Method

The first step is to identify the smart contract deployment transactions on the Near blockchain.

After investigating transactions and the Near protocol docs I reached the conclusion that the deployment transactions have ACTION_NAME = DeployContract in the actions_events table.

Each of these calls the new method in the contract, which is like an init() function initializing the contract onto the blockchain.

It is important to note that Deploy transactions also happen when a contract updates its code calling deploy on itself, so it is important to note that the original contract creation is its first deployment action, but checking the number of updates on already existing contracts will be an interesting metric too.

To find the top 5 contracts in the desired timeframe I used 2 metrics: number of transactions made to the contract and number of unique users interacting with the contract.

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All tables used are from the flipside near.core database

Date: 2022-08-01

Contracts getting deployed

Here we can see the number of contracts deployed on the Near blockchain each day since September 2021 (oldest available date for data on the db).

• Near contract creation entered an uptrend on January 2022 reaching about 100 new contracts per day on April, but has since fallen significantly to a level just under 20 contracts per day, which surely is impacted by the general crypto winter.

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• There are some days when contract deployments spiked a lot, like September 16th when 644 contracts where deployed on the network !!

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• The cumulative line seems to be smoothly rising until the end of April, when we saw the most “traffic” in contracts, but has since been flatter as not so many new contracts are getting created at the current time period.

Top 5 new contracts during July 2022

During July about 1300 new contracts were established on the Near blockchain, so let’s see which of them were the most popular among users :

As we see the top 5 contracts are quite different between the 2 metrics !

That could mean that there are not many trending protocols that emerged during July, attracting a lot of users and having a lot of transactions at the same time.

The only one occurring in both pie charts is PembRock, a leveraged yield farming application.

It is the top one by transaction count and ranked 3rd by user count, so we can assume it is the most popular one accounting for both metrics simultaneously.

That makes it a trending protocol during July on Near blockchain that has caught the attention of users !

Contract creations/updates during July 2022

Now let’s focus on contract activity during July:

• On average 20 contracts are getting deployed onto the blockchain each day over the past month, with the exception of July 19 when 69 contracts were launched.

• Contract updates happen on average 25 times per day, but reached close to 1200 updates on July 19

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July 19 seems to have been a busy day for Near developers, but generally there is a low level of action during the past month.

As expected, on average there are more contract updates each day than contract creations, which makes sense since maintanance on an already existing application is more common than the launch of a fresh app.

Note that the updates chart possibly includes multiple updates for the same contracts and that it includes only contract updates, not creations.