Rethinking Ethereum: Understanding the Development of Ethereum in the Past 5 Years with 5 Indicators

Written by: Signor_Yuan

Source: Tokenview

 

We know that Ethereum has a cryptocurrency Ether (ETH) that can be used for payment. Like other blockchains, Ethereum has the characteristics of being difficult to tamper with and decentralized. Ethereum is the world's leading programmable blockchain. On Ethereum, we can write various smart contracts through code. Thousands of developers have developed various decentralized applications (dapps) through Ethereum.

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From 2015 to 2020, Ethereum has never stopped its development, and it is now pivotal in the field of smart contracts. Let's look at the performance of Ethereum through Tokenview's Ethereum chain data and 5 major indicators.

Block performance-Ethereum has over 9,191,593 blocks

At 23:59:03 on December 31, 2019, Ethereum broke out the last block of 2019, and the height of the Ethereum block reached 9,191,593. We recorded this moment through the eth block browser eth.tokenview.com developed by Tokenview.

Since the launch of the Ethereum mainnet in 2015, as of December 31, 2019, the space occupied by Ethereum nodes has reached 3304GB, and the Bitcoin network at this time was 300.9GB.

In order to stabilize the burst time, Ethereum has a difficulty bomb that constantly increases the difficulty of mining. As the value provided by the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb increases every 100,000 blocks, it never declines, and it shows an exponential growth. Therefore, at a certain point in time, the Difficulty Bomb will quickly increase the difficulty of the network and reduce the block production speed. This phenomenon began to appear in May 2017. During the period from September 22 to October 15, the block production time of Ethereum was about 30 seconds, which doubled the average time. The phenomenon continued for as long as For 24 days, on September 29, 2017, Ethereum's block generation time reached a record high of 30.5 seconds, and only 2829 blocks were generated on that day. In order to solve this problem, on October 16, 2017, Ethereum conducted a Byzantine fork, created new rules, and further improved the entire system. The Byzantine fork made mining significantly less difficult, which made transactions on the Ethereum platform The speed has increased significantly, but the mining reward has also been reduced from 5 ETH to 3.

After the fork, Ethereum's daily block production resumes to about 6000 again. In December 2018, the problem reappeared. Ethereum upgraded Constantinople & St. Petersburg in the early morning of March 1, 2019 to postpone the difficulty bomb and greatly improve the efficiency of the platform. However, the mining reward was changed from the previous 3 The number of ETHs has been reduced to two. After this upgrade, Ethereum returns to the level of 6,400 blocks per day. On October 5, 2019, the Ethereum difficulty bomb once again showed its impact, and the average block production time increased. Although Ethereum upgraded Istanbul in 2019, it mainly upgrades the underlying protocol of Ethereum and upgrades the overall performance. It does not include plans to delay the difficulty bomb. On January 1, 2020, Ethereum upgraded the Muir Glacier to delay the difficulty bomb again. After the upgrade of the Muir Glacier, the current block production time has been reduced by about 25%, and the sunrise block has reached the average of 6000+ Level.

Trading performance-Ethereum network transactions have exceeded 611,556,651

As of December 31, 2019, the number of transactions on the Ethereum network has reached a staggering 611,556,651.

On January 5, 2018, the number of Ethereum transactions on that day reached 1,271,577, the highest in history. The number of transactions on Ethereum on January 12, 2020 exceeded 523,000. Although not as high as the peak number of transactions, the Ethereum network is still very active, while the number of Bitcoin transactions during the same period was less than 320,000. According to statistics, the total transaction volume of the Ethereum network in 2019 exceeded 144.2 billion U.S. dollars, and the total transaction fee exceeded 37.4 million U.S. dollars. Although Ethereum has transferred more and more stablecoins to ETH with lower fees, the total transaction volume is still lower than Bitcoin.

From the data chart of the daily transaction volume of Ethereum in the past 4 years, it can be found that since May 2017, Ethereum's daily transaction volume has started to increase significantly, and it exceeded USD 34.25 billion on January 14, 2018. Of transaction volume set a historical record of single-day transaction volume in the history of Ethereum. The heat did not gradually calm down until the end of February 2018.

Market Cap Performance-Ethereum's Market Cap Exceeds $ 15.8 Billion

After less than 5 years of development, Ethereum has a market value of more than $ 15.8 billion today. On January 15, 2018, the price of ETH soared to an all-time high of $ 1,389.18, and the market value of Ethereum exceeded $ 134.7 billion. Although this result is far from the market value of Bitcoin today's US $ 150.9 billion (the highest was over US $ 325 billion), Ethereum, as the first programmable blockchain to go online, has already achieved good results. It can be expected that it will continue to maintain its dominant position of smart contract platform in the future.

Network Performance-Ethereum's latest mining difficulty is 2.09P, and the network's computing power is 160TH / s

The consensus algorithm used by the Ethereum network is POW (proof of work), which is a proof-of-work mechanism, which means more work and more work. The mining difficulty of the entire network is a relative value relative to the computing power and is dynamically adjusted. It represents the output value of each T computing power in a unit time. The greater the difficulty of the entire network, the smaller the output value of each T computing power. As mentioned earlier, Ethereum continues to increase the difficulty of mining over time through the difficulty bomb. After Ethereum enters 2.0, in addition to achieving higher scalability and decentralization, the consensus mechanism will be converted from POW to POS (proof of equity). The existence of the difficulty bomb is also to prevent miners from jointly resisting the conversion from POW to POS. However, as the difficulty of mining continues to increase, the impact of the difficulty bomb can only be delayed by upgrading until the conversion is realized. By following the mining difficulty trend chart, we can also verify that three upgrades in the history of Ethereum successfully delayed the difficulty bomb, reduced the difficulty of mining, and maintained the activity of miners.

The Ethereum Berlin Hard Fork is tentatively scheduled for June this year. At that time, Ethereum may increase the block size from 1M to 8M. Ethereum 2.0 will bring greater capacity and more transactions per second to the platform. Implementing the conversion from POW to POS will also reduce hardware waste, and Tokenview will continue to pay attention to the next Ethereum upgrade and related discussions.

Activity performance-Ethereum's latest active addresses 206356, new addresses 40664

The number of active addresses and the number of new addresses are important indicators to measure the activity of the blockchain. The number of active addresses refers to the total number of addresses where at least one transaction has occurred in the unit period, and the number of newly added addresses refers to the total number of newly created addresses (containing at least one asset) in the unit period.

We have intercepted data from the active address and new address data graphs from January 1, 2019 to January 12, 2020. It can be found from the data that the minimum daily number of newly added addresses on Ethereum is 28,140, ​​and the number of newly added addresses on November 28, 2019 exceeded 630,000. On June 16, 2018, there were nearly 1.55 million Ethereum addresses with transactions, reaching the peak of this period.

It is worth noting that on January 12, 2020, the number of new addresses on Ethereum was 43,119, and the number of active addresses on that day exceeded 250,000. The Ethereum network currently maintains a good level of activity.

to sum up

Ethereum has been going on for almost 5 years since 2015. Whether it is an Ethereum enthusiast, an Ethereum investor, or an Ethereum developer, the sentiment towards Ethereum must be inexpressible. In December 2018, Ethereum fell to a record low of $ 81.93. Compared with the highest price of $ 1422 in January of the same year, it undoubtedly hurt the confidence of many Ethereum lovers. But at the beginning of 2019, Ethereum returned to the second largest market capitalization. The price on January 7, 2020 was $ 143.8.

It is undeniable that although the advantages of Ethereum programmability and rich development tools are so dazzling, it is not perfect. Ethereum does have defects such as poor scalability, a large number of copycat tokens, and performance bottlenecks. However, through the five performances of Ethereum shown by the above data, we also recognize the success and potential of Ethereum.

Based on the increasing use of Ethereum, the market demand for ETH and its liquidity are also increasing. Recently, the popular DeFi (Decentralized Finance, that is, decentralized finance or distributed finance) is mainly built on the Ethereum network. Although DeFi is not unique to Ethereum, it is undeniable that many inspirations about DeFi were first implemented on Ethereum, and DeFi has become the core focus of smart contract platforms.

In 2020, the eight major currencies including BTC, BSV, BCH, ZEC will usher in half, and if it is smooth, Ethereum 2.0 will also start this year, and realize the switch from POW to POS. Ethereum founder Vitalik also responded to the Ethereum Chinese community. Ethereum 2.0 may be launched in the first quarter of this year or in the second quarter. In any case, 2020 will be a very important year for Ethereum, and it will be the most noteworthy year. What will happen to the next Ethereum, whether Ethereum can continue to dominate the smart contract platform, and whether it can continue to provide sufficient power for the DeFi ecosystem, we wait and see.

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