Regular investors of cryptocurrencies usually have very basic criteria to decide if things are going well. If the prices of their assets are high, things are going well. This is the basic psychology of the masses, especially in Crypto. However, professional investors do not follow this rule. They tend to look deeper and pay attention […]
Regular investors of cryptocurrencies usually have very basic criteria to decide if things are going well. If the prices of their assets are high, things are going well. This is the basic psychology of the masses, especially in Crypto. However, professional investors do not follow this rule. They tend to look deeper and pay attention to other more subtle indicators, like number of addresses or number of wallets that have been created on a Blockchain.
If you study the data that Etherscan.io’s website offers, the number of unique Ethereum addresses has recently surpassed a new frontier. The astounding quantity of 50 million addresses has been crossed. It is important to emphasize that, in the case of the Ethereum Blockchain, number of addresses does not equal the number of wallets. An informative article published earlier this year on Hackernoon.com helps explain their differences. Simply put, a wallet could be something like a Ledger Nano S which is a device that comes loaded with a collection of addresses. One address is more like one separate bank account.
As it can be seen through the Etherscan service, in spite of one of the worst periods in the current bear market here at the end of 2018 , the growth of Ethereum’s number of addresses has not stopped. Statistics suggest that during the current year, Ethereum users have created around one million new addresses per month, on average. No other Blockchain can compete against these numbers.
In general, it is well known that Ethereum has not had a very promising year in 2018 for at least a couple reasons. Many Ethereum ICOs have brought a bad reputation to the platform. The ETH price has dropped from about $1,400 in January, down to around $85 in the second week of December. It is not surprising, then, that the month of January was the one with the largest creation of new addresses. There was even a day in January, the 4th, when 352,888 new addresses were created in 24 hours!
January and February saw millions of new addresses being created. Currently, it is estimated that some 70,000 new addresses are born per day. This is much less than the rate of creation at the beginning of the year, but even so, 70,000 addresses a day is a figure that would be a dream for any other Blockchain. These figures suggest that tens of thousands of consumers still see high value in what Ethereum offers. Millions of people seam to be very bullish about the present use cases of Ethereum and the future developments of this Blockchain.
There is also a very realistic statistic that must be faced. It is about the number of daily transactions in the network. Just as the number of new addresses that are generated per day has decreased, so has the number of transactions. While in January of 2018, a sensational month for Crypto, it was normal to have a million transactions or more per day in Ethereum. Currently, this Blockchain attends to barely above 500,000 transactions per day. Boiling this number down, it means that only about 6 transactions per second are being processed. This number is insignificant if one thinks about the thousands of transactions per second that Visa or MasterCard processes.
This moment of December 2018, in the midst of a highly unexpected depression of the Crypto markets, does not seem to be the best time to evaluate any asset separately. All cryptocurrencies are very far from their highest prices. However, Ethereum is a special case. It is thought that Ethereum has had steeper losses than many other Cryptos. It has been a relatively brutal year for Ethereum. Even so, it is still a market leader and continues to prove its worth and weather the storm that it has experienced all year as it holds a solid third place in the Market Capitalization index. Also notable, it maintains a level of trading of more than a billion dollars per day.
There is only one Blockchain in the world that can compete with this level, Bitcoin. Even if one thinks that, on the one hand, all the factors that are affecting Ethereum are worrying investors and maintaining bearish sentiments, there is evidence of continuous growth with that level of daily volume that continues to give Ethereum a status of notorious leadership. Ethereum investors expect, of course, that this dominance will translate into an increase in ETH prices in the near future.
