Introduction

How does Algorand growth in terms of unique users per day compare to growth in major networks like Ethereum, Solana and Terra?

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. But do users think it is a network worthing transacting in?

This bounty will explore the user adoption for the four networks. Let's dive in the data!

Methodology

For this analysis I updated and extended my previous analysis L1 Unique users in Solana where I compared Ethereum, Terra and Solana. It makes sense to update it to see the performance in March adding ALGO to the equation.

I will compare the number of daily unique wallets which sent a transaction and the number of transactions (txs) per day with the price of each of the network's main tokens (ETH or Ether for Ethereum network, SOL for Solana network, LUNA for Terra Network and ALGO for Algorand) to evaluate market conditions vs. growth/activity. Variable naming in SQL has been done using the tokens symbol except for LUNA, where TERRA is used instead.

For each of the networks, a CTE will be created joining the information of unique wallets, txs and price with the following constraints:

Ethereum

• count(distinct from_address) in ethereum.transactions
• count(distinct tx_id) in ethereum.transactions
• avg(price) from ethereum.token_prices_hourly where

Terra

• count(distinct tx_from) in terra.transactions
• count(distinct tx_id) in terra.transactions
• avg(price_usd) from terra.oracle_prices where symbol ='LUNA'

Solana

• count(distinct tx_from_address) in solana.transactions
• count(distinct tx_id) in solana.transactions
• Daily SOL price was calculated from the daily swaps between USDC-SOL in Orca using the algorand-swaps table taking the total sum(swapped_from_amount) divided by sum(swap_to_amount). Although it is not 100% accurate the price is a nice method for approximating token prices whe no oracle prices are available

Algorand

• count(distinct sender) in a table combining the algorand.payment_transaction (for ALGO transactions) with algorand.asset_transfer_transaction (for ASA, Algorand Standard Assets) tables

• count(distinct tx_id) in a table combining the algorand.payment_transaction (for ALGO transactions) with algorand.asset_transfer_transaction (for ASA, Algorand Standard Assets) tables

• Daily ALGO price was calculated from the daily swaps between USDC-ALGO using the algorand-swaps table taking the total sum(swapped_from_amount) divided by sum(swap_to_amount). Although it is not 100% accurate the price is a nice method for approximating token prices whe no oracle prices are available.

Results from these tables will be joined with three consecutive joins creating one table with the unique wallets and price per day for all four networks.

The last table will be expanded with the averages of these variables, which were calculated on a separate query.

The period analysed is between February 1st and April 6th 2022.

Results

Growth and activity comparison

First part will look at 2 metrics over time: unique wallet users (growth) and number of transactions (activity) for all 4 networks.

Figure 1. shows the unique wallets per day and the average on all networks. Ethereum leads this metric with around 400k users, Solana is next with over 200k users and Terra and Algorand have similar levels, 43k and 39k users per day as average.

The difference in users makes it difficult to compare trends, so in Figure 2. I plotted the difference between the daily unique users and the average for the period analysed. Number of users in Algorand is trending below average in April (-12%) after starting the period with over 20% more users than the average. Ethereum is also trending below average (-14%) but started the period also 5% below, it had a surge in users first half on March and is now on a big downtrend.

Terra and Solana are seing a nice upward trend as of lately, being 10% and 13% above average respectively.

Market conditions

Market condition will be analysed through price action over from each of the network's native tokens: ETH, LUNA, SOL and ALGO.

Figure 5. shows the price action for LUNA, SOL and ALGO over the period analysed. LUNA and SOL are currently in a bull run and ALGO trends sideways around 0.9 USD (right Y-axis). ETH is not shown due to scaling issues.

Figure 6. shows the difference between daily price and average over the period in % for all 4 tokens. ALGO is the only one lagging around the average (+1%) while all TERRA, SOL and ETH are currently enjoying bull price action at +50%, +35% and +20% respectively.

Figure 3. shows the number of daily transactions per network. Solana is here the leading network with its major output and is therefore represented in the right Y-axis. It is in a very significant downtrend from the max levels of 63M txs beginning of February to the late levels over 20M but still a big leap ahead of the rest. Algorand is also in a downtrend, from clear 2nd place with around 2M to current levels of 1M txs daily. Ethereum has remained stable around 1M txs and Terra has seen an increase from 0.5M to 0.6M levels throughtout the period.

Figure 4. quantifies these trends, where Solana and Algorand are currently -40% and -33% below average. Ethereum is -6% below average and Terra is the only network positively trending in txs number at 6% above average.

Are markets conditions slowing down activity/growth on networks?

This section will analyse the metrics on a downtrend compared to the market conditions as network token price.

TERRA has been excluded since both growth and activity have been increasing.

ALGO Network

Figure 7. and 8. show ALGO price vs. transactions and wallets respectively. For this network, the downtrend in price seems to be slowing down both metrics, specially in ALGO transactions.

SOL Network

Solana transactions have been decreasing steadily since February 1st, amounting a 50% reduction from 60M to below 30M. This significant reduction seems uncorrelated to the market conditions, especially since the bull run since mid March.

ETH network

Figure 10. shows ETH price vs. ETH transactions and wallets. Although both wallets and transactions have decreased slighty, the market conditions are uncorrelated since the price action is experiencing a bull run since mid March.

Conclusions

This analysis compares Algorand with 3 major networks in terms of activity and growth.

Algorand network seems to be experiencing a low moment since price is on a downtrend and both activity and growth have slowed down. I think this trend can be reverted since Algorand is building and developing their ecosystem.

Both Ethereum and Solana are showing slow down in some metrics but their market conditions/ price action is experiencing a bull run.

Terra is the only network analysed which is showing no slow down in any metrics, and is having a golden time. I see a bright future for Terra and its evergrowing ecosystem.