Avalanche, a prominent chain in the market, operates as a blockchain platform featuring its native currency, AVAX. It competes directly with Ethereum, emphasizing scalability and transaction processing speed. AVAX serves a dual purpose: securing the Avalanche blockchain and covering transaction fees across the network.

In 2023, Avalanche experienced a substantial surge in new user adoption, starting from January 2022. In response to this growth, I conducted an analysis of the influx of new users and their retention within the Avalanche ecosystem. Subsequently, I delved into various projects to identify those that had successfully attracted the highest number of new users on Avalanche over the preceding 10 months, commencing from January 2023.

Since January 2022, the world of cryptocurrencies has been quite a rollercoaster ride. Big events like the Luna and UST crashes, as well as the FTX crash, have had an impact on various blockchain networks. During the past 1 year and 10 months, Avalanche, too, had its share of ups and downs.

What's fascinating is that after the FTX crash, the number of new users on Avalanche shot up by a whopping 946%, reaching a peak of 141,000 in just one week. However, it later dipped, and from March 2023, there have been some weeks where the total number of new users increased, showing a positive trend.

Over the last three months, an average of 42,000 new users per week joined Avalanche. But in the most recent months, the growth rate dropped by -4.3%.

When we take a close look at various projects and chains, it becomes evident that most of them witnessed a decline compared to the first quarters of 2022. However, in the case of Avalanche, something remarkable happened in the second quarter of 2023 - it attracted the largest number of new users.

To put this into perspective, during the highest point in a single week of the second quarter of 2023, the number of new users joining Avalanche increased by a whopping 48%.

In terms of the overall distribution of new users, it's noteworthy that 32% of the total new users chose to join Avalanche during the second quarter of 2023, while the lowest number of new users joined during the third quarter of 2022.

New Users Retention

I looked into how well new users stuck around over the past year. The concept is quite straightforward. Let's break it down.

Take, for instance, the period of October and November 2022, when a combined total of 400,000 new users hopped onto the Avalanche network. Among these, approximately 64% of the users who joined in October returned to make more transactions in November. Fast forward two months and about 48% of the October new users were still engaging with Avalanche.

This example helps us understand the user retention dynamics for different months. What's intriguing is that only the users who joined in October and November exhibited the highest retention rates. In contrast, the average retention rates for users in other months remained under 10%.

I categorized users by their joining date, and then I tracked their actions on Avalanche after their initial transactions. How do we interpret the chart? For instance, those users who became part of Avalanche before June 2022 only accounted for 9% of the active addresses in October 2023.

Users who joined in January to March 2023 seemed to be less active compared to other newcomers, and their level of activity declined quite rapidly.

I analyzed the activity of new users who became part of Avalanche within the past 30 days. Surprisingly, around 90% of these new users were active for fewer than 3 days during that period. Nevertheless, when we consider the distribution of transactions, approximately 60% of users engaged in less than 3 transactions, indicating that these new users were indeed active.

Looking at the bigger picture, of all the users within the last 30 days, 71% were established users, while the remaining 29% constituted new additions to the platform.

In the following charts, you'll find a heatmap that illustrates the distribution of new users and transactions on the Avalanche blockchain, broken down by days and hours of the week.