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Original title: "From 2015 to 2020, 5 major indicators to see Ethereum's performance" Original author: Signor_Yuan Tokenview From 2015 to 2020, Ethereum has never stopped developing and is now a major player in the smart contract field. We use Tokenview's Ethereum chain data to look at Ethereum's performance through five major indicators.
Block performance - Ethereum blocks have exceeded 9,191,593 At 23:59:03 on December 31, 2019, Ethereum released the last block of 2019, and the Ethereum block height reached 9,191,593. We recorded this moment through the eth block browser eth.tokenview.com developed by Tokenview.
Since the launch of the Ethereum mainnet in 2015, as of December 31, 2019, the space occupied by Ethereum nodes has reached 3304GB, while the Bitcoin network is 300.9GB at this time.
In order to stabilize the block generation time, Ethereum has a difficulty bomb that continuously increases the difficulty of mining. Since the value provided by the Ethereum difficulty bomb increases once every 100,000 blocks, never decreases, and grows exponentially, at a certain point in time, the difficulty bomb will rapidly increase the difficulty of the network, causing the block generation speed to drop sharply. This phenomenon began to appear in May 2017. From September 22 to October 15 of that year, the block generation time of Ethereum was about 30 seconds, which was twice the average time. This phenomenon lasted for 24 days. On September 29, 2017, the block generation time of Ethereum reached an all-time high of 30.5 seconds, and only 2,829 blocks were generated that day.
To solve this problem, Ethereum conducted a Byzantine fork on October 16, 2017, creating new rules and improving the entire system. The Byzantine fork significantly reduced the difficulty of mining, which significantly increased the transaction speed of the Ethereum platform, but the mining reward was also reduced from 5 ETH to 3. After the fork, Ethereum's daily block output returned to around 6,000. In December 2018, the problem reappeared. Ethereum upgraded Constantinople & St. Petersburg in the early morning of March 1, 2019 to postpone the difficulty bomb and greatly improve the platform efficiency, but the mining reward was reduced from 3 ETH to 2. After this upgrade, Ethereum's daily block output has returned to 6,400. On October 5, 2019, the Ethereum difficulty bomb once again showed its impact, and the average block time increased. Although Ethereum underwent the Istanbul upgrade in 2019, it mainly improved the underlying Ethereum protocol and the overall performance, and did not include plans to postpone the difficulty bomb. On January 1, 2020, Ethereum underwent the Muir Glacier upgrade, which aims to delay the difficulty bomb again. After the Muir Glacier upgrade, the current block time has been reduced by about 25%, and the daily block time has reached the previous average level of 6,000+.
Transaction Performance - The number of Ethereum network transactions has exceeded 611,556,651
As of December 31, 2019, the number of transactions on the Ethereum network has reached a staggering 611,556,651.
On January 5, 2018, the number of Ethereum transactions reached an all-time high of 1,271,577. On January 12, 2020, the number of Ethereum transactions exceeded 523,000. Although it is not as high as the peak period, Ethereum network transactions are still very active, while the number of Bitcoin transactions in the same period is less than 320,000. According to statistics, the total transaction volume of the Ethereum network in 2019 exceeded 144.2 billion US dollars, and the total transfer fee exceeded 37.4 million US dollars. Although Ethereum has transferred more and more stablecoins to ETH with lower fees, the total transaction volume is still lower than Bitcoin.
From the daily transaction volume data of Ethereum in the past four years, it can be found that the daily transaction volume of Ethereum has begun to increase significantly since May 2017, and on January 14, 2018, the transaction volume exceeded 34.25 billion US dollars, setting a record for the single-day transaction volume in the history of Ethereum. The heat did not gradually return to calm until the end of February 2018.
Market capitalization performance- Ethereum market capitalization exceeds 15.8 billion US dollars
Ethereum has been developing for less than 5 years, and today its market value has exceeded 15.8 billion US dollars. On January 15, 2018, the price of ETH soared to an all-time high of 1,389.18 US dollars, and the market value of Ethereum exceeded 134.7 billion US dollars. Although this result is far behind Bitcoin's market value of 150.9 billion US dollars today (the highest was over 325 billion US dollars), as the first programmable blockchain to go online, Ethereum has achieved good results. With its outstanding features, it can be expected that it will continue to maintain its dominant position as a smart contract platform for some time to come.
Network performance - Ethereum's latest mining difficulty is 2.09P, and the total network computing power is 160TH/s
The consensus algorithm adopted by the Ethereum network is POW (proof of work), which is a proof-of-work mechanism, that is, more work, more pay. The mining difficulty of the entire network is a relative value relative to the computing power, which is dynamically adjusted. It represents the output value of each T computing power in a unit of time. The greater the difficulty of the entire network, the smaller the output value of each T computing power. As mentioned earlier, Ethereum has continuously increased the difficulty of mining over time through the difficulty bomb. After Ethereum enters 2.0, in addition to achieving higher scalability and decentralization, it will realize the conversion of the consensus mechanism from POW to POS (proof of equity). The existence of the difficulty bomb is also to prevent miners from jointly resisting the conversion from POW to POS, but as the mining difficulty continues to increase, before the conversion is realized, the impact of the difficulty bomb can only be continuously delayed through upgrades. Through the trend chart of mining difficulty below, we can also verify that the three upgrades in Ethereum's history have successfully delayed the difficulty bomb, reduced the difficulty of mining, and maintained the activity of miners.
Ethereum Berlin hard fork is tentatively scheduled for June this year, when Ethereum may increase the block size from 1M to 8M. Ethereum 2.0 will bring greater capacity and more transactions per second to the platform. The conversion from POW to POS will also reduce hardware waste. Tokenview will continue to pay attention to the next Ethereum upgrade and related discussions.
Activity performance - Ethereum's latest active addresses are 206,356, and the number of newly added addresses is 40,664. The number of active addresses and the number of newly added addresses are important indicators for measuring the activity of blockchain. The number of active addresses refers to the total number of addresses that have had at least one transaction in a unit period, and the number of newly added addresses refers to the total number of newly created addresses (containing at least one asset) in a unit period.
We have captured data from January 1, 2019 to January 12, 2020 from the active addresses and new addresses data chart. From the data, we can see that the number of new addresses added daily in Ethereum is as low as 28,140, and the number of new addresses on November 28, 2019 exceeded 630,000. On June 16, 2018, nearly 1.55 million addresses in Ethereum were trading, reaching the peak of that period.
It is worth noting that on January 12, 2020, the number of new Ethereum addresses was 43,119, and the number of active addresses on that day exceeded 250,000. The Ethereum network currently maintains a good level of activity.
Summarize
Since 2015, Ethereum has been around for nearly five years. Whether it is Ethereum enthusiasts, Ethereum investors or Ethereum developers, their feelings towards Ethereum are probably hard to describe. Ethereum fell to its lowest price of $81.93 in December 2018, which undoubtedly hit the confidence of many Ethereum enthusiasts compared to its highest price of $1,422 in January of the same year. But in early 2019, Ethereum returned to its second place in market value. The price on January 7, 2020 was $143.8.
It is undeniable that despite the dazzling advantages of Ethereum such as programmability and rich development tools, it is not perfect. Ethereum does have defects such as poor scalability, a large number of copycat tokens, performance bottlenecks, etc. However, through the five major performances of Ethereum shown in the above data, we also recognize the success of Ethereum and its huge potential.
With more and more applications based on Ethereum, the market demand for ETH and its liquidity are also increasing. The recently popular DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is mainly built on the Ethereum network. Although DeFi is not unique to Ethereum, it is undeniable that many inspirations about DeFi were first implemented on Ethereum, and DeFi has become the core focus of smart contract platforms.
In 2020, eight major currencies including BTC, BSV, BCH, and ZEC will usher in halving. If all goes well, Ethereum 2.0 will also be launched this year and switch from POW to POS. Ethereum founder Vitalik also responded in the Ethereum Chinese community that Ethereum 2.0 may be launched in the first quarter of this year or in the second quarter. In any case, 2020 will be a very important year for Ethereum and the year that deserves the most attention. How will Ethereum trend in the future, whether Ethereum can continue to dominate the smart contract platform, and whether it can continue to provide sufficient power for the DeFi ecosystem, we will wait and see.
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