How Ethereum Performed During the Global Market Shocks of the Coronavirus Pandemic

A special edition of Ethereum by the Numbers with 6 takeaways from last month’s historic spikes in economic volatility.

Over the past few weeks, decentralized finance protocols experienced what many are considering a once-in-a-crypto-lifetime test. This test continues — for both DeFi and traditional finance — as the world weathers and recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic.

On February 12, the Dow Jones, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 closed at record highs. A month later, stock market circuit breakers were triggered across the globe to curb panic selling, as US markets suffered the largest single-day percentage fall since the crash of 1987. March 12 was proof that traditional finance and decentralized finance are still quite correlated. As traditional markets contracted on Black Thursday, so did cryptomarkets, with ETH and BTC prices dropping over 40% in less than 24 hours.

In recent weeks, numerous app, platform, and exchange teams have shared analytics dashboards and described their efforts to ensure high-availability to users during these volatile times. In the spirit of transparency, we wanted to offer an analysis of how the Ethereum network performed at this unique moment in economic history and identify any takeaways for the future of digital networks and finance.

Our report below walks through six data-driven conclusions derived from last month’s spike in activity. Insights were generated using ConsenSys’ analytics suite, Alethio, specifically Alethio’s API and custom reporting tool.