DappRadar has issued its annual report on the cryptocurrency industry, highlighting the problems encountered along with the significant technological advances and the growing number of active daily users. The report highlighted that, despite the turbulent year, the use of DApps was driven by DeFi, NFTs, and blockchain gaming.
Dapp adoption on the rise
One of the most significant statistics was unique active wallet data (UAW) from 2021 and 2022, showing a 50% annual growth in average daily UAW. In 2022, the average number of daily active users rose from 1.58 million in 2021 to 2.37 million.
With an average of 1.15 million UAW per day in 2022, blockchain games played a major role in the DApp sector, accounting for 49% of all activity. This sector saw 7.4 billion in total transactions this year. Per the report, the most popular dapp was splinterlands, a blockchain-powered trading card game that grew by 85% to reach 217,914 monthly unique active wallets in 2022.
The research also noted the difficulties that the crypto sector faced due to negative events like the collapse of Terra and FTX, which led to a steady decline in cryptocurrency values throughout the year and a large drop in the Total Value Locked in DeFi, which dropped from $187.5 billion in January to barely $55 billion in December.
Nonetheless, the DeFi sector keeps pushing forward, with Ethereum continuing to dominate with $32.12 billion in TVL (down 74.56%), followed by BNB Chain with $6.5 billion (down 62.5%) in TVL. In addition, DappRadar highlighted some of the least affected blockchains, including scaling solutions like Arbitrum, whose TVL fell by only 12.07% to $1.74 billion. By contrast, Optimism’s TVL grew by a whopping 127.6% to $669 million.
Despite the decrease in token prices, there were some encouraging signs in the NFT industry. Trading volume increased by 0.41% compared to the same period last year. In addition, the total number of unique NFT traders increased to almost 10.6 million, an increase of 876.89% year over year. Similarly, total sales increased by 10.16 % to reach $68.35 million.
