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📝 Editor’s Note: Setting the Scene

Welcome to OurNetwork’s third Ecosystem Mega Issue for 2024! Today we’re diving in on NEAR, which has one of the most enduring and technically gifted communities in the industry – we are proud to be collaborating on this one.

Today’s issue is very likely the most well-rounded, data-driven snapshot you’ll find on NEAR anywhere. It covers high-level network health, key ecosystem segments, protocol-level fundamentals & much more using cold, hard onchain data. 

Before we dive into our scheduled coverage, here are a few of my big takeaways about NEAR after reviewing the onchain data.

① NEAR is one of the most active ecosystems in the entire industry with 7M daily transactions, second only to Solana. Of the 73.6M daily transactions across L1s on June 15, NEAR accounted for just under 10%, which was more than Polygon, Ethereum, Avalanche, Aptos, and Cardano combined.

② NEAR is a leading chain for mainstream end users, with the bulk of its network activity coming from applications in the consumer vertical. NEAR currently has the Top 2 dAPPs by Unique Active Wallets over the last 7 days, and 3 of the Top 10 – those alone have attracted 9.4M UAWs over the last week.

③ NEAR’s economy is now seeing net positive inflows of new capital, a sign of true ecosystem demand. Year-to-date, $20.13M of bridging inflows have come to NEAR vs $14.87M in outflows (net inflows of $5.26M YTD). I would expect this figure to continue ramping up as the ecosystem continues to mature and more DeFi protocols step in to service end user demand.

To get started on NEAR, check out popular wallets HERE Wallet, Meteor, or Bitte Wallet to begin exploring the rapidly growing NEAR Ecosystem and read more about their vision for Chain Abstraction and NEAR becoming the home for User-Owned AI.

With that, let’s dive into the coverage.

– S 🕛

Technical Updates, DeFi Overview, Consumer Overview, and Protocol Coverage: KAIKAI, HOT Wallet, LiNEAR, Meta Pool, Burrow, Ref Finance & Sweat Economy.

• NEAR Protocol, a L1 blockchain excelling at cost-efficient, high-speed transactions, is on its mission to onboard 1 billion users to the open web. In early September ‘23, NEAR overtook Ethereum and its L1 peers with 706K daily active addresses (DAA). In another half year, NEAR tripled its DAA, hitting an all-time-high of 2.3M. Its growth is fueled by the top dApps hosted on NEAR, including the viral Telegram wallet HOT, the shopping app KAIKAI and the walk-to-earn app Sweat.

• NEAR protocol’s scalability is powered by its sharding mechanism that enables parallel processing. In April, the protocol team increased shards from 4 to 6 while keeping the network running. Post resharding, the network broke new records in peak TPS (ATH 1,618) and peak receipts per second (ATH 3,295).

• The resharding in April also reduced the congestion, driving a step change in lower fees. The average transaction fee has been only ~$0.0032 since then. Businesses like KAIKAI were able to reduce transaction processing fees significantly by ditching Stripe, which charges $0.3 + 2.9% per tx.

• 2024 has been a good year for DeFi on NEAR. The protocol has seen a flow of fresh capital into its core DeFi projects: Ref Finance (DEX), Burrow (Lending), Metapool and LiNEAR (Liquid Staking). It's TVL has grown from ~$100M at the start of the year to ~$284M

• Liquid Staking protocols on NEAR have a total of $259.8M staked. This is distributed between Linear Protocol ($136.7M), Metapool ($115.63M) and HERE Wallet ($7.52M).

• Native stablecoin market cap has grown more than 7x in 2024 from ~$69.62M at the start of the year to $510M. USDC accounts for 54% of these stables with USDT at 36%. The yield-bearing stablecoin, FRAX, was also recently onboarded to the ecosystem and has ~$4.4M in circulation.

• NEAR is a a layer 1 blockchain that uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and sharded architecture to scale transaction throughput. It's building the next iteration of the internet will give users more autonomy over their data, assets, and creative license. NEAR's usage has shown consistent growth since Q4 '23: the network went from processing ~35M transactions in Sept. 2023 to 220M+ in April and May 2024, Monthly Active Users have grown from 2.9M to 15M, and new users have grown from 1.8M to 5M+.

• This substantial increase in NEAR's usage statistics is a result of both new users joining the platform, as well as strong user retention. The average 2-month retention rate is ~40%.

• Revitalized interest in digital collectibles has led to a reemergence of NFTs on NEAR. NEAR has completed 1.1M sales, with 148k sales and 94k transactions being completed in May. NEAR is also setting all-time highs in both transactions and unique buyers/sellers led by Mitte, an NFT marketplace which has grown in popularity over the last 4 months, going from 0% to +90% market dominance.

• KAIKAI is an AI-powered, opt-in interactive lock screen and mobile app that provides curated content and shopping based on the user’s preferences. By engaging with the provided content and/or shopping, users earn KAI-Ching. Unless you are digging deep into the architecture of KAI-Ching, you won’t know it runs on a blockchain. Since it's launch in September 2023, KAIKAI has onboarded 33M+ unique users with 10.82M of them active in the last 30 days, the highest of any app in web3.

• KAIKAI has steady usage and has completed ~278.7M transactions translating into ~768.8M contract calls since its inception. It has done 1M+ transactions per day in May.

• KAIKAI's prolific user acquisition is padded by robust retention. In May, it had 7.9M active users of which ~54% (4.29M) users are returning. This trend holds true for each month this quarter.

• HERE is a platform on NEAR, that builds non-custodial wallets focused on user experience that lower the barrier entry into Web3, as well as security. The teams latest product, HOT, is a non-custodial Web3 wallet for Telegram, featuring a gamified user journey. HOT launched in early 2024, and currently has ~10M wallets created of which ~1M wallets are active daily.

• HERE Wallet and HOT signed more than 130M transactions each in April and May. They account for ~50% of all transactions signed on NEAR Protocol in 2024.

• HOT's MPC wallet has seen massive adoption since its launch with ~400,000 wallets created. These wallets have done ~300,000 transactions bridging ~$3.25mn in value between BASE and NEAR, making HOT a Top 10 App on Base as per DappRadar.

Liquid staking protocols on NEAR experienced a significant shift in January 2024 when the combined TVL of LiNEAR and Metapool, the two primary providers on NEAR, surged to $400M, surpassing 50% of the blockchain's total TVL. LiNEAR has emerged as the leading LST platform on NEAR, with a TVL exceeding Metapool's by >$25M. Despite this, both platforms exhibited similar growth and decline patterns over time. When comparing their TVL to the same period in the previous year, both platforms experienced a remarkable 900% increase, reflecting their expanding influence.

• Since Jan. 2024, LiNEAR has attracted 5.2k unique stakers, nearly double Meta Pool's 2.7k. At its peak in May, LiNEAR saw 1.1k stakers in a single day. LiNEAR also led in staked volume with 11.4M NEAR tokens, which is 2x the amount staked on Meta Pool. Additionally, some users stake on both platforms, with 28% of transactions and 65% of the staked volume coming from these cross-platform users. This indicates that a significant portion of the staking activity involves users who utilize both LiNEAR and Meta Pool to stake their NEAR tokens.

• Burrow is the premier lending platform on NEAR. Users are able to borrow and supply a range of tokens including NEAR, (Liquid) Staked NEAR, stablecoins, and blue chips like BTC and ETH. Currently, users have supplied ~$190.3M (of which ~33.6M is borrowed) worth of value to the protocol, against which they earn ~12k rewards every day. Its TVL has grown 3x in 2024 on the back of generous APYs available on supply of some assets, especially stables.

• Ref Finance is the go-to DEX on NEAR. It has also seen significant growth in 2024, with TVL growing more than 2x. A lot of this growth can be attributed to key initiatives run by the Ref team. For example: Ref's meme season is a competition where holders of the xREF token and memecoins stake their tokens to earn boosted rewards and airdrops. It's recent second iteration offers farming & staking APY as high as 319% and 70% respectively. 49,42 stakers have locked $3.4M in the program.

• High APYs available on liquidity pools, including ~20% on stable pools and ~300% on memecoin pools has spurred the growth of the farming ecosystem on Ref. Currently there are 124 farms with 9.57k farmers on Ref.

• Sweat Economy is building The Movement Economy where users move to earn $SWEAT. Sweat Economy is a Web3 evolution of the Web2 health & fitness app — Sweatcoin — which has 150M+ registered users worldwide. Sweat Economy has seen steady growth of its usage in 2024, from ~1.1M in Jan. to ~1.77M Monthly Active Wallets in May. A healthy chunk (~72% in May) of these active wallets are returning users.

• $SWEAT, the token that powers Sweat Economy, is a NEAR Native NEP-141 token and is available as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. It has 17+ listings including on exchanges like OKX, Bybit, KuCoin, Gate.io, Bitfinex, etc. The token has a FDV of ~$128.8M of which ~$47.2M is in circulation and is held by 15.6M wallets.

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Disclaimer: This issue was published in paid collaboration with the NEAR Foundation. Data and findings are based on the methodologies used by authors and data platforms.