Multi Chain Bytes - 1–28 Jan ‘22

Howdy farmers 👩‍🌾 !

2021 was the year the ecosystem went multichain, with more than 1/3rd of Ethereum’s TVL moving to other chains

With Multichain Bytes we aim to bring you a weekly digest of activity and trends across the multichainverse with up to date info on it’s evolution.

Detailed metrics and analysis

Total Value Locked

• All blockchains except Solana had a sizeable increase in TVL. Fantom leading with 141% growth MoM with Polygon following behind with a 50% increase in TVL.
• Andre’s ve(3,3) release on Fantom and the associated DefiLlama snapshot ushered in massive capital into the Fantom ecosystem in search of high yields.

• On Polygon, the rise of P2E games like Sunflower Farmers, Crypto Riders and Crypto Unicorns and DeFi protocols like QiDao, as well as newer projects like Market & Tetu have contributed to the increased TVL
• Solana’s network outage issues created negative ripple effects causing a large number of arbitrage opportunities. Liquidation and arbitrage bots jamming the network caused an outage. Solana’s TVL has recorded the biggest drop going down -26% for the four weeks ended Jan’28.

Daily Transactions

• Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche and xDAI saw the biggest change in daily transactions for the week ending Jan’28 vs. Jan’7
• Polygon and xDAI saw daily transactions dropping by -24% and -16% respectively.
• Fantom and Avalanche saw daily transactions increase by 42% and 23% for the same period.
• Polygon side-chain saw a massive surge in gas prices and txns resulting from a bot attack on the Sunflower Farmers game. The drop in daily txns is attributable to the fall in $SFF price from $5 to less than $1, and the game developers taking the game into maintenance mode to smooth the rough ends.

Network fees

• Polygon, BSC, Avalanche and Ethereum recorded declines in avg. txn fees to the tune of -58%, -28%, -22% and -15% for the week ending 28 Jan vs. 7 Jan.
• FTM recorded an increase of +15% in avg. txn fees for the same period. With avg. daily txns for the week ending 28 Jan almost breaching Ethereum’s, Fantom’s avg fees are going up despite a drop in FTM token price for the week ending 28 Jan vs. 7 Jan.
• The decline in BSC’s avg network fees is a result of the validators proposing and voting in favour of lowering the fee structure on BSC. The proposal is in line with the network’s goal of maintaining its position as one of the cheapest and fastest available blockchain networks. Further, the drop offs recorded in daily txns on BSC further pushed the average fees down.

Daily active addresses

• Blockchain networks at large recorded declines in average active wallets for the week ending Jan’28 vs. Jan’07. Barring Fantom, every chain recorded a decline in active wallets.
• Polygon and xDAI led the drop with -38% and -37% change in active wallets for the week ending Jan’28 over the average active addresses at the close of week ending Jan’07.
• Fantom has been the best performing chain recording +20% growth in active wallets for the week ending Jan’28 vs. Jan’07.
• The ve(3,3) effect coupled with farmers looking for juicier yield farms attracted users to the Fantom network. The 38% drop in Polygon on the other hand is also again attributed to the SunflowerLand bot spam fix.

Dapp growth

• Developers continue to build and launch new decentralized applications across chains. All chains have posted a growth in new dapps launched between the 1st and 4th week ending Jan’28.
• Despite economic challenges posed by higher gas fees, Ethereum continues to attract new apps as the predominant smart contract platform and witnessed an 8% growth in new dapps for the week ending Jan’28 vs. Jan’07.
• BSC, MATIC, Avalanche and Solana all recorded growth in new Dapps recording 12%, 12%, 16% and 6% change for the week ending Jan’28 vs. Jan’07.

NFT Sales

• Avalanche weekly NFT sales volumes goes past $1.6m for the week ending Jan’28 over Jan’07 recording +84% volume growth during the month. Projects like CraftIsland and Yield Hunt have seen weekly volumes rise by +2,347%, and 55.2% to $272k and $820k for the week ended Jan’28.
• Solana and Ronin recorded the biggest drop in sales for the week ended Jan’28 vs. Jan07. SOL dropped -38% while Ronin recorded -51% decline in sales. Axie Infinity’s volume decline of -21% for the week ended Jan’28 over Jan’07 explains the drop on the Ronin chain.

NFTs on Ethereum

• Led by LooksRare, Ethereum continued with its dominance of the NFT ecosystem. Some market analysts believe LooksRare volumes reflect wash-trading — or trading NFTs at inflated prices to floor prices for encashing the platform’s trade rewards.
• Opensea continued to maintain its momentum growing volumes +88% M-o-M for month ended Jan’28. Projects like World of Women (+184.83%), CryptoSkulls (+135,666%), BAYC (+%98.55%) and MAYC (+69.9%) contributed to this growth.

L2 Adoption

The Top 5 Layer-2 protocols (Arbitrum, Dydx, Optimism, Metis Andromeda & Loopring) currently hold $4.9 billion, or 90% of the Total Value Locked across all of L2’s.

• Arbitrum is the largest layer-2 solution with $2.8 billion, or 51% of the overall TVL for the week ending Jan’28 2022.
• Among the top 5, barring Metis Andromeda, every protocol recorded a decline in TVL for the week ending Jan’28 vs. Jan’7. Metis saw TVL climb 65% from $246m to $406m for the week ending Jan’28. Metis growth can be attributed to the native DEXs Netswap and Tethys that launched last month.
• Boba Network, ZKSwap V2 and Loopring saw the largest negative change in TVL for the fourth week ending Jan’28 vs. week ending Jan’7. Boba TVL dropped -48% while ZKSwap V2 and Loopring dropped -29% and -26% respectively.

Optimism vs Arbitrum

• Optimism and Arbitrum ended Jan’22 with daily txns up +52% and +32% for the week ended Jan’28 vs. Jan’07.
• Data from l2beat.com shows TVL for Optimism and Arbitrum dropped -14% and -2% respectively for the above period. Despite the fall, new Dapps continued to adopt these scaling solutions with no. of dapps up 35% (Opt), and 5% (Arb) for the week ended Jan’28 vs. Jan’07
• Optimism had the launch of Zipswap, a native capital-efficient AMM launch along with the growing usage of Perp Protocol and Lyra Finance