Year over year, the Ethereum ecosystem continues to expand and this year brought a new wave of innovation and blockchain growth. The Ethereum network improved via both network upgrades and increased developer mindshare. DeFi brought hundreds of millions of dollars in value into the Ethereum ecosystem while over 520 new decentralized applications were created throughout the course of the year. Let’s take a minute to analytically reflect on this past year while gaining optimism for the future years to come.

Network

20m+. Total Ethereum accounts created this year

4 million. New active Ethereum addresses in 2019

2. Ethereum went through two network upgrades

4,728,152+. Ether issued his year from block rewards.

Approx 2m. Increase in the average gas limit (from 8 million gas to just under 10 million gas)

8,516. Live Ethereum nodes

Dapps

520. New dapps created in 2019

2019 brought crypto to mobile: MetaMask Mobile, Argent, Coinbase Wallet and more all release wallets this past year.

1-2. The average Ethereum Name Service owner purchased 1-2 domain names while some “whales” own hundreds.

The longest ENS domain is: Forwhatshallitprofitamanifhegainthewholeworldandsufferthelossofhissoul.eth

OpenSea has become the leading marketplace for NFT sales totaling over $7 million in auctions over its two-year lifespan of which $1.7 million came from October alone.

Gods Unchained, one of the most popular dapps on Ethereum has created over 6,714,445 items

Moloch, MetaCartel, Ethereum Marketing, and at least 25 other DAOs were summoned this year.

DeFi

The story of DeFi throughout 2019 is consistently told in the context of the Dai stablecoin which has enabled various new applications.

Stability Fee and Dai Supply by Mkr.tools

55 million Dai. Over the course of 2019, Dai eventually hit its Maker governance imposed 100 million Dai limit, which required a vote to increase the supply. The large drop-off at the end of the year shows the migration from single collateral Dai (SAI) to the new and improved multilateral Dai (Dai).

The Maker stability fee–shown in blue above–started the year at 2.5%, peaked in August at 20.5%, before eventually returning to a more modest 3% fee. The annual accrued stability fee totals 1,640,555 Dai.

A visualization of CDPs over the past year shows how Maker CDPs –– or vaults as they’re now called –– vary in size, age, and collateralization ratio. This year saw thousands of Maker Vaults created and the following graph demonstrates that some Vaults have an extreme amount of collateral locked in at relatively low collateralization ratios (a collateralization ratio of less than 150% results in a Maker Vault being liquidated).

Historical CDPs by Mkr.Tools



The amount of ether locked in DeFi increased dramatically over the course of this past year recently surpassing $650 million. Ether has become the go-to collateral asset for defi platforms and applications.



Ether locked in DeFi platforms by Alethio

On January 1st, 2019, Uniswap had a total of 31 users with just over 30 ETH in daily volume and nearly a year later has hundreds of users with thousands of ETH in daily volume.

Synthetix, a platform for creating synthetic assets on Ethereum recognized unprecedented growth in 2019 –– with an increase in the total value locked in Synthtix from $1.6 million to over $160 million.

Developers

25K+. Monthly increased Truffle downloads throughout 2019.

$300k+. Grants that were given out by ConsenSys over the past year. Wave 3 is now open!

8. Virtual Hackathons in 2019 support by Gitcoin that distributed over 200k in grant funding.

in November 2019 alone, Gitcoin facilitated $302k in value transfer through its platform with a lifetime of over $2.8 million in gross platform value.

Gitcoin Quests were played 12,157 times by over 700 community members

ConsenSys launched its initiative to bring 1 million developers into the Ethereum ecosystem. This year a lot more effort went into analyzing developer communities. At the midway point of 2019, Electric Capital released a report showing that Ethereum’s developer community is 4x larger compared to any other crypto ecosystem. Ethereum’s developer community continues to expand and grow with the addition of exciting fields like DeFi, DAOs, and more.

Food For Thought

12. Days of Winter

2019. The Year of DeFi

5. The amount of Twitter employees working on decentralized infrastructure



