What is a user on the web? For years the saying was that you could pretend to be anything on the internet, a cat, dog or anything you’d like to be. You can take on any, and as many identities as you want online. Blockchains and PFP NFTs have clearly revived that idea in new forms.

People interact with blockchains through wallets, sometimes publicly to establish a public identity through for example your NFT collection, but in other cases anonymously as well. It is relatively easy to operate multiple wallets at once. Wallets are used as an identity system but not necessarily constrained to 1 wallet per human being.

In software one of the core metrics to measure against is number of users. You’ll hear business people talking about their DAU KPI or their MAU, or even the DAU/MAU ratio. Which indicates how much time people dedicate to your website or app in the week or month. (DAU = Daily Active Users, MAU = Monthly Active Users).

In Web3 there are of course users as well. People use wallets, people use apps. At the same time the on-chain user identity is more fluid. So in this TSR Weekly we introduce a couple of new blockchain-native metrics that say something about engagement and their accompanying abbreviations:

WAW (Weekly Active Wallets)

Tezos averages about 40.000 wallets actively initiating transactions on the blockchain.

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DAW (Daily Active Wallets)

On a daily basis this comes in at about 10 to 15 thousand wallets being active.

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On the app side we can also track how many different (smart) contracts are being called by wallets.

WCC (Weekly Called Contracts)

The above chart shows the number of unique addresses starting with KT being targeted in blockchain operations per week. The next chart shows

DCC (Daily Called Contracts)

In the case of Tezos this requires a bit more explanation and differentiation. The Weekly Called Contracts chart going back to the start of the chain seems to indicate there has been a lot of activity since early 2019 already.

Weekly called contracts by type

The below graph shows actively used contract counts per kind of contract:

In this chart the ‘kind’ of contract comes from the tzkt.io kind classification:

• Asset
• Smart contract
• Delegator contract

Asset smart contracts are identified by tzkt.io to be fitting a tzip asset standard (FA1, FA1.2, FA2 etc). Info about asset contracts: https://baking-bad.org/blog/2021/03/03/tzkt-v14-released-with-improved-smart-contract-data-and-websocket-api/

Delegator contracts are a specific type of contract originally used as accounts for baking. Contracts on the Tezos blockchain can be identified by the address used in operations starting with “KT”. But not all of these contracts are fully “smart”. In the earlier phase of the tezos network a special basic kind of contract was used called a delegator contract. You could create such accounts in the early days of pre-Babylon amendment because initially these addresses were the only method through which you could stake xtz: https://crypto.bi/tz-kt/

There are still a couple of thousand of such contracts actively staking some amount of xtz, so they still show up in the statistics.

Daily called contracts by type

By looking at the daily activity of these contracts you can also see the cycle rhythm of Tezos which determines the payouts towards stakers:

Why do we actually want to look at the Weekly Called Contracts (WCC) or Daily Called Contracts (DCC) metrics? Even though the measurement is noisy it gives a sense of the ecosystem size on the side of applications people are using. Similar to wallets not matching one-on-one to users, a contract does not match one-on-one with an app. Often when interacting with an app, you are calling a number of contracts that work together to provide the full set of functionalities. For example with an NFT platform, there are one or multiple minting contracts, individual collection contracts, marketplace contracts, potentially split by auction type. For DeFi similarly an app can consist of a large number of contracts for various tokens and pools.

With this noted lets close with a chart that shows the unique nr of asset/smart contracts called each week. Or in blockchain-native abbreviated form: WCSC (Weekly Called Smart Contracts)

Feel free to download and share these charts yourself and be sure to tag @thestackreport!