About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund.

Network Coverage
Coverage on BTC, ETH, and Stablecoins.

• After accumulating for most of 2022, BTC miner on-chain holdings dropped in June following BTC’s crash down to $20k. The following chart shows the aggregate holdings of about 28k addresses that received recent transfers from mining pools, adjusted to filter out exchange addresses. Some mining operations likely became unprofitable after BTC’s price drop which led to capitulation.

• Hash rate for some older mining hardware like S9’s and S7’s has dropped off precipitously over the last month as it became harder to turn a profit. But overall, Bitcoin hash rate from other hardware has remained strong and is still near all-time high levels.

• On June 22, Bitcoin difficulty decreased by 2.4% providing some relief for remaining mining operations. As always, Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment mechanism continues to work just as designed to keep average block time around ten minutes.

• As the price of ETH has fallen more than 60% over the past few months, the volume of swaps to stablecoins has increased. Swap volume to stablecoins from March to May has increased 32% as users seek less volatile assets in the midst of the continuing crypto selloff. The number of swaps to stablecoins has also increased significantly, from 161k in March to 193k in May.

• Although USDT still has the greatest circulating supply of Ethereum stablecoins, the swap volume into USDC has far outweighed that of USDT and other competing stablecoins over the past few months. Most days saw between $8m and $30m in swap volume to USDC.

• The number of outflows to CEXs has remained relatively constant at about 30k to 60k most days over the past few months despite the extreme market volatility. This steady outflow suggests that most users are holding their tokens or swapping to stablecoins instead of cashing out their funds.

• OpenSea, the NFT marketplace platform, is currently using the most ETH gas. OpenSea recently launched the latest version of their smart contracts on June 11. The biggest headlines surrounding the new contracts are on fees. The new contracts include a move to Seaport, which was designed to help cut ETH gas fees by as much as 35%. Despite those changes, OpenSea still generates the most fees for the Ethereum network.

• As seen below, it didn't take long for users to start trading with the new contract. That activity propelled the new contracts to the top spot on the Ethereum chain once again.

• ETH spent on gas spiked quickly. In the short time of 12 days, the OpenSea contract has about 2.5k ETH spent on transactions — almost $2.5m USD. This level of activity sets OpenSea apart in the ETH ecosystem as it uses about 10% of all gas spent in the ecosystem.