The Top 5 Blockchain Projects of 2023
2023 was a turbulent, but overall impressive, year for crypto, as the community experienced significant sentiment shifts amid the interplay of bear and bull market dynamics. Despite prolonged periods of uncertainty, the year is ending on an optimistic note with increasing signs of regulatory acceptance for crypto assets and the emergence of multiple promising blockchain projects that introduced new innovations to the realms of decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and blockchain scalability.
Together, these blockchain projects have brought a breath of fresh air to the crypto community and sustained mainstream interest in the crypto space under challenging conditions. To that end, we’ve provided an overview of five notable blockchain projects from this year that deserve a closer look – along with several free Flipside community dashboards tracking the on-chain activity and progress of each project.
Pyth Network
Pyth Network is a decentralized oracle solution on the Solana blockchain, focusing on providing high-quality, real-time price data for assets like cryptocurrencies, commodities, and fiat currencies. Unlike projects like Chainlink, Pyth is specifically designed to cater to DeFi applications and emphasizes high-frequency trading data. This makes this blockchain project especially useful for financial applications requiring accurate, real-time pricing information.
Pyth's token debuted on November 20 via an airdrop to 90,000 wallets. With its official launch, Pyth is ushering in a new era of token-led governance for the protocol and is moving rapidly towards its goal of connecting blockchains with financial data sources from the off-chain world.
Pyth Blockchain Data Analytics
Sei
Sei is an ambitious Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for the growing world of DeFi. The blockchain project’s Twin-Turbo Consensus mechanism enables rapid finality, intelligent block propagation, optimistic block processing for faster user response, and native price oracles for reliable trading experiences.
Sei Mainnet announced its beta launch this August, following a successful testnet launch that saw over 400 million transactions and 7.5 million unique testnet wallets created. While there’s no guarantee that Sei will surpass the more established L1 networks occupying the crypto space, the project’s impressive features and passionate community make it a worthwhile contender worth keeping an eye on.
Sei Blockchain Data Analytics
Base
No list of the top 2023 blckchain projects would be complete without Base, Coinbase’s general-use Layer 2 blockchain. Base aims to make Ethereum accessible to everyone through the enablement of rapid, lost-cost decentralized apps (dapps) deployments. Base is built on Optimism’s open-source OP Stack, and the fact that it is EVM equivalent means Ethereum developers’ code, tools, and infrastructure work all out of the box, without the need for additional interoperability measures or technical hurdles adoption.
Coinbase announced Base’s testnet back in February, and the public mainnet went live in August. This launch redefined the role centralized exchanges can play in making on-chain the next online, and the network’s combination of institutional players and independent builders are not working to onboard the next billion users into the cryptoeconomy.
Base Blockchain Data Analytics
Tensor
Tensor is a Solana-focused NFT trading platform that has set out to redefine the NFT trading landscape. Tensor offers advanced trading functionalities like TradingView integration and collection-wide bids, and the project’s approach has drawn comparisons to other successful platforms like Ethereum's Blur, particularly in terms of its community and creator reward systems.
While Tensor launched in private beta back in June 2022, the project truly came into its own in 2023, surpassing Magic Eden as Solana’s primary NFT marketplace and surging in popularity alongside Solana’s recent resurgence. More recently, Tensor and Magic Eden have settled into a neck-to-neck competition to be Solana’s de facto NFT marketplace, but with all the developer and community excitement around Solana this year both projects continue to collectively advance the cause of broader crypto adoption.
Tensor Blockchain Data Analytics
THORchain
THORchain is a with its native asset settlement protocol that is often described as a multichain version of Uniswap. Bitcoin advocate Erik Voorhees recently praised the blockchain project as the only market to trade Bitcoin at scale without an intermediary. This blockchain project has attracted a large and enthusiastic following, in part due to the platform’s impressive liquidity pool returns and community-run ethos.
THORchain was originally launched by a team of independent developers during the 2018 Binance Dexathon. While this project dates back nearly half a decade, the fact that it bounced back after being hacked three times in in a single month in 2021 to become the third largest DEX by trading volume this year is a testament to the team’s efforts – and proof that legacy blockchain projects can survive multiple bear and bull cycles as long as they stay nimble and keep building.
THORchain Blockchain Data Analytics
Dig Deeper into 2023’s Web3 Winners
Don’t see your favorite blockchain project of 2023 in this article? We’ve got you covered!
Flipside’s free blockchain data analytics tools make it easy for you to create advanced dashboards of your favorite web3 projects based on their real-time on-chain activity. All of the dashboards in this article were made by Flipside’s community of independent analysts, and we offer all the crypto tools necessary to boost your project’s visibility via public dashboards or create your own private analytics tools to inform your own personal trades.
Check out this on-chain analysis 101 resource for everything you need to know to create your own free dashboard, or explore Flipside’s existing community dashboards!
