16 Feb Six months of stats

For the last six months, I have generated a report on the first day of the month looking at some key usage statistics for both Symbol and NEM. I will continue to do this in the future but as some of you were interested in my previous articles and are data nerds like me I thought that I put this post out today. I most of the code used to generate the data is already published in my advent calendar article “A Trip Down Memory Lane For Symbol and NEM” and node statistics are just retrieved from the explorer on the first day of the month.

Apologies for the tables by the way, they look awful in WordPress!

Number of nodes

A count of the number of nodes on the 1st day of each month August 2023 – January 2024.

Winner: Symbol (5.57x more nodes).

Monthly transactions

Count of total monthly transactions August 2023 – January 2024.

Winner: Symbol (8.91X more transactions per month)

Monthly unique addresses

The number of unique addresses that have sent or received at least one transaction on the network for any given month between August 2023 and January 2024.

Winner: Symbol (5.19X more average unique users per month)

Daily average unique addresses

The mean number of unique transacting addresses per month (sum of the number of unique daily users / number of days in the month) between August 2023 and January 2024.

Winner: Symbol (3.41X the average number of daily users)

Harvesting power

The percentage of the circulating supply involved in harvesting, August 2023 – January 2024. The circulating supply includes treasury and exchange accounts.

Winner: Symbol (11.44X the circulating supply actively harvesting)

Finally

I am not going to provide much commentary here as the numbers speak for themselves really. Symbol usage continues to grow in some areas and remains relatively stable in others yet the number of nodes is steadily decreasing, probably because it is now generally not profitable, due to the token price, to run one unless your hosting costs are low and your node balance sufficiently high. Interestingly I saw Jag’s post this morning which discusses decentralisation (or lack of) on the Symbol network. As the number of nodes decreases presumably this will lead to further centralisation as harvesters move to active nodes left in the remaining pool. Looking at the harvesting stats for NEM we can see that only a very small percentage of holders are participating in the harvesting process, likely due to the lack of block rewards and the low network usage and therefore fees.

So Symbol dominates NEM in terms of usage and community engagement, yet NEM is more actively traded with a higher price per token than its younger brother 🤷‍♂️ Hopefully we will see some higher-tier exchange listings in the future but I assume the burden of integrating Symbol trading on an exchange is significantly more work than listing another Ethereum-based token and without proven trading volume (and their income from trading fees) it could currently be a hard sell.