KEY POINTS
- The number of non-zero addresses is up by 38%
- Currently, there are 71,364,788 addresses holding some amount ETH
- Growing interest in NFT market could be driving the growth
It almost seems like a repeat of history as the number of Ethereum addresses with a non-zero balance has hit a new all-time high. A similar rise was seen on Dec.30 last year when the token hit its ATH of 2020.
Currently there are 71,364,788 addresses holding some amount of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, blockchain data site Glassnode said in a tweet.
Last year, on Dec. 30, the number ETH addresses with a non-zero balance was 51,491,730, a record high at the time. Since then it is up by 38%.
The reason for rise in the number this year could be the growing interest in the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market.
NFTs, which are basically blockchain-based tokens that can prove ownership, have become more mainstream this year. The NFT boom brought a lot of attention not just to Ethereum but the whole crypto world as well.
NFTs are mainly minted on the Ethereum blockchain and to buy and sell NFTs, one needs an Ethereum address — or wallet. This year also saw other blockchains like Solana catching up.
“NFTs played a huge role in adding new wallets and users to the Ethereum ecosystem. For a good part of the year, OpenSea transactions were taking up more gas than any other dApp,” Matt Aaron, project lead at UniWhales DAO, which builds DeFi analytics data tooling and research, told Decrypt:
It should be noted that, according to Dune Analytics, OpenSea’s monthly volume this month reached its second highest peak since August. December’s volume came up to $3,047,073,775.3, or above $3 billion. This could be directly linked to the increase in non-zero ETH addresses.
Compared to Bitcoin, whose non-zero addresses have picked and gone down, the number of non-zero ETH addresses has been steadily growing since 2017.
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