PANews reported on February 20 that since this year, the pattern of transaction types on the Ethereum chain has undergone significant changes. The number and proportion of DeFi transactions has dropped significantly, while the number and proportion of Bridges and NFT transactions have increased significantly.
According to glassnode data, in terms of absolute changes, on February 18, the number of DeFi transactions on Ethereum (7-day average) was about 41,200, the lowest level since 2021, and a significant drop of 66.84% from the short-term high of 124,400 on January 4 this year. In terms of relative changes, the number of DeFi transactions has also been low recently. On February 14, the proportion of DeFi transactions on Ethereum (7-day average) was about 3.96%, an extremely low level since 2021, and has remained at around 4.6% since then, with a maximum of no more than 5.2%, which is very different from the average level of nearly 10% in the previous two years.
Judging from the time point of the change, the sharp decline in the number of DeFi transactions began on January 15, and before that, on January 8, the number and proportion of Bridges transactions began to increase significantly. Although this does not mean that the decline in the number of DeFi transactions on Ethereum is due to the transfer of related transactions to cross-chain bridges, transaction transfer may be one of the reasons.
According to statistics, on February 19, the number of transactions on Bridges (7-day average) was about 13,300, accounting for about 1.33%, both of which are the highest this year. Influenced by the recent good news of multiple Layer2 networks, including the ecological development of Arbitrum and the update of zkSync mainnet, the number of transactions on Bridges is likely to continue to grow in the future, and this will also have a lasting impact on the transaction structure of the underlying network.
Another structural change worthy of attention is the increase in the number of NFT transactions on Ethereum. According to statistics, on February 19, the number of NFT transactions on Ethereum (7-day average) was approximately 184,100, an increase of 45.29% from 126,700 at the beginning of this year. The proportion of NFT transactions on Ethereum (7-day average) is approximately 18.36%, an increase of nearly 1.5 percentage points from 17.05% at the beginning of this year. Both figures show significant growth.
The recent increase in the number and proportion of NFT transactions began in late November last year, which changed the downward trend of NFT transactions since June 2022. At the same time, stimulated by the recent airdrop of Blur tokens in the trading market, the number of NFT transactions also formed a small peak on February 9, 10 and 11 before the airdrop, with the daily transaction times (7-day average) exceeding 192,000 on these three days.
Currently, the number of NFT transactions has become the third largest ecosystem type on Ethereum, after Vanilla (ETH transfers between external accounts) and Other, surpassing DeFi and Stablecoin. In the future, Blur will also issue a second round of transaction incentives, which may stimulate the continued growth of NFT transactions.
