Daily active users – Weekly fundamentals #55

A walkthrough of the most interesting charts and trends in crypto, with a focus on key business drivers and protocol fundamentals.

This week’s newsletter focuses on daily active users, a metric that has a designated dashboard on Token Terminal. Let’s dig in!

Daily active users (DAU) = number of distinct addresses interacting with business relevant smart contracts.

Overview

Below is visualized the daily active users for the top 20 projects, including both blockchains and decentralized applications, over the past year.

Key takeaways:

• 15 of the top 20 projects are either L1 or L2 blockchains. Osmosis being the only L1 ‘appchain’ that made the cut.
• User activity for the top projects has been relatively consistent throughout the year.
• BNB Chain has started to close the gap to Tron over the past few months.

Key takeaways:

• Tron holds the biggest market share by some margin, with 1.6m daily active users as of March 14th.
• Polygon ranks as number one in the L2 category with 350k daily active users.
• PancakeSwap is currently the most used d’app, with 127k daily active users on the BNB Chain.
• While Bitcoin has more daily active users than Ethereum when measured by distinct sender addresses, it is important to note that the UTXO model used by Bitcoin may more frequently result in one user interacting with the blockchain via multiple addresses.

Momentum

Below is visualized the daily active users for the top projects, including both blockchains and decentralized applications, based on absolute number of users and growth rates.

Key takeaways:

• Tron, the most widely used crypto project, has 1.6m DAUs -- we’re still early.
• Crypto social is trending, with Lens Protocol showing green-only growth rates for the past year.
• Other projects with consistent user growth: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Fantom, Uniswap, and 0x.
• Optimism’s daily active user counts have been on a downtrend after OP airdrop #1.

Key takeaways:

• In general, the 30d growth rates are high (or volatile) when including all projects, also those with low daily active user counts.
• The interest rate swap protocol Voltz’s daily active user count spiked following increased market volatility.
• Toucan Protocol and Gamma Strategies showed strong 30d user growth, but have seen activity decline sharply more recently.
• The activity spikes on Liquity might be a signal of increasing interest towards decentralized (here: ETH-backed) stablecoins.

Key takeaways:

• In general, the growth rates are more modest (or less volatile) when filtering out projects with under 10k daily active users.
• OpenSea has seen a relatively sharp in decline in daily active users (NFT traders) over the past month.
• Fantom is currently the fastest growing L1, followed by Litecoin.
• In the L2 category, both Arbitrum and Polygon have shown strong growth over the past 30 days.

Video of the week

In this episode of 15-minute fundamentals, we dive into the current state of PancakeSwap with Head Chef, Mochi.

00:00 Introduction
00:42 What is PancakeSwap?
02:52 What problem does PancakeSwap solve?
03:38 Core products and their features
05:37 The market & how PancakeSwap is positioned within it
07:50 Analyzing market potential
09:17 Launching PancakeSwap on Ethereum
11:39 Main differences in building on BNB Chain vs. Ethereum
12:37 Approach to capturing market share on new chains
13:49 The team behind PancakeSwap
15:18 Overview of the economic model & stakeholders involved
16:19 Growth drivers & challenges
17:28 The CAKE token & incentives
18:39 What’s next for PancakeSwap?

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Product tip of the week

Tips for getting to most out of Token Terminal

We’ve introduced the ability to filter any data table columns. This is especially helpful if you want to exclude data points over or under certain values.

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