Introduction

Ethereum is the second largest cryptoasset by marketcap with around 400B USD and is considered a programmable money, with more and more projects and applications every day.

Solana and Terra have around 40B USD each, have seen some expectacular growth in the last months and are seen by many as a real challenge to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Algorand is a step behind, with a marketcap of 5B but it has a big potential due to the high speed, low fees and high scalability is was designed for as well as the wide array of applications it allows.

This bounty will explore the new users for these four networks. Let's dive in the data!

Methodology

The term new users will be defined as an address sending a transaction for the first time. In order to analyse the new users, the first step is to obtain a list of all addresses with the date of the first transaction from the on-chain data. Then, this list will be aggregated by day to count the number of daily new users. Adding these daily values over time will give the current number of total new users.

Since each network has different tables to query, the next section specifies the details for each chain:

Ethereum

Initial release July 2015, Stable release August 2021 (London Fork) Source

• from_address as new users from ethereum.transactions table

Solana

Initial release April 2019 Source

• tx_from as new users from solana.fact_transfers table

Algorand

Initial release April 2019 Source

In the case of Algorand, we need to take into account transactions with ALGO and with ASAs (Algorand Standard Asset). For that, the following tables are put together with a UNION:

• block_timestamp, sender and 'ALGO' as first_tx from algorand.payment_transaction table
• block_timestamp, sender and 'ASA' as first_tx from algorand.asset_transfer_transaction table
• sender as new user is used, adding the information of which asset is first transferred from on first_tx

Terra

Initial release April 2019 (Col-1) Source

• sender as new_users from terra.transfer_events table

Results

All-time total new users

Figure 1 shows the total number of new users for all networks since January 1st 2020. The date chosen was according to the available data from the Ethereum tables, there are some data points from early 2015 but there is a very big timespan with no data. The same data issues appear to happen on Terra, where only the latest release is shown (Col-5) and on Solana, where only data since December 2021 is available (old tables were deprecated not long ago). Algorand seems to have all data since around initial release. Ethereum is shown on the left Y-axis while the other three chains on the right Y-axis.

In the period shown, Ethereum onboarded almost 90M new users. Algorand 28M, Solana over 10M and Terra around 2.5M.

In it only fair to make a comparison since Januray 2022 and analyse the growth for each chain.

Growth in 2022

Figures 2. and 3. show the daily new users per blockchain, in absolute value and normalised.

The dominance of Ethereum is contested by Solana in this time period. In the normalised view one can see various days where Solana onboards more new users. Algorand and Terra growth is on a smaller scale, although there are two days (Jan. 12th and 13th) where half of all new users where onboarded on Algorand.

Figure 4. shows the total growth per blockchain on the selected period. Again the two growth speeds can be identified, Ethereum and Solana with their total 9.8M and 8.5M respectively and Algorand and Terra with 1.6M and 0.55M respectively.

Growth distribution in Algorand

Figure 5. shows the growth in users in Algorand network by the asset chosen for the first transaction. At the beginning, users used ASAs as their weapon of choice, having a lead of over 10M users in early December 2021. But a crazy increase of activity on the second half of December 2021 levelled things up. With a massive increase of 11M users in 17 days has a technical draw between ALGO and ASA first time users. Note that this only takes into account the first transaction of a new address.

Conclusion

The lead in adoption of Ethereum is clear, as the oldest of the blockchains analysed it still drives the growth in new users of these major networks. But Solana is getting there and for the last months has been competing at the same level.

Algorand and Terra are still some steps behind, but Algorand proved to be capable of onboarding a big amount of new users as happened on January 13th were over 160k new users sent ALGO for the first time.