Ethereum price rallied back above $3,000 on Tuesday after a weekend dip. This came after a long period of trading below this level.
2021, in fact, was a fortuitous year for the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, with ETH seeing a fourfold increase in value in 12 months.
Continuing the trend in 2022
ETH broke above the $3,120 resistance and traded at a new high of $3,196, at press time. It has also enjoyed immense traction or rather adoption by different institutions across the globe. Following the number of addresses with balance could share some light on this important step.
Blockchain analytics firm IntoTheBlock shared its findings on the altcoin recently. Ethereum’s network gained 18.36 million addresses with a balance greater than zero in 2021. This marked a growth rate of 1.53 million new addresses per month.
Although the number of addresses with a balance does not provide an exact number of holders (because many users may have more than one address), it acts as a proxy for network growth.
Fierce competition
Now, the aforementioned metric projects an extremely bullish case for Ethereum. However, ETH’s price isn’t directly proportional to this growth.
The number of addresses containing more than 1,000 coins has decreased since the start of 2021. In fact, on-chain analytics firm Glassnode reported on February 13, whale wallets had hit a 4-year low of 6,226.
Even so, the average daily amount of transactions on Ethereum has remained constant, without any upside trajectory. At press time, it stood at around 1.2 million. The same has more or less held this level since the middle of December.
The unprecedented rise in gasoline costs could be one of the reasons for this stagnant approach. Many users may look for other alternatives with the same purpose as Ethereum.
Polygon, a Layer 2 solution built on top of Ethereum, gained significantly from this deficit. It allowed projects to pull the actual meat of their transactions off its blockchain while still uploading the transaction details to the Ethereum blockchain.
It is on average more than twice the daily transaction volume of Ethereum. At the time of writing, it incorporates over 3 million transactions per day. Moreover, on January 29 of this year, it had more than 7,000 decentralized applications.
