Bankless | 5 Projects Thriving in the Bear Market

In this bear market with a series of scandals, which protocols and technologies are still advancing and continuously attracting new users? Let Bankless tell you.

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2. Sound

Sound is one of the leading music NFT platforms in the industry, with a record-breaking number of music NFTs minted in November, surpassing 12,000 NFTs in that month alone and totaling over 30,000 minted this year.

In addition to the quantity of music, the number of collectors has also sharply increased, with over 6,500 total collectors and 1,442 new collectors joining in November alone, generating a trading volume of $271,000.

3. Optimism

Aside from social-related protocols, Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions are also gaining further adoption.

Optimism, as the first coin-funded Layer 2 scaling solution, has seen a steady increase in daily transaction counts since the beginning of the year, reaching a peak of 500,000 transactions in a single day. For reference, Ethereum averages about 1 million transactions per day, meaning Optimism's transaction count has at one point reached half of Ethereum's.

Furthermore, Optimism's unique address count has also been on the rise, surpassing 2 million unique addresses. The key indicator used to measure developer activity and the number of daily contract deployments on the network hit a new high last month, with 115 contracts deployed in a single day.

4. Arbitrum

In addition to Optimism, Arbitrum, another Layer 2 scaling solution and competitor, is also performing impressively, if not better.

While Arbitrum's daily transaction count has recently declined, it once reached a peak of 570,000 transactions, surpassing Optimism's 500,000.

The unique address count is close to 2.25 million, slightly ahead of Optimism's 2 million.

The peak of daily contract deployments occurred in October, with 176 contracts deployed in a single day, and recently, multiple days have seen over 100 contracts deployed in a single day.

From the data of Optimism and Arbitrum, it can be seen that even in the current bear market, Layer 2 solutions can still attract users steadily. Compared to Optimism, Arbitrum's advantage lies in its lack of a coin launch. If any related news is released, it is expected to further boost the data.

5. Rocket Pool

The last one on the list is the Ethereum staking protocol Rocket Pool, where staking ETH on the platform earns users liquid rETH tokens. The total circulation of rETH has rapidly increased in the past few months, surpassing 150,000 tokens. However, compared to the leading Ethereum staking protocol Lido, Rocket Pool still lags behind, as Lido currently holds 4.5 million ETH.

However, Rocket Pool's mechanism differs from Lido. Rocket Pool's Minipool feature allows users to run an Ethereum node with just 16 ETH, although requiring a certain amount of RPL tokens as insurance. This feature has proven to be a significant driver of protocol growth since its launch.

The Minipool was launched in November last year, and the current number of nodes has exceeded 10,000.