Ethereum Wrapped 2022: A Year in Review

2022 has been a hell of a year for crypto. There were many twist and turns in a year that left everyone down pretty bad. However, there is still alot to celebrate! With over 390M transactions and 2.31M Blocks produced this year there is alot of data that can be look into. This dashboard aims to take dissect the biggest trends around Ethereum in the past year. The dashboard has the following sections:

I. Ethereum Network Metrics

II. The Users of Ethereum

III. $ETH: Prices and Holders

IV. NFT Metrics

V. Uniswap Overview

I. Ethereum Network Metrics

• Ethereum total fees per week are down by ~90% from a high in January. Similiar, the average gas price is down. While this may sound bad, this may also be due to an increased adoption of L2s and gas optimization of contracts such as OpenSea
• Transactions remained relatively stable throughout the year ranging from 7- 8 million transactions per week. The highest week for transaction output was the week starting on July 25th
• There is a noticeable spike in Ethereum fees on April 25th which was the date of Yuga Lab’s Otherside Mint. Another interesting spike was the day of FTX collapse
• Block production remained relatively steady at around ~42k blocks per week. After the merge block production increased by around 20% to 50k per week
• Total Ethereum Fees from 2021 to 2022 decreased by 51%. Transactions year to year however only decreased by 12%

II. The Users of Ethereum

• Ethereum saw ~48 million addresses active this year with 60% of those being new addressees. Its hard to tell if this is a good or bad metric (may also be due to people shuffling wallets)
• There isnt a noticeable trend for distinct active addresses per week. One of the interesting pieces is that the most active addresses for 2022 was the week of December 5th. Bullish
• New Ethereum addressses per week saw a bottom in late August. Since then the has been an increasing amount of new addresses per week. Bullish
• On a given week 20-30% of addresses active are new
• Active Address from 2022 to 2021 are down 18% while new addresses in 2022 is down 35%
• 52% of addresses only completed 1 successful transaction. 87% of wallets did less than 5! With that number, 5.5M addresses did more than 5 transactions.

What Were the Most Common Interactions for Ethereum?

Using Flipside’s labels for addresses, The following interactions can be determined based on the the to/from a given address was interacting with on the otherside:

• 53% of addresses interacted with a CEX (sent a transaction to / from a CEX). The largest CEX interaction on Ethereum was Coinbase with 27% of Active Ethereum Addresses Interacting with it
• 8.2% of wallets interacted with DeFi. However, 2.7% of addresses interacted with an addresses labelled as DeFi that was not a DEX (1.3M wallets) 5.2% of wallets swapped on Uniswap
• 7.5% of active wallets minted an NFT this year. 3.3% of wallets bought an NFT (and 3.2% of wallets bought on Opensea talk about dominance!)
• 2.9% of wallets interacted with FTX (1.3M addresses) This could potientially show how much damage was done by the blow up (I think the number affected would be much less than this though). This is still much smaller than Binance and Coinbase’s interactions
• 2.7% of addresses use Snapshot for goverannce / voting

III. $ETH: Prices and Holders

• $ETH is down bad
• For Flipside’s Ethereum ERC20 table, most tokens are down bad with only 9.2% of tokens having a positive return (and most of these tokens are complete garbage)
• 44% of tokens saw a 80-99% decrease in their price. Ouch

Top Users of Ethereum

• Binance completed the most transactions on Ethereum with over 21M+ transactions completed and ~5% of the total transactions. Coinbase did 4.86%
• 50 Addresses (Mostly CEXes) did 25% of the total transactions on Ethereum
• Coinbase paid 41k ETH this year in fees, making it one of the gassiest entities on Ethereum

What are Ethereum Addresses Holding?

• There was a 16.96% increase in the number of wallets holding $ETH going up to 153.3M wallets (alot of these wallets are not active)
• Besides $ETH, the biggest tokens wallets are holding are stables, $Shib, $Link, and $LPT?
• $ETH transfer volume had large spikes on the following days: May 13th (Luna Collapse) June 13th (3AC Collapse) September 14th (The Merge) November 7th (FTX Collapse)
• Active addreesses tranferring ETH decreased over the year by 38%

IV. NFT Metric Overview

• Like the price of $ETH, NFT sales volume are down bad - Volume decreased by 90%.

• Likewise, total salers of NFTs are down ~45% and active buyers are down ~50%

• Similiarlly, the average price of an NFT is down by 95%. What is interesting is the large disceprancy between the average and median price of an NFT sold. The median price of an NFT sold in a given week ranged from $26-$83

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V. Uniswap Metrics

• As one of the leading DeFi apps on Ethereum, Uniswap had a strong year with over $555B in Volume and 30M+ Swaps
• Active swappers and the number of swaps increased throughout the year, leading to a peak in late October, right before the FTX collapse.
• Similiar, to ETH transfers noticable spikes in Uniswap volume can be observed on the days of the FTX, Luna, and 3AC Collapse
• The Uniswap ETH-USDC 500 10 pool did close to 40% of Uniswap’s total volume this year. Most of the other top pools are combinations of stablecoin to stablecoin or stablecoin to ETH /wBTC

NFT Mints

• With over 26.34M NFTs minted this year, things are still going quite strong. However, post merge there has been a decline in the number of NFTs minted (could also be due to the end of the year)
• The largest by far was ENS domains, but other noticeable NFT mints include: The Merge NFT (2nd), Uniswaps’ V3 Positions (3rd), Rainbow Zorbs (4th), Love,Death+ Robots token (5th)

NFT Marketplace and Top Projects

• Even though, ~90% of the total NFT sales went through OpenSea 36.7% of volume went through the platform (The large difference is mostly due to wash trading on competing platforms + potiential data discrepancies)

• OpenSea has close to 7x as many buyers as the next competing platform does

• The top projects on OpenSea for 2022 were Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Otherside, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Azuki, Clone X, and MoonBirds. Talk about a strong year for Yuga Labs!

And That’s a Wrap for Ethereum 2022!

With a crazy year for Ethereum, here were some of the top highlights:

• While metrics across the board such as total volume, number of transfers, fees are down across the board: Ethereum is chugging away with more and more innovation
• CEXes are still the dominating force on Ethereum with over 50% of addresses interacting with a CEX and most CEXes having the most transfers / fees on the network
• For the most part, the merge did not create any magical on chain moments (except increase in block production). Events such as the collapse of FTX, Luna, and 3AC caused big impacts on the community
• Most tokens on Ethereum are down quite bad
• DEXes appear to be one of the biggest use cases for users. While volume may be down, users continue to use DEXes such as Uniswap
• The NFT market is rapidly evolving. While sales are down new players emerged this year to challenge OpenSea’s title