DappRadar’s 2022 Yearly Report Highlights Rising Blockchain Adoption Amid A Year Of Crypto Turmoil
Kaunus, Lithuania
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December 22, 2022 02:40 PM Eastern Standard Time
DappRadar, the global dapp store, has announced its annual end-of-year report for the blockchain, dapp, and crypto industry in 2022. It was a year that was marked by one of the most brutal crypto winters yet, characterized by the huge drop in the value of most major cryptocurrencies and a string of disasters such as the collapse of the FTX exchange. Yet somehow, the crypto industry showed its resilience with dozens of incredible technological achievements throughout the year.
The best example of this was Ethereum’s Merge, where the network successfully transitioned from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake (PoS) in order to reduce its energy consumption by an incredible 99.9%. Moreover, hundreds of developers kept their heads down and continued to build while enduring bear market conditions, with several exciting new projects emerging as a result. It can be said that the industry has also learned from many of the harsh lessons it endured in 2022, with numerous projects showing impressive resiliency as the ground collapsed beneath their feet.
DappRadar’s 2022 Yearly Report offers some surprising growth metrics too, showing that the dapp industry as a whole saw a 50% increase in daily unique active wallets, consolidating the dUAW at 2.37 million, up from just 1.58 million dUAW at the end of 2021. Despite this increase, it seems that the industry has consolidated its activity this year, and since the beginning of the year has been on a downward trend. The continuous adoption of blockchain by both consumers and businesses, along with the increasing support from investors, has helped the industry to consolidate. This confirms the resilience and maturity of the industry.
The report highlights the challenges these negative events posed for the crypto industry, with the biggest ones being a sharp decline in cryptocurrency prices throughout the year and a significant drop in the Total Value Locked in DeFi, which fell 73.97% to just $55 billion in December.
That said, the DeFi industry continues to persevere and Ethereum still leads the way with $32.12 billion in TVL, down 74.56%, followed by BNB Chain in second place with $6.5 billion TVL, down 62.5%. DappRadar also highlighted some of the least affected blockchains, namely scaling solutions such as Arbitrum, which saw its TVL fall by just 12.07% to $1.74 billion. On the other hand, Optimism’s TVL soared by an impressive 127.6% to hit $669 million.
There were a number of positive takeaways from the NFT sector too, with trading volume edging upwards slightly by 0.41% compared to a year earlier, despite the decline in token prices. Moreover, the number of unique NFT traders rose by an incredible 876.89% from a year earlier to more than 10.6 million. Total sales similarly rose, by 10.16%, to reach 68.35 million.
The NFT sector was jolted by the emergence of several new marketplaces in the last year. Of those new entrants, the most impressive by far was X2Y2, which achieved more than $1.5 billion in annual trading volume to become one of the top 10 marketplaces in the industry. Another new player is Blur, which only launched in October but has already done more than $205 million in trading volume, enough for it to reach 10th place on the overall rankings.
Further signs of resilience came from the blockchain games industry, which accounted for 49% of all dapp activity in 2022, making it the largest segment overall. At the end of the year, the sector counted an average of 1.15 million dUAW, with 7.4 billion transactions in total. Of the top games, Splinterlands held onto the top spot with 217,914 monthly UAW, up 85.78% from a year earlier, while Alien Worlds retained second place despite its mUAWs declining by 3.67% to 178,118.
Of course, it would be wrong to say that it was all plain sailing for the crypto industry in 2022, with DappRadar’s report highlighting the ongoing prevalence of hack attacks and exploits that resulted in billions of dollars’ worth of losses. In 2022, DappRadar recorded 312 crypto attacks that led to losses of over $48 billion worth of crypto assets. The biggest by far was the Terra Luna scandal, which indirectly led to losses of more than $40 billion. However, the vast majority of hacks targeted centralized exchanges, DappRadar found, with losses there totaling $44.71 billion. Excluding the Terra Luna scandal, the volume of scams is relatively low, with a median loss per hack of 283k dollars and losses totaling 345 million dollars per month.
Overall, it was a challenging year for the blockchain industry but also one in which it demonstrated both resilience and maturity. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the report is that adoption of blockchain technology continued to grow throughout 2022 - a fact that suggests that, despite its current challenges, the future of the industry remains bright.
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