Tezos News
Strong NFT Activity in the Tezos Network Causes a Surge in Transactions and Smart Contract Use
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The Tezos ecosystem saw massive growth throughout 2021, especially when it comes to transactions, general adoption, and smart contracts. The growth is directly connected to the emerging NFT market, which blew up over the past 12 months, pushing adoption and awakening interest for this aspect of crypto in companies, celebrities, artists, gamers, and many others.
Tezos (XTZ) uses a PoS ecosystem that gave it an edge against Ethereum, which is where the NFT sector originally went big. While Ethereum is trying to switch to PoS itself, the process is still not finished, and for the time being, the network is still PoW-based, which makes it slow, expensive, and very energy-inefficient.
According to a recent Coin Metrics report published on February 1st, the number of transactions that involve smart contracts has skyrocketed over the last 12 months, going from less than 10,000 per day in January 2021 to over 50,000 per day. The growth was driven by NFT platforms, including the generative art platform FX Hash.
In addition, one of the gaming giants, Ubisoft, announced plans to add support for Tezos for gaming NFTs in December 2021, bringing even more attention to the network.
Tezos sees a spike in usage, but it still falls behind Ethereum
As mentioned, Ethereum’s network fees have skyrocketed over the last two years. The project was barely keeping up with all the transactions made through trading and dApp usage. When DeFi, NFTs, and finally, Metaverse-related projects started to emerge, Ethereum’s gas fees skyrocketed to a new ATH.
NFT creators and buyers were forced to seek out alternative solutions, and many of them switched to Tezos’ network to conduct their NFT business. The network even has a special portal for all Tezos-based NFT marketplaces, claiming that they are carbon-neutral. Meanwhile, network fees are less than a penny, according to Tezos’ own claims.
Being carbon-neutral has grown to be one of the main concerns when selecting networks over the past year, especially after Elon Musk announced that Tesla will discontinue Bitcoin payments due to the coin’s negative impact on the environment. Bitcoin is far from being the only one, however, as all PoW-based networks suffer from the same issue. So, with Tezos being carbon-neutral, this alone attracted a lot of people who decided that it is time for the crypto industry to switch to eco-friendly systems.
The growing attention brought new users, and the network saw a major spike in active addresses, reaching an all-time high of over 45,000. Meanwhile, active smart contract addresses tripled, going from below 200,000 to more than 600,000 in a single year.
Researchers also noticed a massive spike in daily transactions that were labeled as ‘other transactions,’ particularly in August of last year. At the time, Tezos launched an upgrade that cut block times in half, which made the transactions spike from 40,000 per day to more than 250,000.
The platform features its own tracker that says that Tezos’ daily transactions right now sit at around 309,431, which is still less than a quarter of Ethereum’s daily transaction count. Etherscan shows that the world’s second-largest project by market cap has 1.17 million daily transactions to process.
To learn more about this token visit our Investing in Tezos guide.
Ali is a freelance writer covering the cryptocurrency markets and the blockchain industry. He has 8 years of experience writing about cryptocurrencies, technology, and trading. His work can be found in various high-profile investment sites including CCN, Capital.com, Bitcoinist, and NewsBTC.