By Franklin Smith
Ethereum Network saw revenue decline by a staggering 86% during Q3 2022 (reports from an informative crypto-focused site Bankless. Data indicated that Ethereum registered net revenue of $1.96 trillion in Q2. Unfortunately, third-quarter struggles saw the metric at a mere $274.12 million.
That shows that the September 15 Merge upgrade wasn’t crucial to rescue the Ethereum blockchain. As per the network revenue status, the third quarter has recorded faded Ether demand, with the leading alt exhibiting bearishness for most sessions. Nevertheless, the quarter recorded a few upticks.
Bankless shows Ethereum’s active addresses gained 3.09% from the past quarter. That saw the unique address count hitting 506,384. Furthermore, the quarter saw other positives. For instance, Ethereum noted a staking surge.
Meanwhile, Bankless connected the report to data by Nansen, which indicated an 80% uptick in deposit contracts to 14.1M. The figure incorporated 84,600 unique depositors and 442,000 unique validators.
Meantime, Lido Finance (LDO) may have contributed much to the staking surge. Besides offering Ethereum participants a liquidity pool, LDO was among the top-performing digital coins during the quarter, especially prior-merge. Lido accounted for about 4.25 million of the depositors.
Also, Ethereum flourished in the Layer2 market. The report indicated that L2 protocols’ TVL (total value locked) soared massively to 4.73 billion from 2.40 billion. That suggested a 97% uptick from Q2.
That might not be intriguing as protocols such as Optimism and Arbtirum excelled significantly. Surprisingly, the two networks accounted for around 81% of the total value-locked uptick.
Not a Treasure-trove Still
Meanwhile, the decentralized finance (DeFi) total value locked didn’t follow L2 ecosystem steps. DeFiLlama shows the TVL declined by more than 50% to explore $31.83 billion during the quarter.
That equaled 23.55 $ETH. Thus, the ecosystem exhibited fewer liquidity additions than liquid outflows.
Also, Dune Analytics indicated that the decentralized exchange volume (DEX) volume plummeted to $192.73 billion from $281.68 billion.
Meanwhile, downbeat market conditions likely triggered this fall. The NFT sector witnessed a disastrous decline to $2.08 billion from $8.32 billion. Also, there were dips in cash outstanding debt & surges in stablecoin circulating supply.
The report indicated some dark phases for Ethereum, regardless of positivity in other sectors. Moreover, upcoming developments might see the Ethereum platform returning to impressive growth.
Meanwhile, the Proof-of-stake network might have to satisfy regulations as it attracted SEC’s attention following the merge.