Cohort analysis of the largest DeFi protocols on Ethereum

Over the past year, DeFi protocols have succeeded in achieving adoption and have attracted tens of billions of dollars in TVL. At the moment, smart contract platforms are steadily moving towards reaching $100B TVL. Naturally, this indicator correlates with market movement and is associated with an increase in the price of cryptoassets. However, the number of unique addresses that interact with DeFi on Ethereum also grew by 3 million in just the last year.

The question of how many real unique users interact with DeFi remains open. Previously, The Block Research looked at loyalty in DeFi by analyzing the intersection between tokenholders and users. It turned out that only 6-7% of protocols’ users are loyal according to this metric. In the current research report, we will go a little further and separate users into cohorts to find out how the userbase changes every month. Thus, cohorts are defined by the period when users start interacting with the protocol for the first time.