NEO Chain Statistics

The NEO blockchain has been live since the 4th quarter of 2016, when its first block was issued on October 16. Since then, the blockchain has not only hosted its own cryptocurrency NEO alongside its parallel currency GAS but has also become the home for several NEP-5 tokens, that were issued on the same blockchain. In this article, I want to look at statistics of the NEO blockchain and see, how various metrics have developed over time. As sources, I used the blockchain explorer of NewEconoLabs and the aggregated statistics websites Neodepot and NeoEconomy.

Let’s start with the transaction growth. Even though NEO went live in in mid-October 2016, there were already 345 thousand transactions in those last two and a half months of 2016. The number increased to a total of 5.792 million transactions in 2017, with 86% of those transactions coming in the second half of 2017. The first half of 2018 marks NEO’s peak for transactions per half-year: 9.857 million transactions were executed in the first six months of 2018. The second half of 2018 saw 7.764 million transactions, leading to a total of 17.622 million transactions in 2018. The total number of transactions in 2019 was at 8.479 million, with 56% of the transactions coming in the second half of 2019.

As can be expected, deposits and withdrawals from exchanges are causing many of those transactions. Interactions with the main exchange addresses of Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex, Gate.io, Kucoin and Switcheo have caused a total of 2.72 million transactions up to this point. Furthermore, I would expect Huobi to have caused at least 300k transactions as well – However, they split their NEO holdings over 30+ addresses (potentially even more), which makes it impossible to conclude their total transaction number. Adding to that, the transactions caused by main exchange addresses do not include user deposits to their individual exchange deposit addresses. Therefore, the total number of transactions caused by exchange deposits and withdrawals could very well be around 5 million, which would currently equal 15% of all transactions on the NEO blockchain. The following graphic summarizes these transaction statistics:

Alongside transaction growth, it is also interesting to see the numbers of new addresses created over time on the NEO blockchain. An address is perceived as ‘new’ on the day it received funds for the first time. In 2016, just 5,179 addresses received funds on the NEO blockchain. The number of newly issued addresses went up to 14,203 in the first half of 2017 before address growth really accelerated in the second half of 2017 to 457,115 new addresses. The number of newly issued addresses then saw a peak in the first half of 2018 with 807,059 addresses. The number has been decreasing ever since with 354,893 new addresses in the second half of 2018, 117,079 new addresses in the first half of 2019 and 87,386 new addresses in the second half of 2019. However, the number of new addresses created in the second half of 2019 is still six times higher than the number of new addresses created in the first half of 2017.

Let’s move on to the number of addresses holding the two most popular assets on the NEO blockchain. Currently, there are 180,040 addresses holding at least 1 NEO while 102,439 addresses are holding at least 1 GAS. A balance of at least 100 NEO is currently held by 29,273 addresses, while a balance of at least 100 GAS is currently held by 6,401 addresses. See the following graphic for more details:

NEO and GAS are not the only assets issued on NEO’s blockchain. In fact, I found 36 NEP-5 tokens that are traded on crypto exchanges. In an analysis of holders with a balance of over 100 USD per asset, NEX is ranked in the first spot with 8,132 addresses. The ranks 2 – 4 belong to WWB, SWTH and TKY with around 1,800 addresses each. DBC is placed on spot 5 with 1,217 addresses, while CPX and QLC are ranked 6th and 7th with around 900 addresses each. SOUL and TNC are ranked on spot 8 and 9 with around 550 addresses. The other 27 NEP-5 tokens in the data sample have less than 400 addresses holding an amount of over 100 USD per asset.

This article discussed various statistics of NEO’s blockchain. With block 1 issued in October 2016, both the number of transactions and the number of newly created addresses have seen a peak in the first half of 2018. Looking at holders per asset, there are currently 180 thousand addresses holding at least 1 NEO. Of 36 publicly traded NEP-5 tokens, five have over 1,000 addresses holding an amount of over 100 USD of that particular asset.