Overview of the key Ethereum metrics | Supply, Activity, Hash Rate, Wallets, Transactions| March 2021

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(Edited)

A lot of movements in the crypto world in the last months. BTC to new ATH, Ethereum following but just not as BTC performance. Binance has launched BSC and that might take some share from ETH.

With all these movements lets check the activity of the network and take look at the key Ethereum metrics.

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The data presented here is mainly from etherscan charts and some Glassnode charts as well.

We will be looking at:

  • Supply
  • Block Rewards
  • Number of Addresses
  • Active Addresses
  • Hash Rate
  • Daily Transactions
  • Fees
  • Contracts

The period that we are looking into is from 2015 – 2021.

Supply

The supply is always an interesting topic in crypto. At the moment of writing this, March 20, 2021, Ethereum has a total supply of 115.1M coins.

Ethereum had a presale in 2014, where 60M ETH ware sold to investors and 12M ETH was allocated to a development fund. A total of 72M starting supply. Since then, more then 43M ETH were mined and added to the supply. Still the initial supply represents more than 60% of the current supply.

Here is the chart for the ETH supply over time.

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As mentioned more than 43M ETH in total were mined since its inception. We can see that the supply is slowly increasing. In the last year an approximate 5M ETH more was added to the supply. The year before that around 6M.

The block rewards chart looks like this.

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We can see that at first the block rewards (inflation) were higher with more than 30k ETH generated per day. It has dropped since then and at this moment around 13.5k ETH daily is added to the supply or around 405k ETH per month.

Number of addresses

Another key metrics for crypto projects is the number of wallets.

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The number of ETH wallets addresses has been growing at a fast rate and now it is around 144M. It is the crypto with the highest number of wallets. For comparison Bitcoin has around 60M wallets at the moment.

Here is the chart for the number of new wallets created per year.

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The first two years 2015 and 2016 had very low numbers of wallets and then in 2017 and 2018 we have seen a lot more wallets created. Almost 18M wallets in 2017 and 35M in 2018. A drop in 2019 and a record high number of wallets created in 2020 with almost 47M wallets.

Active addresses

How many of those 144M addresses are actually active?

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According to Glassnode the number of active addresses has just spiked reaching more than 500k active addresses per day. This is still lower from the ATH numbers in January 2018 when there was more than 700k active addresses per day.

Hash Rate

The network security in a proof of work chain is measured in hash rate, or how difficult is to mine. The bigger the completion, the higher the hash rate.

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The ETH hash rate has been growing and it has reached a new ATH crossing the 400k GH/s. The Ethereum network now has more miners then ever before.

Daily Transactions

The activity on the network is mostly represented by the number of daily transactions.

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As we can see Ethereum has broken its ATH in number of transactions. On September 17, 2020 there was 1.4M transactions per day, breaking the previous record from January 4th, 2018 of 1.35M transactions per day. In the last days the numbers of transactions is around 1.2M to 1.3M per day.

ETH Gas and fees

Next the daily fees in ETH.

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The fees are at all time high making the network not usable at times. On September 17 they have reached a massive 42.7k ETH per day. In today’s prices this is around 76M USD in fees daily. In the last period the fees are between 10k to 20k ETH per.

The fees for a single transactions are measured in gWei, from the smallest ETH unit Wei. One ETH has one billion billion Wei (18 zeros). The gas price for transactions has been in the range from 100 gWei up to 600 gWei. In the bear market in 2019 the gas price was 10 to 20 gWei.

Verified Contracts

Ethereum is a smart contract blockchain. Here is the chart for verified contracts.

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The number of verified contracts has grown a lot in the last six months. This is all due to the DeFi movement.

But we can see that in the last two to three months the numbers of verified smart contracts has dropped. This also can be due to the growth of BSC, that has been taking place in this period.

The peak was at the end of October 2020, reaching almost 400 contracts per day, and a drop since then to around 150 daily contracts.


Overall, the Ethereum network metrics are following the price movement with more wallets created then ever in 2020, more active wallets as well reaching 500k daily active wallets.
The Hash rate (mining power) and the number of transactions have reached new all time highs but also the fees as well. With this level of activity and price movements Ethereum is on the verge of its capacity. Simple transactions fees are 10$ on regular basis and smart contracts transaction fees can go from 30$ to 50$. With these types of fees, the network is becoming a whales platform where only transactions with significant amounts are made. The ETH 2.0 should solve some of the scalability issues but it is still years away. Anyways interesting time for the Ethereum blockchain which has been the center point of innovation for crypto in the last years.

All the best
@dalz

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21 comments
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Dealing with Ethereum is one of the most soul draining processes in crypto as a whole. Not many people know how to deal with pending transactions and nonces. It's the worst user friendly experiences and the most expensive one you can get in crypto, and I'm being mild.

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That's true. I tried using low fee and it took me days to complete a Tx. ETH has been an expensive nightmare.

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Thanks for the stats. I've never looked much into ETH stats other than they used to be around Hive stats and costed so much. It's been a very tough time using ETH for anything lately. 2017-2018 it was a good alternative to basically unusable BTC. Now it's become a land for the whales. I'm glad we have CUB on BSC. I don't have much there. But I'm happy to finally be part of DeFi.

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Some of these charts contradict the boom suggested by the rise in price. Interesting.
Activities are either down or are not proportionally increasing.

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Fees are up :)

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That's the weirdest part: hash rate is up massively, trx are topping out. Shouldn't that lead to lower fees?

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Love these types of info packed educational posts!!

You gonna do this for any other chains?

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Thanks!
I'm doing it for a few chains. BTC, ETH, BNB/BSC ...plus I do some platform specific like Uniswap, Pancake... and for the stablecoins :)
If you go back through my post you will find posts on all the above.

Do you have any chain that you would like to see something similar to this?

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And NFTs make all even more expensive on ETH :D

At some point, it will become too expensive (IMO is today too expensive) for real-world use cases.

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Hi @dalz
Thank you for the statistics. Ethereum is such a leader in DeFi , decentralization and as it evolves we all learn more.

Thank you for your your contributions at the Leofinance Roundtable about Binance Smart Chain.
I see it as a huge opportunity to improve my financial position, and hope no hacks hit our Cubfinance.

I wish I had a crystal ball and could see the future, because I would love to convert my Eth to BNB-Cub while the APRs are so high.

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ETH, it's been a powerhouse, but certainly has left the door open to competition.

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Honestly I am SUPER bullish on Ethereum long term. If things go as planned with the burning and then POS system it's going to seriously shoot up the value of Ethereum as you now have reduce production and people who are going to stake A LOT of Ethereum to make more further reducing the supply.

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Long term I think most of the top coins will perform vey well.
The industry is still at its beginnings and every token that survives will eventually grow.
Longterm, ETH, BNB, DOT, ADA ... etc if all is well, will have high value.

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The high transaction cost has always kept me away from Ethereum because I never had much to invest in it and for that reason I never really delved into Ethereum.
You wrote a really very detailed post and now, thanks to you, I know a lot more about ETH.
Thanks and !BEER

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