by decentralized exchanges like Uniswap is booming, etc. With this surge of demand also comes rising pain points, like growing gas prices. The good news? We’re also currently seeing a boom in the rollout of layer-two (L2) scaling solutions, so the tide is turning.

Subscribe to this publication.

It’s free (for now)

Cryptowriter

Discussion about this post