In its latest study, infrastructure provider Web3 Alchemy looks back at statistics showing that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is growing rapidly. For example, the creation of new smart contracts on the Goerli testnet is up 577% in one year.
The development of the cryptocurrency ecosystem is booming
According to the latest research done by infrastructure provider Web3 Alchemy, the 1st quarter of this year shows that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is undergoing significant development. While it is far too early to dare to speak of a bull run despite the price action in recent months, it must be acknowledged that projects are building value on both sides.
For example, this is evidenced by a 577% increase in the deployment of new smart contracts on Goerli, an Ethereum testnet, compared to Q1 2022:
Figure 1 – Creation of new smart contracts on Goerli
However, the graph below also shows a 46% drop from last quarter. There are at least two explanations for this, the first being that the fourth quarter of 2022 was particularly prolific in terms of developments.
Another reason is the scarcity of ETH on Goerli, which makes testing increasingly difficult. Moreover, although ETH was already trading peer-to-peer, this trading has been accentuated since liquid markets have been created, such as LayerZero’s bridge giving a price to supposedly fictitious assets.
Some of these developments have therefore migrated to another Ethereum testnet: Sepolia. Moreover, Alchemy says that when it launched its faucet in March, an application that allows users to retrieve cryptocurrencies for free on a testnet, the 70,000 daily visitors were exceeded.
However, not all activity can migrate quickly from one testnet to another, so existing apps on Goerli would need to be deployed on Sepolia as well, to allow developers to test more reliably on the latter.
Ethereum and its layers 2
Beyond the activity on the testnets, the main network is not left out. In fact, the Ethereum blockchain has seen the creation of smart contracts increase by 48% between the first quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2022.
This trend can also be seen among layers 2 Arbitrum (ARB) and Optimism (OP), but also on the Polygon sidechain (MATIC). On the comparative data, the past quarter shows a cumulative increase of 160% on the three networks, although a decrease of 30% is to be noted compared to the fourth quarter of 2022.
This upward trend can also be seen in the bridged funds to layers 2, which shows the growing popularity of scaling solutions. As a result, the number of users using these transfers is estimated to have increased by 518% over one year:
Figure 2 – Number of users sending funds to Arbitrum and Optimism
So, as we have seen on several occasions, the ecosystem continues to build a little more each day, and these few data confirm these observations, which bodes well for the years to come.
