The crypto industry had a remarkable year in 2024, with rising coin prices driving growth across many chains. However, despite this overall expansion, on-chain activity didn’t see quite as much success. According to a report from the blockchain growth platform Flipside, there was a clear need for networks to offer both quantity and quality of on-chain activity in order to attract users and transform them into valuable contributors.
While some chains struggled to maintain or even achieve growth throughout the year, others managed to thrive. For instance, the layer-2 network launched by Coinbase, known simply as “Base,” experienced exponential growth in both user count and on-chain activity during 2024. In fact, according to data shared exclusively with CryptoPotato, Base’s monthly acquired users increased by 56 times this year alone – a staggering statistic.
Furthermore, Base managed to attract a substantial number of super users who executed over 100 decentralized finance (DeFi) transactions each month – an impressive feat considering the competition. With 15.1 million super users, it managed to outperform even Ethereum, which boasted just 10.7 million super users engaged in similar activities.
However, it wasn’t just Base that managed to make waves in the world of on-chain activity; Ethereum also saw impressive growth throughout the year. Despite facing stiff competition from its own layer-2 networks Arbitrum and Optimism, Ethereum still managed to average 1.56 million acquired users per month – significantly outperforming both competitors.
Furthermore, when it came to DeFi-related super users, Ethereum once again came out on top with a whopping 10.9 million users compared to Arbitrum’s 6.2 million and Optimism’s meager 1.8 million. Interestingly enough, while institutional acceptance of cryptocurrencies may have played a role in driving some of this growth across certain chains, there were other factors at play as well – such as the increasing popularity of cryptocurrency investment products like spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Despite bitcoin’s historic surge above the $100,000 level and the launch of these new investment vehicles, its own on-chain activity didn’t quite keep pace. While Bitcoin did manage to acquire 935,900 new users each month during the year – a significant figure in its own right – it failed to see much in the way of sustained growth or meaningful new user onboarding outside of periods of intense speculation.
In fact, according to Flipside’s data, Bitcoin’s acquired users actually declined by 28.5% during the post-US election rally in November – indicating that much of this growth may have been driven by short-term speculation rather than long-term user adoption. Overall then, while there were certainly pockets of success when it came to on-chain activity during 2024 – particularly within certain sectors like decentralized exchanges where Uniswap continued to dominate across multiple chains – there remains much work yet to be done if we wish to see truly widespread adoption and engagement within the broader cryptosphere.
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