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There’s a lot of exciting activity in the Consumer Crypto category. Here's a data driven summary of whats been going on over the first quarter of the year.
NFTs slowly recovering being bolstered by Bitcoin and Solana. Paid Mints at all time highs, never stopped growing since the 2021 bull market.
The price volume of NFTs is gradually recovering since hitting a low in the summer of 2023, buoyed by Bitcoin and Solana. Meanwhile, the number of paid mints for NFTs on Ethereum is consistently reaching record highs. This is largely due to EVM Layer 2s minting more NFTs at reduced prices and costs.
NFT volumes increased 450% from the bottom September 2023 of $300M to $1.4B in March 2024, of which $530M was Ethereum NFT volume, $515M on Bitcoin, and $240M on Solana.
The number of monthly unique addresses minting across Ethereum and EVM Layer 2 networks have steadily climbed to a new all-time high of 1.33M in February. Despite falling prices during the bear market and lagging dollar volume of NFT transactions, the number of NFT mints continue to rise. Layer 2’s like Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc. have gas fees less than $1 and now after the Dencun upgrade, lower than $0.01 enabling an environment for creators, artist, and brands to onboard more collectors. And helped by the web3 social native integrations of NFT minting directly in the feed on Farcaster and Lens.
Web3 Social has had a break out moment since the beginning of 2024.
Farcaster explodes with number of Daily Active Users, Frames and Channels created. Memecoins like Degen lead the way for user acquisition and engagement.
Farcaster has reached over 40k DAUs and amassed over 273k total users, with 292k wallets connected to accounts.
Since launching Frames on Farcaster, there have been over 668K frames casted from over 48K unique users. Frames have enabled a unique social experience unseen in web2 social, with frames being a window into interacting with any other application or protocol within the social feed post itself. Many Frames are airdrops or NFT mints directly from creators or brands, right within their social posts.
Since the release of Channels, there has also been a massive spike in Channels being created with the most popular being, Base (162K Followers), Degen (60K Followers), and Zora (26K). Multiple channels have airdropped tokens based on early and ongoing participation, such as Degen, while creating utility such as tipping, rewards, and bounties.
The memecoin of Farcaster and Base network with utility.
DEGEN, originally formed as a utility token to reward early community members of the /Degen channel, has emerged as both a memecoin and utility token across the Farcaster ecosystem as well as other applications building on Base. Applications have used the token as a GTM strategy to onboard existing community members to the platform.
This has resulted in significant growth, with the total number of holders surpassing 118K, DEX transaction volume exceeding $786M, along with over 1.7M total DEGEN transactions. Examples of apps using this strategy include Perl for social prediction markets, Drakula for engaging with short form content, and Bracket for sports betting.
Lens goes permissionless and sees significant growth.
Lens opened up their protocol to be permissionless, at the end of February, allowing full decentralization for anyone to sign up and developers to build on the protocol. The announcement was well received, resulting in the immediate minting of 33k profiles (generating $250K in protocol revenue in under 24 hours) and now up to 274K profiles minted, or users signed up.
There’s been an uptick in daily and monthly active users with 10K DAUs and 75k MAUs across Lens in March, with the Hey application leading the way with nearly 7K DAUs and 42K MAUs. Notably, Orbs and Phaver are leading Lens based social applications with 10.6K and 12.3K MAUs, respectively. The Lens ecosystem has a number of accesible front end clients for users to access and engage with the protocol.
The memecoin of Lens and Polygon network with utility.
BONSAI was formed to incentivize usage on Lens and engage with open actions by an early team building on the protocol. Its become the main utility coin of the Lens ecosystem for minting and collecting NFTs. BONSAI is deployed on the Polygon layer 2 network, and is a DN-404 smart contract that marries together an ERC-20 and ERC-721 contract.
In a very short amount of time Bonsai has gained significant marketshare of all the paid mints taking place on Lens with over 87% of recent transactions. They’re also becoming integrated natively into more Lens ecosystem applications like Orb and Zurp.
Base paves the way for Consumer Crypto apps to build on.
There has been significant competition among layer 2 chains such as Optimism, Arbitrium, Zora, ZkSync, and Base. Recently, Base has seem to take the lead on consumer applications largely driven by its integration into the Farcaster ecosystem and the growth around its memecoin culture with Degen and many others.
Base has grown to nearly 6M users, $1.3B in bridged value, and $40M of network revenue. The L2 broke 2.5M in daily transactions and 14M transactions in a week, 400K DAUs and 1.4M MAUs, and $10M a week in revenue.
Base has become one of the most if not the most attractive Layer 2 for consumer applications and protocols to build atop.
Blast starts with a lot of staked money earning yield and early applications utilizing the native incentives.
Blast, a new L2 focused on NFTs and DeFi with a yield bearing native ETH token, launched on mainnet on March 1st. Their initial announcement pre launch garnered a lot of attention for users to bridge their ETH to earn native rewards which resulted in $2.3B staked and 180k users leading up to its release..
Currently, Blast has a Total Value Locked (TVL) of $2.5B and 655K users.
The wealth transfer to a new L2 in combination with the incentive based yield and point earning systems have prompted many companies to build on it. To further motivate developers to create dapps, Blast initiated the Big Bang competition. This competition enables companies to vie for grant rewards and connect with investors within the Blast ecosystem. The winners spanned a wide range of sectors, including consumer social categories such as NFTs/Gaming, SocialFi, and GambleFi.
Polymarket comes back stronger than ever with consistent all time high prediction market volume.
Polymarket reached an all-time high in monthly volume in January, surpassing $50M, and sustaining over 40M per month since then. Much of this volume is directly related to high-stakes prediction markets for political candidates and ETF-related predictions.
In 2024, influential figures like Donald Trump and Bill Ackman are acknowledging the rise of prediction markets, specifically Polymarket, as a source of accurate information and signaling a potential mainstream breakthrough.
Titles embraces AI for ease of onchain content creation via attribution.
Titles is an AI powered publishing and remixing protocols, training AI models on NFT collections and enabling the creation of derivatives from artist/creator communities with baked in attribution and royalty payments.
They partnered with Own The Doge ($DOG), an ERC-20 token fully backed by the first official Doge meme, to develop a custom AI model that lets users easily generate their own derivatives based on the Doge meme. Currently, there have been over 31.7K NFT derivatives created using Titles' Doge Model by over 30K unique contributors.
Pods creates the market for Onchain Podcasts.
Pods has onboarded 30 Podcasts shows, minted 274 episodes, attraced 5.3K collectors and over 12K mints. Podcasts have made $25K from minting revenue on the platform so far.
Nameservices go crosschain with native wallet delegation.
Delegate is the leader in wallet to wallet delegation, creating an abscraction layer of wallet ownership. The most adopted use case is proving ownership of a wallet with high value assets to get access from a less valuable wallet without having to risk the assets.
Delegate is protecting nearly $1.4B in assets accross 67.8K vaults.
Clusters is a crosschain name service, connecting onchain identity across multiple chains. Since launch they’ve had more than 72K names registered.
The platform is also integrated with a marketplace facilitates bidding on names. There have been over 60k cross-chain bids totaling 800ETH from 54K users.
Onchain game on EVM testnet built on MUD engine attracts users with a fun game and good user experience.
The latest update of primodium brings player count to over 10K users and 650K transactions.
Realms continues the Loot ecosytem into the most built on onchain game paving the way for the Starknet gaming ecosystem.
Realms is an Autonomous World inspired by Loot, originally minting their collection of Realms as a derivative of Loot to build a MMOCCG (massively-multiplayer on-chain composable game) on L2 StarkNet. Lords is the native token of Realms, which can be earned by staking Realms and via emissions for activity in the game.
Since its release, there have been over 25 games such as Eternum, Loot Survivor, Underdark, Rising Revenant, and over 5 game studios formed such as Underware, zKorp, and grugs lair.
Realms announced their Layer 3 powered by LORDS for their own game and ecosystem of games build atop them.
Pets fully onchain with an onchain economy.
Fren Pet is one of the earliest onchain games and the first on the Base L2 ecosystem. They’ve seen a significat uptick in their traction with over 10K players and 5.6M $FP spent (current price of FP is $7).
Onchain survivor game takes crypto community by storm, distracting people from work and creating new friends and wealth.
Crypto the Game is a mass multiplayer online survival game was launched and immediately well-received, securing a grand prize pot of over 41ETH. It attracted 410 players who formed tribes, participated in chat rooms, and competed in immunity challenges such as arcade games and scavenger hunts. The game ended on February 9th, with MFL_tw securing enough votes to win the final prize of Crypto The Game's first season. Their second season is kicking off!
Theres a lot going on in Consumer Crypto and theres a lot more going on faster than you can keep up.
We’ll try to help you keep up with quick visuals and data to try to keep up on this space quarterly.
Thanks!
PTC Crypto Team.
Disclosure: PTC Crypto is an investor in some of the projects mentioned above, including Titles, Pods, Delegate & Clusters, Lens, Bonsai, Polymarket, Realms. At the time of this publication, PTC Crypto or its members may have exposure to the assets described in this article. The above material and content is educational in nature and should not be considered to be a recommendation to invest in a digital asset.
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A lovely breakdown from @blockchainbrett and @jg at PTC on the state of consumer products in crypto. Oh and yes, featuring @titles 💫 https://paragraph.xyz/@consumercrypto/consumer-crypto-numbers-q1-24
TY Ser!