This is issue #71 of the on-chain analytics newsletter that reaches more than 11k crypto investors every week 📈

This week our contributor analysts cover L1 Networks: Near, Avalanche, Terra, Solana and Binance Smart Chain.

• NEAR is a sharded, Proof-of-Stake public blockchain. NEAR supports smart contracts targeting both WebAssembly (Rust, AssemblyScript) and the EVM (Solidity, Vyper). Aurora––launched this week––allows developers to use NEAR the same way they use Ethereum, entirely through MetaMask, using ERC20 tokens, and even paying gas costs in ETH. Since launching mainnet last year, the total number of accounts on NEAR has grown to 179,240 accounts as of May 11. The rate of growth was 225% through April.

• The daily transaction count on NEAR exploded in the month of April, reaching as high as 100k per day in recent weeks.

• Just weeks after listing on DappRadar in April, NEAR already has 4 apps ranked in the top 10 in the exchange and marketplace categories. The number of users engaging with these apps, Ref Finance, NEARNames, Paras and Pulse, has been growing rapidly, with average MoM growth reaching 600%.

• Avalanche (AVAX) is an open-source platform for launching decentralized applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. Despite a 50% reduction in fees in a March network upgrade, Avalanche is the 4th Highest Layer-1 in fees (note: fees in on Avalanche are burned, benefitting all network participants). Fees aren't a perfect measure, but they do show real user demand and can't be faked like trading volume.

• In the six weeks since the Apricot Phase 1 Upgrade, Avalanche users burned more fees on smart contract transactions than in the first six months of Mainnet. Fees for Avalanche users got significantly cheaper, but the burn rate increased as more users, applications, and assets joined the network.

• The Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge launch on February 8th unlocked DeFi to grow on Avalanche. In the time since, users have executed over 2.1M transactions, created 95,000 unique wallet addresses, and transferred more than $180M in assets to Avalanche from Ethereum.

• The UST supply continued to climb strongly over the last few months, more than doubling since the last edition of this newsletter in March. The total supply is now sitting at 2.07 billion UST, mainly driven by the launches of Mirror protocol in December 2020 and Anchor protocol in March 2021.

• As a result, the fee income from UST has increased over the last six months. This rise in UST fees has compensated for a slight downturn in KRT fees. Other fee income includes the remaining Terra stablecoins and fees paid in LUNA. All fees amount to ~$11.5m in annualized income for LUNA stakers.

• In addition to transaction fees, Terra rewards stakers with daily seigniorage rewards of 39k LUNA - this amounts to $220m per year. Staking LUNA has also resulted in major airdrops of MIR and ANC. At current prices, the MIR and ANC airdrops equal a staggering $300m and $550m this year, respectively.

• TVL on Solana hit $1.6B earlier this week, on the back of massive growth (+700%) since the beginning of April. Leading the charge was Raydium, which peaked at above $1B in TVL — and newer dapps are showing even more rapid growth trajectories. Solfarm, a yield aggregator, hit $100MM in TVL within days of launch.

• Alongside app growth, the censorship resistance of Solana has been steadily trending up as well. There are now over 600 validator nodes in the network, with efforts underway to raise that number into the multiple thousands by the end of the year.

• The ongoing Solana Season hackathon is approaching 10K applicants. That’s a 3x increase in apps compared to the prior hackathon, which was just two months ago — apps are coming in from across the globe, with ~1k apps from each of SEA, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, China, and North America.