2024 is already halfway through, and OurNetwork has invited three well-known contributors to report on the most important on-chain developments in the cryptocurrency field in the areas of consumers, DeFi, and infrastructure.
Consumer Overview
With the rise of consumer cryptocurrencies in the first half of the year, Polymarket’s monthly trading volume exceeded $100 million, Zora’s monthly user count surged to 350,000, and Pump.Fun became the leading revenue-generating application with $50 million in revenue since the beginning of the year.
On-chain social platforms continue to grow. The total user count of decentralized social networks Farcaster and Lens Protocol is increasing, with Farcaster’s FID count approaching 750,000 and Lens having over 430,000 independent users. However, it should be noted that over 70% of users in Farcaster and Lens have fewer than 50 followers.
Zora, an on-chain content creation and social platform, has over 350,000 monthly trading users, including over 66,000 monthly creators and 330,000 monthly collectors. This month alone, over $1.6 million in creator rewards has been paid out.
An increasing number of Zora minters (3.3 million and growing) come from non-zora.co referrers. The top referrer is Layer3, a discovery platform responsible for over 290,000 mints.
Leading crypto prediction market platform Polymarket has also seen significant growth, with active users (peaking at over 3,500) and weekly trading volume ($43 million) reaching all-time highs after the first presidential debate.
In the first half of 2024, Memecoins dominated cryptocurrency returns, with the top 10 tokens averaging a gain of over 1,834% between the beginning of the year and June 21.
In the gold rush, selling shovels is profitable, right? The meme coin launchpad and trading platform pump.fun on the Solana chain has deployed over 1.1 million meme coins since its launch earlier this year. The platform has generated protocol revenue of over 3,405 SOL (approximately $49.7 million).
Last week, analysis platform DEX Screener launched Moonshot as a competitor to pump.fun, issuing over 26,000 tokens and generating protocol revenue of 3,000 SOL ($440,000). It is worth noting that most of these activities occurred in the first few days after Moonshot’s launch and gradually decreased in the second half of last week.
In the NFT space, the Ethereum mainnet remains the largest platform for on-chain transaction volume for EVM chains. The NFT market Blur has propelled L2’s Blast to the second position in terms of NFT trading volume, capturing 20-40% market share in EVM L1/L2 and 80-90% market share in L2.
In the past six months, the Solana NFT ecosystem has seen increased activity, with the adoption of compressed NFT (cNFT) and Token-2022 (T22) standards accelerating the process. Earlier this year, Magic Eden reclaimed its position as the largest marketplace for Tensor in terms of both trading volume and number of traders.
This week, a wallet made around $1 million in Mad Lads. Also, the floor price of CryptoPunks has risen from 23 ETH to 28.47 ETH ($99,000). The most recent sale occurred on July 1st at a price of 29.5 ETH.
DeFi Overview
DeFi has shown strong performance in the first half of the year, with key usage metrics such as DEX, staking derivatives, and lending all rising by around 100%.
So far this year, DEX has added approximately 600,000 tradable assets. Uniswap is the largest DEX in the cryptocurrency field, accounting for about 410,000 of the newly added assets. This metric is significant as startups often need structural advantages to overcome existing enterprises. Currently, DEX hosts around 2.5 million assets on-chain, providing global liquidity and accessibility. No traditional exchange can offer similar functionality.
Staking derivatives (liquidity staking and re-staking) have seen an increase of around $30 billion in staked assets this year. EigenLayer accounts for about $15.2 billion of this growth, while Lido accounts for approximately $11.1 billion. For Lido, revenue comes from fees and inflation on Ethereum, while EigenLayer’s revenue comes from applications built on top of it, many of which are still in the development stage.
Active loans in lending protocols have increased by approximately $5 billion this year. Aave, as calculated by Total Value Locked (TVL), accounts for about $4.5 billion of this growth. Spark and Morpho have entered the top three compared to their ATH in 2021, with active loans of approximately $1.7 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively. Aave remains the market leader, with a 62% market share in approximately $7.9 billion of active loans.
Infrastructure Overview
Multiple blockchains with 2 million+ daily active addresses (DAA); ETH L2 continues to expand
In the first half of 2024, several blockchains have continued their growth momentum. NEAR and TRON both have over 2 million daily active addresses (DAA), with Solana closely following at around 1.5 million. With the development of the TON ecosystem and Telegram integrating more TON into its in-app functionalities, TON and SUI have also seen a significant increase in active addresses. SUI has attracted a large number of active addresses through its SPAM campaign, and although DAA has since declined, it remains higher than pre-SPAM levels.
Although DAA has been steadily increasing, the total fees in blockchain often vary based on chain sentiment. In well-known blockchains, total fees averaged about $100 million per week in the beginning of the year but have now dropped to around $50 million. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and TRON still have the highest fees.
Ethereum scaling solutions, including Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups, continue to provide low-cost transaction options for users. The number of transactions on L2 has increased from around 5 million in early 2024 to between 7 and 10 million in June/July 2024.
Arbitrum’s fees have surged due to Layer Zero airdrops requiring users to “spend” a certain amount of ZRO to claim tokens. On June 20th, Arbitrum users paid over $4 million in fees to claim tokens, making it the most profitable day for Arbitrum in 2024.
