Distributed research for distributed networks — OurNetwork is crypto's go-to platform for onchain analytics.

📝 Editor’s Note:

With 2024 at the halfway mark, the OurNetwork team tapped three of its marquee contributors to cover the most important onchain developments in crypto across Consumer, DeFi and Infrastructure.

Let's get to it.

Consumer, DeFi, and Infrastructure

• Onchain social continues to grow. Decentralized social networks Farcaster and Lens Protocol are increasing overall user numbers, with Farcaster reaching nearly 750k FIDs and Lens surpassing 430k unique handles — but note that across both Farcaster and Lens, over 70% of users have fewer than 50 followers. 

• Onchain content minting and social platform Zora has over 350,000 monthly transacting users, including over 66,000 monthly creators and 330,000 monthly collectors. Over $1.6M in Creator Rewards have been paid out this month alone. 

• A growing number (3.3M and counting) of Zora mints come from a referrer that isn’t zora.co directly. The top referrer is Layer3, a discovery platform responsible for over 290,000 mints:

• Leading crypto prediction markets platform Polymarket has also grown considerably, reaching an all-time high this past week for both active users (over 3,500 at peak) and weekly trading volume ($43M) following the first presidential debate.

• Memecoins dominated crypto returns in the first half of 2024, with the top 10 tokens posting an average of over 1,834% gains between the start of the year and June 21.

• During a gold rush, sell shovels… right? Solana memecoin launchpad and marketplace pump.fun emerged earlier this year and is already responsible for deploying over 1.1M memecoins. The platform has generated over 340,500 SOL ($49.7M) in protocol revenue to date. 

• Last week, DEX Screener, an analytics platform, launched Moonshot as a pump.fun competitor and has enabled the launches of over 26,000 coins since, generating 3,000 SOL ($440k) in protocol revenue. Note that the majority of this activity took place during the first few days following Moonshot’s launch before dwindling in the latter half of last week.

• In the NFT space, Ethereum mainnet is still home to the largest amount of trade volume across EVM chains. Blur, the NFT marketplace, has driven Blast, the L2, to hold the second slot in NFT volume with 20-40% market share across EVM L1/L2s, and 80-90% market share across only L2s.

• Activity in the Solana NFT ecosystem has surged over the last six months, accelerated by the adoption of the compressed NFT (cNFT) and Token-2022 (T22) standards. Earlier this year, Magic Eden regained its position over Tensor as the top marketplace in terms of both volume and traders. 

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This week, one wallet swept ~$1M USD in Mad Lads. Also this week, the CryptoPunks floor moved up from 23 ETH to 28.47 ETH ($99k). The most recent sale was on July 1 for 29.5 ETH.

• DEXs have added ~600k new tradeable assets year to date. Uniswap, crypto's leading DEX by volume, accounts for ~410k of this increase. The metric is meaningful because startups tend to require structural advantages to win over incumbents – DEXs currently host ~2.5M assets onchain with global liquidity and accessibility. No traditional exchange can offer similar functionality.

• Staking derivatives (liquid staking & restaking) have added ~$30B in assets staked year to date. EigenLayer, the restaking platform, accounts for ~$15.2B of this increase, while Lido, the liquid staking platofrm, accounts for ~$11.1B. For Lido, the yield comes from Ethereum’s fees and inflation, whereas for EigenLayer the yield comes from applications built on top of it, many of which are still in the R&D phase of development.

• Lending protocols have added ~$5B in active loans year to date. Aave, the leading lending protocol by TVL, accounts for ~$4.5B of this increase. In contrast to the previous ATH in ‘21, both Spark and Morpho have entered the top 3, with ~$1.7 and ~$1.1B in active loans, respectively. Aave remains the market leader, with ~62% market share on ~$7.9B active loans.

• The first half of 2024 showed continued momentum across multiple blockchains. NEAR and TRON both have over 2M daily active addresses (DAA), with Solana is close behind at ~1.5M. TON and SUI also experienced a significant rise in active addresses, as the TON ecosystem gains steam and Telegram starts to integrate more of TON into their in-app features. SUI also attracted an explosion of active addresses with its SPAM program — while DAAs have declined since, they still remain elevated above pre-SPAM levels.

• While DAA are steadily increasing, total blockchain fees tend to vary based on chain sentiment. Across notable blockchains, total fees averaged about $100M per week at the beginning of the year, but have fallen to about $50M. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and TRON continue to be the top fee-generating blockchains.

• Ethereum scaling solutions, including optimistic and ZK rollups, continue to provide a low cost transaction option for users. Transaction counts across L2s rose from ~5M at the beginning of 2024 to between 7-10M in June/July 2024.

• Arbitrum experienced a significant jump in fees as the Layer Zero airdrop required users to "spend" a certain amount of ZRO to claim their tokens. Arbitrum users paid over $4M in fees on June 20 to claim the token, making for the most profitable day for Arbitrum in 2024.

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