2022 Retrospective

    Introduction

    • In this Analysis, You will read about Ethereum 2022 Retrospective. In order to understand better, I divided my findings into three main categories:
    • Project ETH supply growth for 2023 by using different average gas prices. 
    • What is the highest value DEX swap by protocol?
      • Where were there the most DEX swaps by protocol?
    • Which were the highest gas-consuming NFT mints?

    Analyzed by Hess - Reading Time Almost 8 Min.

    What is Ethereum?

    • Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. Ethereum was conceived in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin
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    NFT Mints and Secondary sales Fee

    I should mention that all parameters are based on US dollars.

    • Like the transaction fees, The average mint fees in USD in January and February were much higher than in recent months. Due to the ETH price, The average mint fees decreased over time. The average mint fee was 100-500 US dollars in January and February, reaching 5-20$ in November and December.
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    • At the End of 2021, The Crypto winter didn’t start, and the total number of transactions on Ethereum was much higher than in 2022. I compared the two last months of 2021,2022 and expectations for 2023.

    • The Burnt GWEI in November and December 2021 was nearly 9B, while the burnt GWEI in November and December 2022 was 9x lower than in 2021.

    • For 2023, I expected four types of Growth. Activities in November and December 2023 increased 2x, 3x, 6x, and like 2021 9x higher than in 2023. If activities increase 2x in 2023, The Burnt GWEI would be 2.4B.

    DEXs

    • Users can use two types of DEXs. one DEX swaps directly on their platforms, and the other DEX is a DEX aggregator and uses other platforms to find the best and cheapest route for users. In the below charts, I put all types of DEXs.
    • Uniswap is the king among other platforms. Based on the number of transactions and Users, Uniswap had the highest number of swaps in daily shares. The daily share of swaps on Uniswap was 55-75% compared to other top popular DEXs.
    • Overall, 58% of swaps were on Uniswap, 14.3% were using Metamask, and 12.8% were on the 1-inch platform.
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    What is Gas?

    • Crypto gas refers to the cost required to perform a transaction on the Ethereum network. Ethereum miners, whose equipment and power support the network, will set a price to perform computations based on supply and demand.

    What is GWEI?

    • Gwei is a denomination of the cryptocurrency ether (ETH), used on the Ethereum network to buy and sell goods and services. A gwei is one-billionth of one ETH. Gwei is the most commonly used ether unit because it is easier to specify Ethereum gas prices.

    What are DEXs?

    • DEXs are decentralized crypto exchanges that offer access to digital assets without an intermediary. Instead of relying on a company to fill and record crypto trades, DEXs offer peer-to-peer (P2P) token swaps using blockchain technology. More specifically, DEXs use smart contracts to execute trades.

    What is NFT Mint?

    • Minting an NFT, or non-fungible token, is publishing a unique digital asset on a blockchain so that it can be bought, sold, and traded.

    Method

    Gas Fee:

    I Used Ethereum.core.fact_transactions table, and from the gas_price column, I extracted burnt GWEI. For 2023, I Calculated the brunt of GWEI in the last two months of 2022 and assumed a fixed growth for 2023.

    DEXs:

    • As you may know, We have a DEX table on Flipside. But the problem was only swaps of six DEXs were available on that table. So, I wanted to cover more DEXs. I used the fact event table and extracted swap tx_hashs. Then, I used the transfer token table and joined origin_to_address with the address from the Dim label table. We have a tag on the DIM label table that can be filtered to dex.
    • The last thing I did was join my Swap tx findings with the dex table.

    NFTs:

    • The easiest part was for NFT. I calculated the average daily price of ETH, and then I used the NFT mint table. On that table, the Tx fee is available. I joined with the price table and calculated the transaction fee in USD.

    Full Analysis

    Transactions and burnt GWEI

    Before I examine the burnt GWEI on Ethereum, Let’s take a quick look at average/median/max/min Fees daily since January 2022. Also, Let’s see which platforms consumed the max fee in 2022.

    • The ETH price had a lot of ups and downs during 2022. Over time, the ETH price decreased by nearly 50%. In the middle of 2022, The ETH price again increased and reached 2K US dollars but quickly dropped more. So, The average transaction fee decreased recently and is considerably different from the average fees in January or February. At that time, The average fees on Ethereum were 30-40 US dollars but now below 5 US dollars.

    • Last year, the Mev bot paid the maximum Ethereum gas fee, 113K US dollars.


      MEV, or Maximal Extractable Value, is a technique used by validators and bot operators to capture excess value from the slippage or spread enabled by on-chain transactions on decentralized blockchains.

    Burnt GWEI directly relates to the number of transactions on the Ethereum chain. As you can see, when the total number of transactions increased, The burnt GWEI increased, too, and when the total number of transactions decreased, The burnt GWEI decreased too.

    Let’s examine some key facts about DEXs:

    • The highest Volume: Curve with 335B US dollars. 1inch with 225B and Uniswap with 164B US dollars.
    • The Highest Number of Swaps: Uniswap, with 58% of total swaps, is in the first place.
    • The highest average Swap Volume: Syntheticx, with 535K US dollars, is in the first place. After that, Curve with 402K is in second place.
    • The Max Swap Volume: 1inch with 100M Swap volume is the top DEX based on max swap volume. 0x with 70M and Uniswap with 61M are the following places.
    • Median Swap Volume: Syntheticx, with 274K US dollars, is the top dex based on the highest Median Volume. Curve with 28K and Balance with 4K is the following places.
    • The highest number of Swaps in one Day: Uniswap, with 148K swaps in one day, is in First place. After that Metmask router with 35K is in the second place; after that, 1inch with 31K is in the third place.
    • The highest number of swaps of a token in one Day: WETH on Uniswap had the highest number of swaps in one day with 89K Swaps.
    • Highest Max Volume of a token: USDT on 1inch with 100M US dollars is in the first place. USDT on 0x with 70M US dollars and WETH on Curve with 59M US dollars are the following places.

    Top Collections based on Mint Fees

    • Based on the highest paid fees, Vaynersports pass with 78M US dollars Fees is in the first place. The second minted collection was Akutar with a 51M US dollars fee. The jims, with 12.9M US dollars in third place.

    • Based on the max paid fees, Tubby Cats, with 539K US dollars paid fee is in first place. Tokai Kingdom with 105K and Hedgies by DYDX with 67K US dollars are next places.

    • Based on the highest average fees, Tubby Cats with 34K, Benji bananas 12.7K, and Yokai Kingdom with 10K US dollars.

    Fees by Platforms ( Secondary Sales )

    • Users paid 683M US Dollars in fees by buying NFTs from Opensea. The second top platform is X2Y2, with a considerable difference from Opensea. Users paid 29M fees on that platform. The third one is Looksrare with 16M US dollars.

    THANK YOU FOR READING!

    ALL CODES AND CONTENTS WERE WRITTEN BY HESS.

    :bird: Twitter: @hessaminanloo

    :t-rex: Discord: hess#0890

    :calendar: Analyze Date: 2022/DEC/22

    Conclusion

    • In the last two months, The burnt GWEI has been around 1.2B. If Transactions activity increases 2x in 2023, The burnt GWEI would be 2.4. If the growth is the same like 2021, The burnt GWEI will 10B.

    • The highest number of swaps happened on Uniswap, and the highest volume went through the 1inch platform.

    • The highest paid fees for minting NFTs were related to the Vaynersports pass.

    • Users paid nearly 680M US dollars on Opensea for fess.