NEAR Protocol is a sharded, proof-of-stake (PoS), layer1 blockchain that is simple to use, secure and scalable. It is designed to provide the best possible experience for developers and users to ultimately, facilitate the mainstream adoption of decentralized applications. Unlike other blockchains, this network has been built from the ground up to be the easiest in the world for both developers and their end-users while still providing the scalability necessary to serve those users. It facilitates the development of decentralized applications, even if developers are only used to building with traditional web or app concepts. Besides, NEAR onboards users with a smooth experience, even if they have never used crypto, tokens, keys, wallets, or other blockchain artifacts. It also allows the application to scale seamlessly. The underlying platform automatically expands capacity via sharding without additional costs or effort on your part.

NEAR is the native token of the NEAR blockchain. It is used for transaction fees, staking, acquiring a validator seat, and decentralized applications. All transactions which occur on the NEAR blockchain must be paid for using NEAR. Fundamental to PoS ecosystems, NEAR can be delegated to validators (staked) to earn NEAR rewards. To become a validator on the NEAR blockchain a minimum amount of NEAR is required. Last but not least, those building on the NEAR ecosystem can choose to leverage the NEAR token in several ways expanding on its utility.

In this analysis, the active users of the NEAR ecosystem in the past 90 days have been investigated.

The required data for the analysis of active users of the NEAR protocol were collected from the transactions table of the mdao_near schema. For a deeper analysis of user activity, the interaction time interval was calculated to measure the average time interval (in minutes) between each time a user has used the platform.

In conclusion, the number of active users has been calculated on the NEAR platform over the past 90 days. The data has demonstrated that there was a huge spike in the number of users during the early days of May. Different reasons were attributed to this sudden increase including both internal and external matters. The number of receivers has been much higher compared to the number of senders and the platform should focus on equalizing them to have a healthier balance. Overall, the NEAR protocol has achieved a huge milestone during the past few months, and while the activity and engagement of its users have decreased entering the second half of 2022, it is hugely influenced by the recent crypto industry downtrends as a whole.

The analysis of the NEAR protocol’s active users over the past 90 days has shown that around 10.8M users have participated either as a sender or as a receiver in a transaction on the platform. The number of active users over different timeframes has indicated that the number of active users massively jumped during May. To be precise, the sudden increase was during the early days of May. After that, it decreased to its previous levels and even lower in the last days of June. It is possible that the activity on NEAR protocol was affected by the Terra crash in May, however, there were some milestones that the network achieved in that month, especially surpassing the 10 million wallets. According to the Near in May official blog post, multiple events occurred during that month including the inaugural NEAR Hacker House, NEAR community talks, SailGP and NEAR partnership, the launch of NEAR’s Kenya regional hub, publication of a 4-part series entitled NFTs on NEAR, and participation of NEAR at Davos for World Economic Forum.

The active users were also divided into senders and receivers to be able to compare them with each other. There has been a considerable gap between the number of senders and receivers and the number of senders has only been around 3% of the number of receivers. the analysis of their activity during different timeframes has also indicated that except in the early days of April, the share of receivers from the transactions was much higher compared to the senders. Receivers were also responsible for the spike in May and reached levels higher than 95% during that period. Besides that, the analysis of the average interaction time interval has demonstrated that it has gradually increased in the past 90 days for both senders and receivers. Overall, the average time for the receivers has been slightly higher compared to the senders.

For this analysis, a wallet address was considered active if it was a participant in a transaction, either as a sender or a receiver. Two columns of tx_signer and tx_receiver were selected as indicators of senders and receivers, respectively. Then, they were unionized to achieve an overall number of active users. Ultimately, these active addresses were measured over daily, weekly, and monthly timeframes in the past 90 days. It is worth mentioning that, a particular address is counted just once over any timeframe, regardless of the number of transactions it had participated in.

To further analyze the activity of users on NEAR, the average time interval between each interaction of them with the platform was calculated and has been demonstrated in the following charts. As it can be seen in the graphs, the time interval was low early in May when both the number of users and the number of transactions were high. Interestingly, the number of active users was lower before and after early May with a significant difference. In late April, while the number of users was low, the number of transactions conducted by them was high, and as a result, their interaction time interval was low which means the user engagement was high during that time. On the other hand, the number of active users has decreased since mid-May while at the same time, the number of transactions has also decreased. This, in turn, has resulted in a higher interaction time interval and a lower user engagement for the platform.