Avalanche Blockchain Saw 1500% Transaction Growth in 2022: Nansen

Transactions on the Avalanche blockchain grew as much as 1,500% last year compared to 2021, even as the broader industry saw the collapse of several centralized crypto players and entered a technical bear market.

In Avalanche’s Q4 report shared with CoinDesk, data and analytics firm Nansen said the network demonstrated strength with notable increases in both NFT trading volume and the total number of transactions.

“While the network ended on November 21, 2021, with nearly 27 million transactions, Avalanche’s cumulative total passed 450 million transactions on November 21, 2022, marking an astounding 1,507% increase in a single year,” Nansen said.

Such transaction activity came even as the total value of tokens locked on Avalanche-based decentralized finance applications plummeted from 2021’s peak of $15 billion to just over $900 million in November 2022, DeFiLlama data shows.

“Avalanche users may find themselves asking ‘which crypto winter?’ as the network made impressive progress in the fourth quarter of 2022, said Mega Septiandara, research analyst at Nansen.

“With strong transaction sums and NFT trading volumes that pair well with new features and products set to enhance the user experience, Avalanche is poised for continued growth in 2023 as the entire Web3 space works to recover from the chaos caused by the FTX collapse, Septiandara added.

Looking specifically at Avalanche’s C-chain, the report noted that daily transactions in the fourth quarter were mostly volatile, ranging between roughly 100,000 to 230,000 transactions per day.

Part of this growth may have come from the Avalanche subnet, a custom blockchain built on Avalanche with products such as DeFi Kingdom’s DFK subnet which reached a cumulative 200 million transactions on November 13, 2022.

Compared to Ethereum, however, the report noted that Avalanche C-Chain’s transactions were relatively stable.

Avalanche C-Chain, short for contract chain, is the standard smart contract blockchain on Avalanche, which makes it possible to create all Ethereum-compatible smart contracts. This works complementary to X-Chain, which is used to send and receive funds in the form of AVAX tokens.

Elsewhere, Avalanche saw a thriving non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace throughout Q4, with the likes of industry-leading marketplace OpenSea expanding to the network.

In addition to significant growth in total transactions and NFT trading volume, key developments that Avalanche saw during the fourth quarter include several new projects, protocols and features joining the ecosystem.

Notable projects include Core Web, a free, all-in-one command center that gives users a more intuitive and comprehensive way to view and use Web3 across Avalanche and Ethereum, and JoePegs, an NFT marketplace launched in May that has has grown to become the largest on Avalanche with over $3.4 million in secondary NFT sales and more than 12,000 users, Nansen noted.