Now that we're in a bear market, is anyone actually still using your blockchain?

I love metrics. So I am constantly analysing data to compare and validate my theories on which blockchains and projects will survive and demonstrate the most upside potential. One metric, I look at often is the daily active users. It's a great metric to tell whether the chain is being used.

What are Daily Active Users?

This is simply the number of addresses on the blockchain that perform at least one transaction on a particular day. If there are 1000 addresses sending transaction, then that implies 1000 people used the blockchain.

Why is it important?

A blockchain will be successful if people are using it. That is an obvious assertion. If lots of people are making transactions, then the project has inherent utility. If its being effectively used during a bear market, then there is potential for great upside during a bull run.

Why compare to the November highs?

During the peak of the bullrun, we saw enormous take up and investment in crypto. Millions of new users creating their accounts, interacting with the blockchain, experimenting with dApps etc. It was sometimes difficult to find the data for the exact date, so all results were taken on or close to 10 November 2021, as this was the date of Bitcoin's all time high.

By comparing the current daily users to that date, we can ascertain a decent perspective on which users decided to stick around, or perhaps even which projects are still attracting new users, despite the bear market.

What data could be missing?

An obvious hole is that this shows the blockchain data only. Any transactions made on exchanges will not be counted towards the daily active users.

Another possible gap in the data comes from the impact of bots. Many blockchains have bots performing automated tasks, and these appear the same as any other user.

The date I chose was base don the Bitcoin price, and likely doesn't perfectly coincide with the all time highest daily active users on any particular chain - that could of course occur any day.

Examples:

The following is an examples are for Polkadot and Avalanche. I checked the published statistics on the Polkadot and Avalanche websites, and then compared them to data on Messari and/or Glassnode. This is the same thing I did to complete the table below.

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Polkadot Daily Active Users from Polkadot website

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Avalanche Daily Active Users from Avalanche website

Sources:

The sources for the information were checked against the blockchain results on either the project's own websites and/or messari. Results are rounded to nearest 100 users. , Beaconchain, Messari, Glassnode

Results

I've prepared the table below based on the data. I've also included a column demonstrating the change in daily active users between November and now.

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Conclusion

I will reserve judgement for now as to which projects show more or less potential for value increase based on their daily active users only. Suffice it to say, obviously for a project to become successful, adoption is key.

How does your project choice measure up? If you are concerned about your investments, check the numbers against several other sources. Messari would be another good place to start.

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EDIT: Holy Shit, something in this post has pissed people off. Copping a barrage of downvotes to the post and every single comment. Just trying to share publicly available stats in a readable manner, apologies to those below who are already taking hits...