Tezos on-chain activity and adoption
The Tezos ecosystem has experienced tremendous growth in the first 2.5 months of 2021. After a lot of hard work from a wide variety of Tezos teams developing tools and standards that facilitate end-user applications, a number of products have launched this year and gained strong traction.
The chart above shows the number of interactions with Tezos smart contracts each month over the past 12 months. This is an important metric to follow as it tracks real activity with Tezos-based products. On-chain activity is a significant contributor to a cryptocurrency’s network effect. And as I outline in
this blog post, cryptocurrencies derive their value from network effects.
February was a stellar month for Tezos on-chain activity with the network experiencing just over 100,000 smart contract interactions. Even more impressive, 12 days into March and that number has
already been surpassed. Tezos is currently on-track to crack over 300,000 smart contract interactions in March, which would smash February’s number by over 3x. If we continue on this trajectory, April could see over 1,000,000 smart contract interactions, which would be a terrific milestone for the Tezos community.
This adoption can largely be attributed to the recent wave of Tezos-based products that have launched. Most notably,
hic et nunc (which is Latin for “Here and Now”), absolutely blew up over the past two weeks. As the first NFT marketplace on Tezos, hic et nunc facilitated
over 20,000 sales in its first 10 days and has gained adoption by a
number of
high-profile artists and
creators. Additionally,
The Alchememist’s NFT auctions, which are powered by
OpenMinter, and
tzcolors saw significant engagement. These sorts of early experiments are made possible by maturing community standards and wallets such as
Kukai, which allows users to
easily store, transact, and view their NFTs.
In addition to the NFT explosion so far this month, on-chain activity has also significantly increased in other areas like DeFi. In particular,
Kolibri, the first algorithmic stablecoin on Tezos which launched on 17 February 2021, was a community favorite in early March. By 7 March, Kolibri had
passed 500 “ovens” (collateralized debt positions), securing over $6.2m worth of tez and minting over 1.1m kUSD.