Data & Insights Recap: Active Pursuit

Ethereum and Bitcoin experienced an uptick in the 7-day moving average of active addresses over the past week. Ethereum's active addresses spiked from 372k to 508k, the highest the average has been in 2023 while Bitcoin's active addresses rose from 906k to 1.11 million reaching levels not seen since May 2021. Ethereum's growth was attributed to Binance Exchange with one of their hot wallets partaking in over 710k transactions on September 13th and engaging with over 700k unique addresses while Bitcoin's growth seems to be more organic with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong calling Bitcoin the “most important asset in crypto”. He also confirmed that the exchange would be integrating with Bitcoin’s Lightning Network soon.

In it for the friend.tech

Friend.tech's 24-hour earnings exceeded those of Ethereum last week. The price of the app's most expensive key was 40% of the floor price for a Bored Ape Yacht Club, one of the most important NFT collections. The number of daily unique buyers of friend.tech's keys jumped to 13,700 on Saturday while the number of daily unique sellers reached a new peak of 12,140. The number of buyers still exceeds sellers, but the largest day of key selling was September 15th, with almost $2.4 million worth of keys sold in one hour.

Binance.US says bye to execs

Things took a bad turn for Binance.US this week as the exchange laid off about a third of its staff and several executives were reported to be leaving due to mounting regulatory pressure. The exchange had to halt USD deposits and withdrawals and suspend trading of its USD pairs after losing its banking partners, which was significant given it is a U.S.-based exchange. July and August volumes dropped sharply to $500M mainly due to the lack of USD pairs as USD is what allows users to cash out from the exchange into their bank accounts. Prior to this, monthly volumes always totaled over $5.8 billion, often by a significant amount.

Absolutely bananas

Telegram bots have risen in popularity as they allow users to execute a range of automated trading activities on decentralized exchanges through Telegram’s messaging interface.?In a testament to their success, Telegram trading bots topped the list of gas-consuming smart contracts over the last 30 days. The two largest Telegram bots, Banana Gun and Unibot, each burnt over 700 ETH this past month.?

Others on the top 20 list include Uniswap, OpenSea, and several popular layer 2’s.

Data & Insights is a weekly newsletter and article series by The Block Research Analyst Rebecca Stevens that highlights recent trends and top charts from The Block’s Data Dashboard. Sign-up to receive Data & Insights in your inbox every Monday for free. Previous articles in the series are available with a subscription to The Block Pro.