Charting Ethereum's five-year journey by the numbers

It was the launch of a new "frontier."

On July 30, 2015, the first iteration of the Ethereum network officially went live after more than a year and a half since its initial debut and the completion of an $18 million token sale.

During the next five years, the smart contract platform gathered an eclectic community of developers, builders and advocates around it before playing  host to the initial coin offering (ICO) craze of 2017-2018. Today, Ethereum is at the forefront of what proponents call a boom in decentralized finance applications.

To be sure, the network has faced its fair share of headwinds, from the 2016 implosion of The DAO and the subsequent debate over the response that led to a blockchain fork to the complicated nuts-and-bolts challenges involved in long-awaited shift from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.

On that latter point: Ethereum is finally, painstakingly but concertedly moving toward the first phase of what is known as Ethereum 2.0 — an ambitious reimagining of the network that has drawn the efforts of an array of developers and startups. Next week, a multi-client test network dubbed Medalla will go live, and the progress of that particular initiative could be the deciding factor in whether the initial phase of ETH 2.0 goes live before the end of the year or in early 2021.

Of course, one way to chart Ethereum's five-year journey is by tracking the price of ether (ETH), Ethereum's native token.

But in this piece, The Block took a look at the historical performance of Ethereum from a data perspective, casting a five-year net to showcase how the network has evolved and grown over time. Currently, the network is kept alive by an estimated 6,765 nodes according to data from EtherNodes.org, with the vast majority of those running the Geth client. 

Looking at the growth of unique addresses on the network, one can trace the growth from 9,206 addresses to more than 523,000.

(It should be noted that the spikes reported in 2016 were a result of spam attacks on the network).

A look at the aggregate transaction data over the past five years shows that the Ethereum network has seen nearly $1 trillion in settlements — about $986 billion at last count, to be exact.

On the question of those making money directly on the network — looking at you, miners — the following chart shows that 2018 was, by a significant margin, the busiest year for revenue.

On an aggregate basis, the following chart shows a significant climb in revenue during the first half of 2018 — perhaps coinciding with the period during which the price of ETH was at or near its all-time high price. 

As for actual mining activity on the network, one can look to the five-year arc of hash rate growth or recession. The high water mark for Ethereum's network hash rate was in the late summer/early fall of 2018.

The following chart shows the overall utilization of the Ethereum network. At various times in its history, the network has reached near-complete utilization, including since the beginning of 2020. 

In line with the ever-growing network utilization, miners on the network have voted over time to expand the so-called gas limit. Gas is the cost paid users must pay to transact on the network. The votes to expand the gas ceiling make it possible to process more transactions at a given time, but increases the cost of the resources needed to run and maintain nodes. 

The expansion of DEXs and DEFI

Ethereum has played home to an ever-expanding ecosystem of apps and services built around the decentralized finance, or DeFi, banner. At the heart of that activity are decentralized exchanges which, though representing just a sliver of the volume on centralized exchanges, have undergone significant growth in recent months.

And while there is still one more day until July comes to an end, current data shows that DEXs have seen a $3.8 billion in volume since the start of the month — more than doubling the amount seen in June.

The aggregate supply of stablecoins on Ethereum has also swelled, reaching more than $8 billion as of the time of writing.

An ecosystem map created by The Block Research analyst John Dantoni shows the breadth of services that occupy the DeFi space, from protocol-based lenders to token issuers to stablecoin operators. As of February, the ecosystem had drawn in $223 million in VC funding and $577 million from token sales — totaling $800 million when combined. And that number has continued to grow over the course of 2020.

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