Ethereum Inflation, Supply, Staking and Other Key Metrics | Dec 2024

in #ethereum13 days ago

How is the Ethereum network doing these days? The market has turned bullish in the last month.
Since the PoS update the inflation for Ethereum is reduced by 90%, from 4.3% to 0.43%. Additionally, part of the ETH for transactions is burned, that pushed Ethereum into deflationary territory. Meanwhile, the share of staked ETH kept on growing drying up the liquid ETH supply.

Let’s take a look.

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Here we e will be looking at:

  • Overall Supply
  • Number Of Wallets
  • Active Wallets
  • Transactions
  • Fees
  • Staked ETH
  • Contracts

The data presented here is mostly gathered from the etherscan charts and Dune Analytics.

Supply

The overall supply now looks like this:

image001.png

A steady increase in the supply from just above 70M in 2015 to 120M where we are now.
We can see that in the last period after the merge, the supply has been almost stagnant, and even dropped a little.

Ethereum Supply After the Merge

The chart for the new ETH issued after the merge and the transition to proof of stake looks like this.

image003.png

Overall, ETH has been deflationary in the period. But for how much? In absolute numbers it’s around -75k ETH, while in relative number it is -0.06%. Close to zero in a period of two years.

Since March 2024 we can notice that the ETH supply has been growing again due to less activity on the network and smaller amounts of fees burned. At the top there was more than 450k ETH burned since the merge, and now we are around 75k meaning a 375k more ETH was put in circulation in the last months.

The table for the yearly inflation looks like this.

image005.png

From more than 10% down to negative -0.28% in 2023. The last year was the first year in which Ethereum ended with deflationary supply.
2024 will probably end inflationary with just above 0.2%, still less than the 0.43% base inflation.
Even with positive inflation of 0.22% this is still quite a hard asset, having in mind that if we take the last two years it will be at zero.

Number of Wallets

Now for the general network numbers.
Here is the chart for the total number of Ethereum wallets created.

image007.png

Ethereum now has more than 292M wallets! The numbers of wallets keeps growing at a steady pace.

When we look at the number of new daily wallets created we get this chart.

image009.png

This is starting from 2022.

Some sideways action here but still a relatively steady number with the number of new daily wallets around 100k per day.

Active Wallets

How many of them are being used?
Here is the chart.

image013.png

We can see that there was an overall uptrend up until 2021, reaching around 700k active wallets. Since then, there has been a downtrend up to December 2023, when it started growing again, from 400k to 600k active daily wallets.

Transactions

How about the number of transactions? Is the Ethereum network now more active after the merge? Here is the chart.

image015.png

There was a spike in the transactions back in the bull market of 2017, up to 1.4M, then a drop to around 500k per day.
In the previous bull market in 2021 the ATH was somewhere around 1.8M transactions per day, a steady drop since then and a growth again in December 2023, and we are now somewhere around 1.3M transactions per day on the Ethereum network.

Fees

There was misunderstandings that the merge will make the fees on Ethereum smaller. But this is not the case. The merge is a consensus upgrade, not a scalability upgrade.

image017.png

At first there was a small increase in the fees back in 2017-2018 bull run. Then in the next bull ran a massive increase in the fees up to $100 at one point. A drop in 2022 and since then it has been in the range of 5 to 10 USD.

Staking Ethereum

Staking a big topic in the Ethereum network since the PoS upgrade. Here in short will just check the share of ETH staked from the overall supply. Here is the pie.

image019.png

A 29% staked ETH from all the supply. The trend for the staked ETH has been constantly up in the last period. For a token of this size and market cap this is quite a big share.

Number of Contracts

Here is the chart for the number of smart contracts deployed daily.

image021.png

There was a peak in the number of contacts back in 2023, and then a drop in 2024, from 1k to around 400 where it has been up until recently when it dropped further to below 100 daily verified contracts on the Ethereum network. Maybe a lot of the sidechains are taking some the share of the contracts.


In summary, while the market has been volatile, the stats on the Ethereum network has been quite constant so to speak. The number of transactions, active wallets, new wallets, have all is a type of stable range. Looks like these numbers have been almost maxed and they stay at those levels. On the other hand fees remain down and the amount of ETH burned is lower then the inflation causing the overall ETH supply to goes slightly up.

All the best
@dalz

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Some people are worried about the inflation but honestly it's so minor compared to other tokens that it feels like a rather healthy inflation number. Not too much and not too little with plenty of development still happening on the chain.


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I was hoping that the merge would make fees smaller, thanks to this post now I know why not.

The number of ETH wallet creations has increased and stabilized, and the number of active wallets has increased. 292 million wallets have been created which amazes me. Transactions increased and fees decreased. Very strong network

The staking percentage on EThereum is low. The reason for this is that you need to have at least 32 ETH to be able to stake. If we calculate from the current price, it is necessary to have approximately 126k dollars.

Despite some negativities, the fact that the current eth address is at an average level should be pleasing for ETH investors.

I think 100k wallets being created daily is a huge one. The ETH blockchain is experiencing steady growth and it will even grow more next year at the peak of the bull run. Thanks for the update.