Alephium experienced the most explosive growth in 2024. But how far have we come? Besides being the fastest horse in 2024, what else have we accomplished?
Credit: https://x.com/whenInternetOfB/status/1819048866034950502
#1 Understanding the Success
The key to measuring a network's success is understanding Metcalfe's Law.
Simply, a network's value increases as more people use it. This leads to market dominance and boosts economic growth in digital platforms.
To illustrate: If a digital platform has two users, there is only one possible connection. With 10 users, the value increases because there are more connections and interactions.
Think of a fax machine: owning one is useless. With two, you can communicate with one other person. But with millions, the fax machine becomes very valuable.
Source: What is Metcalfe's Law? Definition, Types & Examples Techopedia
To learn about Alephium's success, we have to look at Alephium users.
The Alephium Statistics
Active Addresses
Right now, Alephium has 176,000 active addresses. While some users may have multiple wallets, an increasing number of active addresses usually shows higher user engagement and adoption. (Sources are available by clicking the images!)
Number of ETH holder addresses: For context, there were zero addresses back in November 2023. By the end of May '24, there were a bit over 9,000 addresses. Today, there are 9,925 wallet addresses. That's a 10% increase in two months. It may not be a huge leap, but it is growing.
The Mining Hashrate
According to data from Minerstat, the Alephium network hashrate has grown from 45 TH/s before the Leman upgrade to 2,000 TH/s now. Proof of Less Work will activate at 1 EH/s, which is 1,000,000 TH/s. We need a 500x increase from here, but you'll be surprised once all ASICs are shipped out.
Network Nodes
Right now, there are 125 nodes contributing to the Alephium network. Out of which, 59 were geolocated by Alephium.World.
It's nothing extraordinary. However, if we compare it to some Proof of Work (PoW) coins, we can say it's relatively good. For example, DOGE, which is the 9th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has 589 total nodes. To surpass DOGE's market cap, ALPH has to 105x in market valuation. But to surpass DOGE's number of nodes, ALPH only needed to 5x. Crazy!
You might be thinking, "But Mow, that's a memecoin!" Yes, it is. But it's also a fork of Bitcoin, with probably the biggest and craziest crypto community, including Elon Musk, and it is the second largest Proof of Work (PoW) coin in existence.
Transaction Volume
The number of on-chain transactions shows the overall activity and usage on the ALPH network. Before the Rhone Upgrade, this number is about 27,500 transactions daily. (Screenshot taken May 28, 2024)
And today, this number has grown to 84k. That's an impressive 3x increase in just 2 months! Yep, this one is crazy too!
Although measuring blockchain transactions can be complex and nuanced, still, these figures indicate a massive increase in usage and user base.
The Developer Community
While there is no accessible way to count how many developers are actually working on ALPH-related projects, we can still come up with a statistical estimate. It is common for a DApp to start with a small team of 1 to 3 developers in the early stages and then later expand to a larger team as the project grows and secures more funding. Popular DApps in the ecosystem fall around the same range.
Currently, we have about 40 active projects contributing to various parts of the ecosystem, including DApps, NFTs, memes, betting platforms and tools that improve the overall functionality and usability of ALPH.
We can estimate there are about 80 to 120 active developers 'devving' on Alephium
The level of developer activity (commits, updates, new features from core developers) can also indirectly impact user adoption as it indicates ongoing improvements. Take a look at this chart from DefiLlama. We are at almost the ATH levels at 792 commits from 27 devs.
Social Media Activity
More often than not, crypto is driven by sentiment, which is why the community plays a big role. For example, if most of the community believes their token is finished, then it likely is. We've seen this many times already, and we don't want to name specific examples. This also works the other way around; price predictions are self-fulfilling prophecies. Remember the day all DOGE holders decided they were going to hit $1 during Elon's SNS appearance? It was monumental, because they almost did. It was crazy. Moving on...
How big of a community is the ALPH Community? Let's check the numbers.
Alephium's Twitter (@alephium): 38.8k Followers
This is still quite young. For comparison, Kaspa (@KaspaCurrency), another PoW L1 blockchain doing well this cycle, has 206k followers. From here, ALPH needs to 5x in twitter size to get into the Kaspa size. This is actually good. This means there is more room for growth.
Alephium's Telegram: 9k Members
As much as I would like to avoid comparing ALPH to Kaspa, the numbers are striking. Currently, Kaspa has 39,700 members. This means ALPH's Telegram group needs to grow 4.5x to reach Kaspa's level. It's a similar situation with Twitter followers!
Alephium's Discord: 11,044 Members
If you are guessing Kaspa's discord to be somewhere 4.5x to 5x of Alephium's size, then you are actually correct! 11,044 x 4.5 = 49,698.
Looking Ahead
Alephium is a successful L1 chain. Despite the significant network growth, it is still relatively small. This means there is plenty of room for further growth.
Today, we've only looked at the numbers, but we know there are other metrics we can't measure. These statistics are already impressive, and we can expect even more significant growth in the coming months as these get deployed:
Oracle Integration
Ledger Support
BSC Bridge
Lending and Borrowing Dapps
DEX Aggregators
Deployment of Bitmain and IceRiver ASICs.
Thanks for joining me today.
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