Q1 2023 Market Performance
• 83% market cap increase in Layer-1 (L1) smart contract platforms.
• Bitcoin programmability gaining renewed interest boosting Stacks performance.
• Temporary USDC depeg and halt in BUSD issuance led to increased dominance of USDT.
Revenue Generation
Ethereum, the consistent heavyweight in the crypto arena, generated the highest revenue with $457M, almost 2.8x the combined revenue of all other featured L1s. Hedera had the most significant revenue growth, up 489% QoQ, driven by its Consensus Service.
Stablecoin Market
Owing to USDC’s temporary depeg and the cessation of Binance USD (BUSD) issuance by Paxos, USDT has now taken center stage which particularly favoured TRON that witnessed a 30% boost in its stablecoin market cap.
Staked Tokens
Every network experienced a quarter-on-quarter increase in USD terms during Q1 with Stacks (403%) and Solana (125%) taking the lead outpacing their respective market cap growth implying a net uptick in staked native tokens.
Validator Count Variance
Networks like Ethereum, Avalanche, Cardano, Polkadot and Harmony employ some form of stake-weight limit for validators count that varies across networks and doesn’t strictly standardize.