This report dives into the recent growth of the onchain economy as of October 2024, and analyzes several use cases behind that growth, including stablecoins, layer 2s (L2s), collectibles, social media, gaming, DeFi, and institutional adoption. Overall, the data is clear: the onchain economy is growing rapidly.
This report also dives into the recent growth of Base, an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) incubated by Coinbase which has since seen significant growth since it launched its mainnet on August 9, 2023.
"Base is a secure, low-cost, builder-friendly Ethereum L2 built to bring a billion users, and a million developers onchain, with an ecosystem of onchain applications."
In the ~1 year the chain has been live, it has positioned itself at the forefront of the L2 space. During this time, the Base team has contributed to several onchain advancements: driving rollup transactions to sub-cent fees through EIP-4844, creating smart wallets to ease account abstraction, contributing to the Superchain stack, and plenty more. Daily transactions on Base are up 1,600% since the start of January, ascending from 372,000 to over 6.63M in October. Across many of the metrics analyzed, Base is growing faster relative to the total onchain economy, such as TVL, active addresses, and transactions.
The growth of the onchain economy extends beyond financial speculation. 66% of all active onchain applications are non-DeFi, such as gaming, social, and digital collectibles. DeFi apps account for 33% of onchain apps on major networks.
With new use cases continuing to emerge, and developers and users continuing to come onchain, the onchain economy is poised to accelerate in the coming months and years.
