About the editor: Spencer Noon is an independent crypto investor & onchain analyst.

Editor’s note 📝 :

Last week the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) was held in Paris. It’s the largest annual European Ethereum event and jam-packed with technical talks, community events, and major announcements.

I did not attend EthCC this year but I always look forward to tracking the major developments coming out of the event. It’s usually a great indicator of where crypto’s bleeding edge is headed.

For this week’s newsletter theme, I selected five projects who in my personal opinion generated the most buzz** in Paris last week. For dramatic effect (and clicks) I’m calling them EthCC’s Biggest Winners.

Those projects were: Ethereum, Chainlink, Uniswap, Worldcoin, and The Graph.

At the top of each project entry we’ve posted a link to their respective EthCC milestone. Then, and like always, our contributors dive into the current onchain data for their analysis.

Hope you enjoy this week’s issue! I had a lot of fun putting it together.

—Spencer 🕛✌️

PS: We’re still looking for a newsletter sponsor, especially since we’re now paying Elon’s Twitter X more than $1700/mo to be a verified organization 😐. Please DM me on Telegram or send me an email if you’re interested 🫶.

EthCC Highlight 🇫🇷 : Vitalik Buterin's talk on Ethereum account abstraction

• With EthCC6 in the books, it’s a good time to view the Ethereum ecosystem through a wide-angle lens. Despite significant hurdles in the past year, the total value secured on-chain between ETH and major ERC-20 tokens stands at $350B, below all-time highs but still 9x above July 2020 levels. Outside of ETH, $76B in stablecoins are currently circulating on the network—the largest token category. Though stablecoin market caps have contracted this year, Ethereum’s crypto-economy remains well-capitalized.

• Looking at a breakdown of ERC-20 market caps (ex-stablecoins and wrapped assets), blockchain utilities including network scaling and other infrastructure—a hot topic of the conference—has swelled to around ¼ of ERC-20 market capitalization. But DeFi remains the largest dApp sector.

• While tracks such as Web3, NFTs, and Gaming focused on the application layer, upgrades at the base protocol level were also a point of discussion. Three months after Shapella, the validator set continues to grow, now at 686K. About 25M ETH is staked. The validator queue is still about 34 days.

• 🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: On July 18th, an Ethereum wallet dating back to genesis moved its total holdings of 61,216 ETH to another address. This was the first time the wallet had ever touched its ETH holdings. Tracking the holdings of genesis wallets and crowd sale participants is interesting in light of ongoing regulatory discussions about crypto assets and their status as securities or commodities.

EthCC Highlight 🇫🇷 : Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) launches on Mainnet

• The Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) is a protocol that provides a unified interface for dApps and web3 devs to securely manage cross-chain operations. CCIP is designed to address the interoperability challenge among different blockchain networks, enabling seamless communication and asset transfer. Since launching on July 17, Chainlink CCIP has generated $13,268 in revenue. CCIP has found early traction on Avalanche and Optimism, which represent 48.23% and 47.11% of revenue, respectively.

• In 2Q23, Chainlink Network processed 82.76M Price Feed TXs, which is down 17.12% quarter-over-quarter but still up 34.29% year-over-year. Polygon, Solana, and BNB Chain represent 56.9%, 38.4%, and 2.6% of TXs, respectively.

• In 2Q23, Chainlink Network generated 1.43M LINK in revenue from Price Feeds, which is down 12.29% quarter-over-quarter and 48.05% year-over-year. Ethereum's share of revenue is back up to 62.6% after 3 months of <60%.

EthCC Highlight 🇫🇷 : Uniswap unveils its next-gen protocol UniswapX

• For Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange in DeFi, trading volume and active addresses have historically been correlated with each other. However, in July 2022, a notable divergence occurred. Compared to July 2022, the daily average Uniswap volume dropped by 43%, from $1.22B to $695M. In contrast however, the daily average number of active addresses more than doubled, increasing from 25,206 to 53,013.

• Meme coins have played a pivotal role in driving the expansion of new users on Uniswap. Remarkably, 32% of all historical Uniswap users had their inaugural experience with the platform by engaging in Meme coin swapping. As the below chart shows, this percentage can surge to a remarkable 80% when it’s a Meme season.

• Uniswap attracts a diverse range of traders. Among its user base, 86% are classified as "Shrimp" users, 11% as "Dolphin" users, and 3% as "Whale" users. In terms of Ethereum usage, Uniswap's community can be categorized as follows: 88% of users are Novice, 11% are Intermediate, and 3% are Advanced users.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: The first purchase of $PEPE was made on Uniswap, spending approximately 0.013 ETH to acquire 2.519 trillion PEPE tokens. These tokens are currently valued at around $3.4M (reached a peak value of $4.5M).

EthCC Highlights 🇫🇷 : Worldcoin global launch + @dcbuild3r's excellent ZKML talk

• Worldcoin is an identity and financial network that consists of a privacy-preserving digital identity (World ID) and a digital currency (WLD) distributed to users for being a human. Users prove their humanity using an iris scan. WLD is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, designed for utility and governance purposes. Worldcoin users receive their tokens on Optimism. Since launching on July 24th, 114.5M WLD tokens are in circulation with 291k unique holders.

• In the first 3 days since launching, the total volume of WLD swaps has surpassed 6.7M WLD, which is more than $14M. The majority of the swap activity has been on Ethereum. However, Optimism has recently started to gain volume, especially among Worldcoin users, while WLD on Ethereum is largely held by CEXs.

• Despite the higher volume of swaps on Ethereum, WLD tokens are being heavily utilized in DeFi protocols on Optimism. WLD users mainly interact with the Worldcoin contract. Protocols such as MetaMask, Uniswap, and 1inch are also favorable among users.

• 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: WLD’s supply cap is fixed at 10B tokens, 75% of which will be allocated to the Worldcoin community. At launch, all 7.5B community tokens were minted, however, only 500M of them became available. The rest of these tokens will be unlocked over 15 years and vesting is enforced by four smart contracts. This transaction shows the distribution of 7.5B WLD tokens to vesting wallets and the initial 500M tokens to the World Assets cold wallet.

EthCC Highlight 🇫🇷 : The Graph Network gets a major performance boost with Substreams launch

• Since the launch of The Graph Network, quality of service and syncing performance has significantly improved, with the network now outperforming the hosted service. Currently the network achieves 78ms median latency, ~50% better than the hosted service, and a query success rate of 99.99%. Additionally, over the last 6 months the network has newly enabled support for Polygon, Celo, Gnosis, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Fantom and soon Optimism so high quality of service can be experienced across chains.

• To date, the network has processed over 3.2M GRT in query fees, with 80% usage coming from Ethereum. However, dapps are increasingly querying Arbitrum, Gnosis and Celo. It is expected this distribution will shift as more dapps upgrade from the hosted service to the network. Dapps across chains can upgrade their subgraph to the network any time.

• On July 20th, substreams-powered subgraphs were enabled on the network that improve syncing speed of subgraphs up to 100x. In the image, blue are visits to substreams docs, green are visits to substreams-powered subgraphs docs and red are substreams-powered subgraph deployments. Since the launch last week, over 20 new substreams-powered subgraphs have been deployed on Graph Studio.