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This week our contributor analysts cover emerging networks: NEAR and bloxRoute.

NEAR Protocol is (as of writing) on blockheight 33,012,780 with 181 online nodes (60 validating). NEAR processed an avg of 15,734 transactions in the past 14 days with blocks being validated in ~1s. Transaction volume picked up October 2020 and has been sustained (spikes excluded) with a slight uptick in March 2021.

Gas paid for transactions broadly mirrors this trend (except with the majority of transactions being low-cost). A large chunk of March volume has come from NEAR’s bridge relayer.

• The number of daily active accounts on NEAR has been rising since launch (up to ~1000 now) and active contracts have hovered around 300. NEAR recently announced a few integrations, particularly NFT applications and standards. Additionally the project announced the launch of its Rainbow Bridge this week.

• Reported circulating supply (of total 1b NEAR) is ~330M, with up to 5% in annual inflation and with 70% of transaction fees burned. However, transaction fees to-date (denominated in NEAR) have been negligible. Current stake volume is ~400m (staking locked NEAR), with 25% from the top 5 validators.

• The amount of new NEAR Protocol contracts deployed on its mainnet increased by 6,116 over the past 5 months. This represents a net growth of ~320% since September. As NEAR aims to be competitive in the smart contract landscape, the relatively large smart contract growth is key. The percent increase has stabilized into a more linear function against time, needing further catalyst for exponentially modeled growth.

• The total amount of NEAR accounts has increased ~310% since January. This appears to be in the early stages of an adoption s-curve, with no clear point in the chart where the growth has reached an inflection point.

• NEAR’s Github activity indicates robust commitment from the development team to refine the protocol. 68% of commits to the Near repository were in the past 90 days, and 54% of additional development occurred in this time period as well.

bloXroute Labs is building the crucial network infrastructure, aimed at scaling all blockchains, by enabling a fast blockchain network layer. It is currently considered the fastest Ethereum mempool service provider.

The average delay a transaction experiences to get on-chain is ~ 1/(μ-λ) where μ is the TPS the blockchain can sustain and λ is the average transactions arrival rate. The figure shows normalized λ/μ for several blockchains that are known to have very low fees.

• In Ethereum, μE is controlled by the gas limit parameter, while λE is gas used in a block. Hence, μE-λE is the unused gas in a block. The figure illustrates its effect on fees, for two weeks (blue vs red). When the system operates at low “unused gas” range, the cost substantially increases.

• For a fixed λE, a larger μE reduces transaction fees. When the gas limit μE decreases by 20%, the transaction fees double. Projecting this to a scenario where the gas limit would have been increased from 12.5M to 15M, the figure shows the expected daily reduction in transaction fees in a period.