The State of the Ethereum Network – July 2019

Five years ago today — on July 22, 2014 — the Ethereum crowdsale went live, kickstarting years of developer, startup, entrepreneur, and enterprise fervor. Five years later, the blockchain ecosystem is diverse, global, increasingly decentralized, and growing in importance, recognition, and prominence.
For the most part, the blockchain ecosystem ended last year licking its wounds after a spectacular fall from all-time 2018 crypto highs. The conversation around the much-discussed bear market has slowly given way to the acknowledgment that, despite still-volatile market prices, the friction of industry-wide activity has thawed crypto-winter, revealing a strong, stable, and growing ecosystem. For Ethereum in particular, 2019 has been a whirlwind of activity, interest, and improvement.

Network Activity

Since its inception, the Ethereum mainnet has processed over 500 million transactions — surpassing the 500 million mark on July 17th. In 2019 alone, over 130 million transactions have been processed, and network utilization remains fairly stable at an average of just under 90%. Over 70 million unique addresses exist on Ethereum, 16 million of which (16%) have been created since the beginning of the year.
On June 1st, there were 616,000 active addresses transacting on the network — the busiest in 2019. With a total ether supply of 106 million, that is an average of 2.28 ETH per address. Excluding the top 500 addresses by ETH ownership (which account for 37% of the total supply), the average ETH holding per address is 1.43 ETH.

In February, the Ethereum network underwent the

Constantinople upgrade

, a planned hard fork to improve the network and bring it closer towards the multi-phase Serenity update that will include (amongst other things) the switch to proof of stake. The Constantinople update included a total of 5 Ethereum Improvement Proposals. Notably, EIP 1234 reduced the block reward from 3 ETH to 2 ETH, a development known as “

The Thirdening

.”

Enterprise Adoption