NEAR Protocol Overtakes Ethereum and Bitcoin in Key Activity Metrics

NEAR, a smart contracts platform, is beating out Bitcoin and Ethereum in at least two key network metrics.

Activity on NEAR has spiked since September, overtaking Bitcoin and Ethereum, both in terms of daily transactions and active addresses. After retracing from that initial jump, both metrics have continued to climb, widening their gap relative to the two largest blockchains.

NEAR has 838,000 daily active addresses, the most out of major Layer 1 chains after Tron, tying with BNB Chain, with Bitcoin, Solana and Ethereum coming next, according to data provider Artemis Terminal. NEAR’s daily transactions of 1.7M beat out Ethereum, Bitcoin and Avalanche, while still trailing Solana, Tron and BNB Chain, the data show.

Games and Payments

Games and payments apps are fueling growth, with KAIKANOW, a shopping app, leading the way in terms of active wallets. Fitness app SWEATCOIN drove the spike in September, when it launched in the U.S., and today reached 1 million on-chain active users for the first time.

“We built NEAR Protocol to be the entry point to the Open Web and onboard the first billion users,” Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, said in an emailed comment. He said SWEAT’s success is “demonstrating that a great Web2 business can successfully migrate to Web3 and showcasing the power of NEAR to support global mainstream usage.”

While outperforming in terms of network metrics, NEAR’s native token is trailing BTC and ETH this year. NEAR has gained 42% year-to-date, compared with ETH’s 73% increase and BTC’s 130% rally.

KAIKAI and SWEAT

Kai-Ching, the native stablecoin of the KAIKAINOW shopping app, leads the way for unique active wallets among all blockchain dapps, according to DappRadar, showcasing 683,000 in the past 24 hours.

KAIKAINOW recently partnered with shopping behemoth Cosmose AI, which uses artificial intelligence to power better shopping experiences.

The integration, announced in April, meant Cosmose AI ditched Stripe, choosing to go with KAIKAI, a move that the company says has driven more than 1 million transactions through the app. Kai-Ching, in fact, leads unique active wallet users in terms of 24 hours, 7 days, and the past month.

Sweat Economy, a “walk-to-earn” app designed to incentivize movement, has 118,000 unique active wallets, in the past 24 hours–eclipsing Ethereum-based game Pixels by 16,000 UAW.

KaiKai and Sweat currently comprise roughly 90% of all transactions on NEAR. And according to data points from flipsidecrypto, the two largest sectors on the platform are dApps (with 80% of all activity), and gaming.

NEAR’s recent success will be more sustainable with a larger number of popular dapps, as consumers’ attention has proven to be fickle – what’s trending one day can quickly fade the next.