Consumer applications on NEAR continue to thrive, with daily active users growing to 3.1 million in the third quarter.
Author: OurNetwork
Compiled by: TechFlow
Editor’s Note: Background
Welcome to our 2024 Ecosystem Special! In this issue, we’ll be taking a deep dive into NEAR, a platform with one of the most enduring and technically-savvy communities in the industry.
NEAR has been focusing on the chain signature feature, which allows NEAR accounts to sign transactions on any blockchain. Chain signatures not only enhance the capabilities of developers, but also enable them to write smart contracts that interact with other blockchains. This feature is an important driver of NEAR's vision for 2024 and beyond, as it aims to simplify the underlying architecture of blockchains to provide users with a smoother experience.
Another important direction for NEAR is artificial intelligence, especially user-autonomous technology, which has received much attention in recent years. A key step in NEAR’s AI development roadmap is the launch of an incubation program, which includes projects that provide payment infrastructure, GPU markets, and tools for monetizing artists’ works.
This is just the beginning, and below we will take a deeper look at NEAR’s past, present, and future direction. Let’s take a look. —ON Editorial Team
Abhishek Anirudhan Website | Dashboard
NEAR has a strong third quarter with 30 million new users and 600 million transactions
NEAR Protocol is a fully sharded, cost-effective Level 1 blockchain known for its high-speed transaction capabilities and aims to bring 1 billion users to the open network. Its core focus is to improve usability, provide a flexible account model, and build a highly scalable blockchain capable of supporting mainstream applications with billions of users. In the third quarter, NEAR added 30 million new users, bringing the total number of on-chain users to more than 130 million, and processed more than 600 million transactions.
Flipside
Despite the exponential growth in transaction volume, transaction fees have remained relatively stable. In the third quarter, the protocol generated 300,000 NEAR by processing more than 600 million transactions, with an average transaction fee of 0.0005 NEAR per transaction. This is due to sharding, a scaling method that divides a blockchain into multiple parallel chains. Currently, the protocol has 6 shards and plans to increase to 10 by the end of 2024.
Flipside
NEAR’s technical strength and its vision of chain abstraction and user-autonomous AI have attracted many new developers to the ecosystem. This year, developers have deployed about 5,000 new contracts, exceeding the total number of contracts deployed in 2023 (about 4,500).
Flipside
Consumer Ecosystem | Dashboard
Consumer adoption on NEAR continues to thrive, with daily active users growing to 3.1 million in Q3
NEAR’s chain signatures are a breakthrough chain abstraction solution that enables developers to simplify multi-chain dApp development to a single layer — a smart contract on NEAR that can communicate with all other chains. NEAR’s major consumer applications and wallets, such as Sweat Economy, HERE Wallet, and Bitte Wallet, have successfully implemented chain signatures, leading to a significant increase in usage — in the third quarter, NEAR’s average daily active users were approximately 3.1 million, an increase from 1.6 million in the first quarter. This brought the average monthly active users to 22.9 million in the third quarter, up from 13 million in the second quarter.
Artemis
Consumer apps like Kaikai, Sweat, and HERE Wallet (also known as HOT Wallet) have introduced over 55 million new wallets to the NEAR ecosystem and web3.
Flipside
Consumer applications on NEAR have shown strong user retention. In fact, the majority of the chain’s daily active users are retained users. In Q3, of the 3.1 million average daily active wallets, only 280,000 were new wallets, while the remaining 2.8 million were wallets of existing users.
Artemis
DeFi Ecosystem | Dashboard
NEAR’s TVL and Liquid Staking Reach $250 Million
Decentralized finance (DeFi) on NEAR is experiencing a resurgence: Total value locked (TVL) grew from ~$100M at the beginning of the year to ~$250M at the end of Q3. The recent launch of the chain signature feature, as well as upcoming infrastructure projects and projects such as multi-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) Defuse, are expected to further drive this growth.
DeFiLlama
As the total locked value (TVL) on NEAR grows, liquidity staking is also increasing. In 2024, NEAR not only introduced new projects such as HERE Wallet staking and TruStake, but also included the already mature Meta Pool and LiNEAR. In addition, Allstake, a full-chain reset protocol, is also among them. These projects have contributed a total of approximately US$325 million in assets.
DeFiLlama
Interest in decentralized finance (DeFi) on NEAR has also extended to memecoin. NEAR’s latest DeFi project, meme.cooking, is a token launch platform that has reached a total locked value (TVL) of about 11K NEAR (about $54,000) within 2 hours of its launch.
Pikespeak
Stablecoins on NEAR
Sebastian Melendez | Dashboard
NEAR has seen a surge in stablecoin usage since the start of 2024 — with monthly volume exceeding $2 billion in August and year-to-date growth exceeding 800%.
Artemis
In June 2024, the number of monthly stablecoin transfers on the NEAR blockchain peaked at over 3.3 million.
Artemis
The total stablecoin supply on NEAR reached $671.05 million, making it the tenth largest blockchain by market cap in this category.
DeFiLlama
Didier Pironi | Dashboard
The number of delegators on the network has been growing steadily, notably from 50,000 at the beginning of 2023 to over 250,000 in 2024. This indicates that more and more users are participating in staking and delegating activities on the network, which may reflect the growing confidence of users in the platform and its staking rewards.
Pikespeak
The total amount of NEAR pledged has continued to grow since 2021 and has maintained significant stability after surpassing 400 million NEAR at the end of 2022. Currently, a total of 619 million NEAR is staked to secure the network.
Pikespeak
The number of validators on the NEAR network has remained relatively stable since 2023, typically fluctuating between 160 and 240. This stability suggests that the network’s staking ecosystem is functioning well and is healthy.
