Ethereum Statistics

With a total of over 600 million transactions and 85 million unique addresses, Ethereum is arguably the biggest blockchain currently in existence. The blockchain achieved all these numbers in just 4.5 years – Ethereum’s first block was mined on July 31, 2015. In this article, I will take a look at several statistics of the Ethereum blockchain and outline, how they developed over time. The sources for the underlying data were taken from Etherscan and Ethplorer.

The first aspect to look at is transaction growth. Ethereum started out with around 1 million transactions in the second half of 2015. This number rose to 5.5 million transactions in the first half of 2016 and 8.1 million transactions in the second half of 2016. The growth accelerated in 2017, with 19.3 million transactions in the first half of 2017 and 83.7 million transactions in the second half of 2017. The transaction number per half-year peaked in the first half of 2018 with 144.5 million transactions. Since then, the transaction numbers per half-year have stayed above the mark of 100 million transactions with 106.7 million in the second half of 2018, 117.9 million in the first half of 2019 and 125 million transactions in the second half of 2019.

19.3% of those transactions can be attributed to different entities. At least 12.5% of all transactions have been caused by centralized exchanges, although it has to be noted that this number only includes transactions of main exchange addresses and not transfers to individual users’ deposit addresses. The total number of transactions caused by centralized exchanges is therefore likely higher than 12.5%. The number of transactions caused by decentralized exchanges is with 4.3% of all transactions on Ethereum lower than the number of transactions caused by centralized exchanges. However, both decentralized exchanges Etherdelta and IDEX have each caused more transactions than the main exchange addresses of any other centralized exchange, except Binance. Looking at other areas than crypto exchanges, 1.7% of all transactions can be attributed to gaming dapps while 0.8% can be matched to gambling dapps.

Alongside transaction growth, it is also interesting to see the numbers of new addresses created over time on the Ethereum blockchain. An address is perceived as ‘new’ on the day it received funds for the first time. The blockchain started with 40 thousand transactions in 2015, the number then went up to 948 thousand unique addresses at the end of 2016. Again, growth accelerated in 2017, with 2.89 million new addresses in the first half of the year and 14.62 million new addresses in the second half. The number of new addresses created in a half-year period peaked in the first half of 2018, with 21.75 million new transactions. Since then, the total number of new addresses has been stable, with around 14.5 million transactions per half-year, which is also the same level we saw in the first half of 2017:

Let’s take a closer look at the assets on Ethereum. To measure the adoption of an asset, I like to consider the amount of holders of at least 100 USD of this particular asset. It is a better metric than the total amount of holders, since it ignores addresses with just tiny amounts of a token, whereas an amount of 100 USD is also small enough to not only focus on whales.

In a ranking of ERC-20 tokens by addresses holding at least an amount of 100 USD worth of that asset, Tether (USDT) is ranked in the first spot. It has by far the most addresses holding a balance worth 100 USD with 186 thousand addresses. On the second spot, we can find Chainlink (LINK), which has 50k addresses holding 100 USD or more. The utility token of the Brave browser, Basic Attention Token (BAT) is ranked third with 44k addresses. On spot number 4 and 5 we can find OMG (38k addresses) and ZRX (28k addresses).

From the sixth spot on, the ranking becomes more compact, since the difference between addresses per tokens is not as huge, as we have seen with the first five tokens. Enjin is placed sixth with a total of 15k addresses holding ENJ worth 100 USD or more. On spot number seven, we can find HOT with 12k addresses, while spots number 8 and 9 go to NEXO (12k addresses) and GNT (11k addresses). NPXS is ranked tenth and is also the only remaining token with over 10k addresses holding an amount of 100 USD or more.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a complete rich list for Ethereum’s native coin Ether, since Ethplorer only provides rich lists for Ethereum tokens. The most detailed rich list of Ether holders was provided by Etherscan, however, they only listed the top 10,000 addresses, which all hold more than 750 ETH. Nevertheless, we can gather from that list that 1,211 addresses hold at least 10,000 ETH and 8,132 addresses hold at least 1,000 ETH.

In this article, we looked at blockchain statistics of Ethereum. Since its launch in mid-2015, both the network’s transaction and address growth have peaked in the first half of 2018. For the last 1.5 years, transactions have been over the mark of 100 million per half-year, while the amount of new addresses created per half-year has been at around 14.5 million. Looking at holders per asset, there are currently 10,000 addresses holding 750 ETH or more. A ranking of holders per asset with a balance of at least 100 USD, Tether (USDT) is ranked in the first spot, followed by Chainlink (LINK) and Basic Attention Token (BAT).