In June of this year, we published The State of the Ethereum Network, highlighting some key data and statistics from across the network. Six months later, near the close of 2018, we are at the tail end of a long “crypto-winter”, where the market fluctuations between late 2017 and now have consumed popular attention of the blockchain industry. A closer look at the numbers, however, reveals a robust technology, inundated with projects and developers and with a determined upward trajectory of development into the new year.

Transaction Activity

The Ethereum network has processed a total of over 353 million transactions to date. That’s an increase of over 100 million transactions since June 1 (up from 240 million total transactions). On January 4th, the network processed 1.3 million transactions in 24 hours, the most in a single day ever. Since June 1, the average number of daily transactions has been roughly 610,000 [source].

Diving a bit more into value transactions on Ethereum, we see relative stability on the network following the “boom” of late 2017 and early 2018. Starting in March 2018, the network stabilized at ~50 million ETH transacted per month, and has fluctuated nominally month-to-month since. The number of transactions per month has decreased slightly since Q3, from ~20 million per month in July to ~16 million per month in November. The average ETH per transaction has increased in that same time frame, however, more than doubling from ~2 ETH/transaction to just under 5 ETH/transaction in November [Figure 1].

Figure 1. Ethereum transaction data Dec. 2017 — Nov. 2018. Alethio Data Science.

There are nearly 49 million unique addresses on the Ethereum blockchain. In one year, that is an increase of nearly 4x, up from ~13,000,000 addresses on December 3, 2017. In six months, that is a 1.5x increase, up from ~35 million addresses in June 2018 [Figure 2]. The average ETH holding per address is ~2.17 ETH. Without the top 10 addresses, the average ETH holding per address is ~1.87 ETH. Without the top 50 addresses, the average holding is ~1.59 ETH [source].

Figure 2. Ethereum unique address growth. Etherscan.

In 2018, a newly created addresses was used, on average, for 35.45 days before going “inactive.” The length of use this year is up over 3x, from an average of 11.25 days in 2017.

In addition to value transactions, deployments of smart contracts onto the Ethereum blockchain have steadily increased. Since June, in which ~200,000 smart contracts were created, the rate has grown, surpassing 1 million in October and reaching nearly 1.5 million deployed smart contracts in November [Figure 3]. Since late 2017, the number of successful calls to smart contracts has remained consistent at 1.2 million per day .

Figure 3. Smart contract creation 2018. Alethio Data Science.

Without fail, the Ethereum blockchain remains the most robust smart contract platform in existence. Of the top 100 tokens by market cap, 96% are built off Ethereum. Of the top 1000 tokens, 89% are built off Ethereum [source].

User & Developer Activity

One of the unique utilities of Ethereum is the ability to program and build decentralized applications on top of the technology. State of the Dapps lists 2,286 live dApps across the blockchain ecosystem, having just surpassed 2,000 in October. 2,175 of those live dApps have been built on Ethereum. For many users, accessing dApps is most easily done through mobile wallets such as MetaMask, the most widely used Web3 browser extension. MetaMask hit 1 million lifetime downloads in April and has picked up an additional ~200,000 since then.

Developers are the ones behind the continued growth of the Ethereum ecosystem. Through market fluctuations, they remain committed to the technology and its applications as they continue building out solutions.

The Truffle Framework is a suite of tools created to get developers from idea to dapp as comfortably as possible. There are 26,000 Truffle products listed on Github alone. Truffle Framework’s first product, aptly named Truffle, is a development environment and testing framework that has become instrumental in developers’ ability to create dapps on the Ethereum blockchain. Truffle recently surpassed 1 million downloads, and now rests as 1,168,595 lifetime downloads since its release in May 2015. On average, Truffle is downloaded 100,000 a month. Ganache, Truffle Framework’s second product, is a personal blockchain for Ethereum development used to deploy contracts, develop your applications, and run tests. Ganache has been downloaded nearly 600,000 times since its release in October 2017. In November, it was downloaded 86,000 times, and shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon [Figures 4–6].

Figure 4. Truffle monthly downloads. Truffle Framework.

Figure 5. Ganache monthly downloads. Truffle Framework.

Figure 6. Truffle Suite developer adoption. Truffle Framework.

Loom Network developed and launched a layer 2 platform on top of Ethereum, allowing gaming and social dApps to scale while still relying on Ethereum’s core security and decentralization. The team released CryptoZombies, a live app enabling anyone to learn to code smart contracts on Ethereum. CryptoZombies has 330,000 users, an increase of over 1.5x from June 2018.

It looks like developers are here to stay, and more are on their way.

Miner & Network Activity

Ethernodes reports over 11,000 active nodes interacting with the Ethereum blockchain. These nodes are spread across six continents, demonstrating the geographic diversity of the network. In 2018, miner rewards have stayed fairly consistent, at an average of 620,000 ETH per month — with the largest outliers in January (640k) and February (572k) 2018 (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Miner rewards 2018. Alethio Data Science.

Ecosystem Adoption

Beyond developers and miners, interest in Ethereum in the general population is growing. Reddit’s r/ethereum community has grown more than double, from 176k in early December 2017 to 418k in early December 2018 [source]. Bounties Network is a platform allowing anyone to submit and complete tasks, from writing requests and creative exercises to research and technical tasks. In 2018, the number of transactions on the network has skyrocketed, from less than 50 in January to over 1,500 at its zenith in October. Significantly, the number of unique addresses transacting per month has increased in the same time frame, up to 350+ in October, demonstrating the growing diversity of people interacting with the platform.