Flow vs Other L1s
How does Flow compare to other L1s in terms of user **retention**? Is a user who made a transaction previously likely to make another transaction a week or a month later? Compare and contrast this type of activity vs other L1s like Solana and Ethereum
Flow seems to have a lot more new users (starting from the first available date onwards) daily than old, or returning users. This is shown both in count and % terms very clearly. This could be that a lot of wallets are made and used in centralized exchanges such as Binance
or others, specifically to trade the denominated token itself and not necessarily to interact with the ecosystem that Flow
offers. Flow
seems to have wallet support for Ledger hardware wallets but does not have a MetaMask
-like equivalent which would make it easier to use for the average person. The low numbers could also be attributed to how new the chain is as well.
Ethereum has a good amount, above 50% in most days, and weeks, that are returning or old users. This is expected as it is the no 1 L1 chain, is no longer new (we're looking at the last 90 days) and most of the users have been using the chain for a long time. What we see in the above graph is that on the week of March 14-21st there was not a lot of traffic through the network so it may not be a good starting point necessarily. This gets corrected on the 2nd week 21-28th March when these wallets that were inactive start appearing in the mix.
Polygon is still the leading L2 choice for a lot of people and seems to follow a similar but not exactly the same pattern as Ethereum
. What we see is that a lot of the users are returning or old users, which is good, as it means that the ecosystem has a loyal userbase. What is slightly worrying, at least in the last 90 days, is the amount of new users coming into Polygon
.
Solana, similarly to Polygon
, Solana
seems to have a loyal userbase as most SIGNERS
are returning or old users. What is worrying, at least in the last 90 days, is the decline in new SIGNERS
, wallets coming into Solana
.
Osmosis, similarly to Solana
and Polygon
seems to have a loyal userbase as most SIGNERS
are returning or old users. What is very worrying for Osmosis
, at least in the last 90 days, is that there are not that many new users.
Notes
Something to be noted is that for Flow
there's not enough data ~ 40 days compared to the rest of the chains. For Osmosis
and Solana
the chains went down for a few days, therefore the data is incomplete at best.
Last but not least it is important to understand that this analysis starts 90 days ago onwards. What is expected is that this is a proxy of the complete data and that the population we're comparing against is compared to and starting from that day, week (90 days ago), to understand what the difference would be if I chose any other date (see below 180 days for ETH
).
The reason why I did not chose this timeframe for all of the chains is that Flow
for which the comparison is done is a relatively new chain and also the reason for choosing this timeframe compared to the first 90 days for each chain is that there were different market conditions, crypto adaption e.t.c at the launch of each of these projects, so it would not be a fair comparison at all in my eyes.
Summary
Given the above notes, what we can see overall is that Flow
has a lot of new users, which is a great sign, but these users are not returning back to use the chain again as it seems. This could be due to a lack of support for a browser-based wallet, marketing or other reasons. For example, it could just be that the chain itself has a different target demographic and investor-type, at least for now. What we can see overall is that the majority of the other chains, minus maybe Ethereum
are dropping increasingly in both new and old user numbers, which is not really a great sign, but if we keep in mind the macroeconomic conditions*, then we can appreciate that there is still a lot of demand for all of them.