L1 Unique Users
Question 37: Compare the number of unique wallets that have sent a transaction since February 1st on Solana vs Ethereum vs Terra. How does user adoption seem to be trending for Solana compared to these other major chains? Does it appear that market conditions are slowing down growth or activity on the networks?
Introduction
Ethereum, Solana and Terra are three of the top blockchain projects. Ethereum is the number 2 crypto asset in terms of capitalization and is considered a programmable money, with more and more projects and applications every day. Solana and Terra have seen some expectacular growth in the last months and are seen by many as a real challenge to Bitcoin and Ethereum. This bounty will explre the activity of unique wallets for the three networks.
Methodology
I will compare each of the network's unique wallets sending a transaction with the price of each of the network's main tokens (ETH or Ether for Ethereum network, SOL or Solana as wrapped SOL in Wormhole for Solana network and LUNA as wrapped LUNA in Wormhole for Terra Network) to evaluate market conditions vs. activity.
For each of the networks, a CTE will be created joining the information of unique wallets and price with the following constraints:
Ethereum
count(distinct from_address)
inethereum.transactions
symbol ='ETH'
inethereum.token_prices_hourly
Terra
count(distinct tx_from)
interra.transactions
token_address = '0xbd31ea8212119f94a611fa969881cba3ea06fa3d'
inethereum.token_prices_hourly
Solana
-
count(distinct tx_from_address)
insolana.transactions
-
token_address = '0xd31a59c85ae9d8edefec411d448f90841571b89c'
inethereum.token_prices_hourly
Results from these tables will be joined with two consecutive joins creating one table with the unique wallets and price per day for all three networks.
The last table will be expanded with the averages of these variables, which were calculated on a separate query.
Results
Comparison of user adoption
On a first comparison, networks are ranken ETH, SOL and TERRA for the number of unique wallets per day, averaging roughly 400k, 200k and 50k respectively. With all numbers with the same axis size, it is difficult to make a more detailed comparison, so the difference to the average in percentage will be visualized as well.
In this second visualization, the positive trend above the average for all three network can be seen better. They all seem to have retraced to the average in the last day, being Terra relatively better with still 8% over the average compared to around 2% above for Ethereum and Solana.
So I would say Solana and Ethereum are very similar on their behaviour while Terra is on a slighty more positive trend that Solana. In absolute terms, Solana has about half the activity than Ethereum and 4 fold the activity of Terra.
Similar case occurs for Ethereum, were correlation is not very meaningful.
Terra on the other hand looks to have a better correlation, having similar highs and lows. I would even dare to say that it is a decrease in network activity which causes a retrace in price and viceversa.
Unfortunately, the price data is not available for the whole studied period, no the question remains if these arguments remain valid for data from February.
Conclusions
Ethereum has still an advantage in terms of activity to Solana and Terra, but Solana is closingthe gap effectively.
Terra's native token price has the bigger imapct on networ's activity and the burn mechanism is probably the explanation of why activity preceeds price - Terra's burn mechanism at its finest! That would be ignoring the non-burn activity of the network so I wouldn't jump to hasty conclusions, just a mention that it might be a feature in Terra's design, not a bug.