2022 will go down as a challenging year for the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, but the adversity faced has been strewn with plenty of positives for the decentralized application (DApp) ecosystem.
DappRadar has released its yearly report on the industry, focusing on challenges faced alongside notable technological achievements and an increasing number of active daily users.
Cointelegraph highlights the main takeaways from the DApp industry in 2022, which are pertinent, considering macro factors like inflationary concerns in major economies, the collapse of industry-specific projects like Terra/Luna and FTX, as well as market woes across the board.
Perhaps most telling is unique active wallet data (UAW) from 2021 and 2022, demonstrating a 50% increase in the average daily UAW year on year. This is up from 1.58 million daily users in 2021 to an average of 2.37 million daily active users in 2022.
Source: DappRadar
It must be noted that there was a downtrend of DApp users from February 2022, which DappRadar associated with the escalating war in Ukraine as well as crypto-specific black swan events, including Terra/Luna and FTX’s collapse.
The decentralized finance (DeFi) industry was particularly affected in the wake of Terra’s TerraUSD (UST) depeg and the resulting cryptocurrency market decline, with a significant drop in total value locked (TVL) of around 73% to $55 billion as of December 2022.
Related: Gaming makes up over half of blockchain industry usage, DappRadar
Layer-1 DeFi protocols saw the biggest drop in TVL, with Ethereum experiencing a 74.5% reduction to $32.12 billion TVL, while the second biggest DeFi ecosystem, BNB Chain, recorded a 62.5% drop in TVL in 2022. Layer-2 protocols fared slightly better, with Arbitrum falling 12% to $1.74 billion. Optimism’s TVL increased by 127.60%, hitting $669 million.
On-chain data for nonfungible token (NFT) trading volume was in contrast to DeFi’s year-to-date. NFT trading volume increased by just 0.41% year on year, while the number of unique traders…
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