1. Objective

    Like every decentralized finance protocol, addresses are proxies through which users interact with the protocol functionalities. There are two types of addresses on Ethereum; externally owned addresses (EOAs) and contracts accounts. EOAs live in local user wallets while contact accounts live in smart contracts on the blockchain.

    There are a number of functions an EOA can perform on Aave, but the user must have deposited some collateral first. So this investigation uses the deposits table as a point of inference for unique EOA addresses using Aave.

    For contract accounts, they usually call flashloans functions which are not possible with regular EOAs. But such calls must be initiated by EOAs. For the purposes of this investigation, contract accounts are counted instead of EOAs since they are the ones that actually interact with the Aave protocol.

    2. Unique EOAs

    Unique externally-owned addresses using Aave on a daily basis are shown below. There was a gradual rise in daily unique addresses from genesis to mid-January 2020 where there was none for a long while until early, July 2021. This chart pattern looks somehow confusing because Aave is the no. 1 project on DefiPulse by TVL, as such, it is expected to see a constant daily influx of new users. However daily unique addresses skyrocketed to an ATH of 334 in July 2021.

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    3. Unique Contract Addresses

    We can see similar chart behaviour being exhibited by this graph showing unique daily contract addresses using Aave. There is a sharp increase the few days after inception, but the graph stalls afterwards. After 19 solid months, daily unique users skyrocket to an ATH.

    3. Conclusion

    I believe we are missing some data here. If that is not the case, then we can say Aave's deployment on other L2 chains is driving the growth of user base more than regular Ethereum mainnet.