As the cryptocurrency market recovered from 2022 lows in Q1 2023, a Messari report shows that Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, leads in various financial and ecosystem metrics, solidifying its position in decentralized applications (dapps) and smart contracts.
Despite a modest decline in network usage by around 2.5%, the report notes that Ethereum remained resilient and dominated across several key indicators. For instance, its market capitalization posted a quarter-on-quarter increase of 83%, outpacing its peers in the “layer-1” category.
Additionally, the smart contracts platform’s revenue, derived from the sum of all fees collected by the protocol, rose to $457 million in Q1 2023, nearly 2.8 times the combined revenue of all other featured competing layer-1 networks.
Ethereum dominates with the highest TVL
Ethereum’s leadership also extended to other areas of the ecosystem.
The platform led decentralized finance (DeFi) when ranked by total value locked (TVL) and transaction volume. DeFiLlama data shows that Ethereum manages over $24.9 billion, more than half of all the DeFi TVL when writing on June 18.
Moreover, Ethereum maintained its dominance in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), accounting for the highest volume among all featured layer-1 networks, Messari added.
The report also notes that inflation and deflationary pressures are critical to assessing a network’s viability and sustainability. Using this metric, ethereum (ETH) and the binance coin (BNB) were the only tokens exhibiting deflationary tendencies, with their supply decreasing by 0.2% and 5.4%, respectively. This was primarily due to their mechanisms of burning a portion of transaction fees.
In Ethereum, the implementation of EIP-1559 saw the beginning of a portion of the “Base fee” that is not paid to validators. In Ethereum’s transaction fee model, the “Base fee” is a fee that every user must pay when transferring tokens or deploying smart contracts.
According to UltraSound Money, 3,398,675.70 ETH has since been burned and removed from circulation.
Ethereum’s network strength was also reflected in its validator ecosystem. With a security budget totaling $32.6 billion, Ethereum has a considerable staked value among all proof-of-stake layer-1 networks. Despite stake-weight limits, Ethereum’s vast number of validators, at 618,797, pointed out the network’s decentralization and security.
As of June 18, on-chain data shows that 19,801,316 ETH has been staked, with the average stake per validator being 32.19 ETH.
