Foreword:
Ethereum has 242.8 million transactions in 2019. When will it exceed 1 billion transactions annually? Can this goal be achieved in three years? The core key lies in the developers on the supply side, including the development of ETH2.0, and the development of the ETH ecosystem (such as DeFi, games, etc.). It may seem difficult to achieve the goal today, but once the tipping point is broken, it may not be impossible. The author of this article is Matt Cutler of Blocknative, translated by "SIEN" of the "Blue Fox Notes" community.
Web 3 is taking root, moving from a proof of concept to an enterprise-level solution. The Blocknative team reviewed 2019 and tried to understand: "How many public chain transactions have been so far?" This quickly led to another question: "How many new public chain transactions can we reasonably expect to occur in the next few years?"
Surprisingly, as far as we know, no one has posted the answers to these questions. Therefore, we decided to do it ourselves. Here are the results we found.
The results were surprising, exciting, and encouraging.
After a lot of searching, we found blockchain transaction data from CoinMetrics. Using these data as the basis for our modeling and verifying our methods and hypotheses, we constructed the first census of every public chain transaction in the ecosystem, that is, all transactions since the birth of the Bitcoin Genesis block.
10 years, 3.1 billion transactions
In the past ten years, the total number of blockchain transactions exceeded 3.1 billion. It is worth noting that in 2019, it broke the threshold of 1 billion annual transactions. In fact, more than 37% (>1.1 billion) of the total historical transactions of the blockchain occurred in 2019. The growth trend is gratifying:
(Summary of transactions on the blockchain from 2009 to 2019, source: Blocknative, CoinMetrics)
The above data set includes 24 public chains with the largest annual transaction volume, including: Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin, Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Tether, Ripple, Litecoin, Binance Coin, Dash, Decred, DigiByte, Dogecoin, EOS, GAS, Neo, TRON, Waves, Stellar, Monero, Tezos, Verge, and Zcash.
In 2019, Bitcoin (259.2 million transactions) and Ethereum (242.8 million transactions) accounted for 44% of the total global blockchain transactions. From 2009 to 2019, the blockchain industry promoted a total value transfer of more than 4.6 trillion U.S. dollars. Of these, 96% occurred between 2017 and 2019.
(The adjusted transaction value of each blockchain is summarized, source: Blocknative, Coin Metrics)
Note that the total value transfer seems to be related to the price of the underlying asset. (Blue Fox Notes: Mainly because of the extreme volatility of encrypted assets)
When will the annual number of Ethereum transactions exceed 1 billion?
Overall, the five-year compound growth rate of the blockchain industry is 44%. Simply make a hypothesis, if the current trend can continue unchanged, then this means that this industry is expected to have nearly 20 billion new blockchain transactions in the next five years:
(Linear blockchain transaction volume growth forecast)
At this rate, Ethereum and Bitcoin, and perhaps EOS, will exceed the threshold of 1 billion transactions per year in 2023. However, I suggest that we have reservations about this forecast, because our future will not follow the linear growth forecast, let alone actual restrictions, such as block size. (Blue Fox Notes: There are many possibilities in 3 years, including technological breakthroughs in nonlinearity)
Having said that, when will Ethereum break the threshold of 1 billion transactions? What is it to drive? Will the widespread adoption of various layer 2 schemes promote the growth of transactions and also confuse this type of data aggregation? Or will ETH2.0 be a catalyst for explosive demand for on-chain transactions?
Although we want to focus on when Ethereum will cross this threshold, we believe that the more important thing is how to achieve the leap. Joe Rubin proposed the goal of bringing millions of developers to the Ethereum ecosystem. This is critical because we believe that these developers will create experiences that attract new users and drive the realization of 1 billion transactions.
In other words, millions of developers focus on the supply side of our industry, including education, tools, and support to help developers start building. The billion transactions are focused on the demand side. In many ways, these are two sides of the same coin.
And, as we saw at ETHDenver 2020, builders are busy exploring the next generation of technology. These methods make it possible to realize completely new types of transactions that would not exist without a blockchain. We believe that these nonlinear innovations can push our industry to exceed 1 billion transactions by 2023.