Introduction

Transaction Growth

The NEO blockchain has been live since the 4th quarter of 2016, when its first block was issued on October 16. Since then, the blockchain has not only hosted its own cryptocurrency NEO alongside its parallel currency GAS but has also become the home for several NEP-5 tokens, that were issued on the same blockchain. In this article, I want to look at statistics of the NEO blockchain and see, how various metrics have developed over time. As sources, I used the blockchain explorer of NewEconoLabs and the aggregated statistics websites Neodepot and NeoEconomy.Let’s start with the transaction growth. Even though NEO went live in in mid-October 2016, there were already 345 thousand transactions in those last two and a half months of 2016. The number increased to a total of 5.792 million transactions in 2017, with 86% of those transactions coming in the second half of 2017. The first half of 2018 marks NEO’s peak for transactions per half-year: 9.857 million transactions were executed in the first six months of 2018. The second half of 2018 saw 7.764 million transactions, leading to a total of 17.622 million transactions in 2018. The total number of transactions in 2019 was at 8.479 million, with 56% of the transactions coming in the second half of 2019.As can be expected, deposits and withdrawals from exchanges are causing many of those transactions. Interactions with the main exchange addresses of Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex, Gate.io, Kucoin and Switcheo have caused a total of 2.72 million transactions up to this point. Furthermore, I would expect Huobi to have caused at least 300k transactions as well – However, they split their NEO holdings over 30+ addresses (potentially even more), which makes it impossible to conclude their total transaction number. Adding to that, the transactions caused by main exchange addresses do not include user deposits to their individual exchange deposit addresses. Therefore, the total number of transactions caused by exchange deposits and withdrawals could very well be around 5 million, which would currently equal 15% of all transactions on the NEO blockchain. The following graphic summarizes these transaction statistics: