How much did Ethereum grow in the first quarter of 2022 compared to last year?

The cryptocurrency research firm Bankless released a data report on Ethereum on the 29th, comparing in detail the changes in Ethereum between the first quarters of 2021 and 2022. Ethereum has shown remarkable growth over the past year.

The following numbers compare the performance of the first quarters of 2021 and 2022.

Ethereum Protocol

Network revenue grew from $1.6 billion to $2.4 billion, a 46% increase. This data measures the amount of transaction fees paid in ETH by network users. $2.1 billion, 87% of the revenue, was removed from ETH's circulating supply through the burning mechanism of EIP-1559, which officially launched in August 2021.

ETH's currency inflation rate decreased from 1.10% to 0.51%, a 54% drop. This indicator tracks the net change in ETH supply. New ETH is issued through block rewards as an incentive for miners to confirm network transactions.

The daily average of active addresses increased by 4% from 507,662 to 529,018. This metric tracks the average number of addresses interacting with the network on a single day during the quarter.

The amount of ETH staked increased from 5.2 million to 10.9 million, a 111% growth. This represents the amount of ETH staked on the beacon chain before Ethereum transitions from PoW to PoS, accounting for approximately 9.2% of the total circulating supply.

DeFi Ecosystem

The Total Value Locked (TVL) of DeFi protocols increased by 82% from $49.1 billion to $89.5 billion. This data measures the value of assets deposited into Ethereum-based DeFi protocols.

The circulating supply of stablecoins increased by 188% from $42.3 billion to $122.1 billion. The data includes both centralized and decentralized stablecoins, native assets, and assets bridged to Ethereum from other blockchains.

The trading volume on decentralized spot exchanges increased by 667% from $513.4 billion to $3.9 trillion. The trading volume on decentralized perpetual contract exchanges increased by 2,704% from $7.4 billion to $209.1 billion.

NFT Ecosystem

The trading volume in the NFT market soared by 19,290% from $60.6 million to $11.64 billion, primarily driven by the two largest NFT markets, OpenSea and LooksRare. Approximately 226,000 unique wallets have bought or sold NFTs this quarter.

The number of unique wallets holding NFTs increased from 980,000 to 3.98 million, a 306% growth, including ERC-721 and ERC-1155 token standards.

The floor price of BAYC continues to rise, surpassing 120 ETH by the end of March; CryptoPunks peaked at the end of last year, with the current floor price around 60 ETH.

Layer2 Ecosystem

The TVL of Ethereum Layer2 scaling solutions increased by 964% from $687 million to $7.3 billion. The data includes optimistic rollups, zk rollups, and validiums.

Optimism has an average of 31,000 monthly active addresses, while Arbitrum has an accumulated unique address count of 483,000. These two networks launched in the third quarter of 2021, and limited data prevents direct comparison.

Arbitrum's network revenue is $9.4 million, while Optimism's network revenue is $5.7 million.