Ethereum “is strong […] it is diverse, it is growing, and it is receiving attention from individuals and industry players across the world,” the Ethereum-focused development company Consensys reported recently in an extensive statistical report.
The quintessential Ethereum (ETH) company, founded by early contributor Joseph Lubin, published an analysis of the platfrom using an array of quantitative metrics, emphasizing its growth even amid the cryptoasset market’s careening price action – in Ethereum’s case now into double digits, in line with Arthur Hayes’ predictions last August.
Ethereum’s Numbers Are Strong: Consensys
The number of unique ether wallets is steadily growing, Consensys reports citing etherscan.io, now numbering nearly 50 million, up from about 36 million in June. The age of wallets – before they become “inactive” – is also increasing on average, up to 35 days now, three times more than a year ago. Consensys takes this increased user activity as a positive sign of ecosystem health.
Average monthly value transactions, however, is now on the wane at about 15 million per month – down from nearly 35 million per month during January. But, in line with a recent Delphi Digital analysis on Bitcoin transactions, this is not necessarily bad and may reflect falling selling pressure – although such a comparison is cursory and would need further scrutiny to produce more reliable claims.
Finally, Consensys reports the amount of smart contracts – a term Ethereum’s founder, Vitalik Buterin, has publicly lamented – is growing at an impressive rate: 1.5 million smart contracts were deployed on the platform in November, from 200,000 in June.
Ethereum’s dApp Ecosystem Dwarfs Its Competitors
The report states correctly that the vast majority of decentralized applications (dApps) are deployed on the Ethereum platform, a whopping 94% of them – 2,190 out of 2,307 – according to StateoftheDapps. However, according to the same source, the comparatively minuscule amount of EOS dApps – 103 – claim more daily active users than all of Ethereum’s ecosystem.
It is worth noting that 17% of all dApps are listed as abandoned or broken – with the vast majority of those hundreds necessarily being dead Ethereum dApps.
The various Ethereum development tools Truffle, Ganache, Loom, and CryptoZombies have been cumulatively downloaded millions of times. The report therefore claimed that “It looks like developers are here to stay, and more are on their way.”
Consensys claimed back in January, almost a year ago now, that Ethereum had 30 times more developers than the next biggest smart contract platform, according to unnamed “reports from a large analyst firm.” In this recent report, however, the company did not make similar, directly comparative claims.
With respect to institutional interest in Ethereum, the Consensys report was somewhat un-specific, instead hewing to figures and trends pertaining to the entire cryptoasset industry. It observed – as CryptoGlobe has reported – that venture capital funding into the industry has more than doubled, even as the ICO market has been doused with cold water. The report also mentioned a $15 million investment into the MakerDAO project, an Ethereum-based decentralized stablecoin that has been rapidly growing lately.
Consensys’ Recent Issues
Despite the Brooklyn, New York-based company’s enthusiasm, they have of late been hitting some rough patches during the sobering 2018 collapse in Ethereum’s price. The price per ether has fallen an eye-watering 94% from January highs of roughly $1,400, far outpacing bitcoin’s own correction.
The company has begun to reform its management ethos to be more aggressive in pursuing and launching profitable projects – or else more quickly culling them. Furthermore, CryptoGlobe recently reported that the company would fire 13% of its workforce, presumably in light of the massive fall in ether price.
As if the brutal ether price action and fiscal austerity at Consensys were not enough of a headache for the Ethereum space, CryptoGlobe recently reported that a well known and periodically executed attack on vulnerable Ethereum Geth nodes is once again under way. The same attack has netted tens of millions of dollars worth of stolen coins in the past.
