In this weekly we highlight a specific feature on thestackreport.xyz landing page which are the top contracts on the Tezos mainnet chain, giving a glimpse into what’s currently trending in the Tezos community.

At the end of the article there are some initial thoughts about discovering stories straight from blockchain data. A topic that will be explored in much more detail in the future!

On to the charts, the top contracts by nr of transactions in past 60 days.

1 - HEN Minting contract

For the Tezos in-crowd it will not come as a surprise that the top contracts are all NFT-related. Even with all the new platforms and TEIA fork on the way the HEN minting contract still is the most active contract on Tezos:

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2 - FXHASH token contract

FXHash generative token contract comes in as second highest contract in nr of transactions. Lots of activity but also a bit inflated, because its a more complex contract with more calls to handle the generative minting process:

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3 HEN Marketplace contract

Third most active contract is again HEN-related, it’s the marketplace contract that is used to put objkts up for swap and collect. Receiving steady activity from the different front-end forks as well as HEN back up:

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4 OBJKT Marketplace

Another NFT related contract, the old @objktcom marketplace that has by now been replaced coming down in activity as expected, comes in fourth as :

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5 FXHASH Marketplace

Number 5 in top contracts by activity is again a NFT marketplace contract, this one for FXHASH specifically:

Charts rendered in a 4x1 aspect ratio format for stacking multiple charts in a list on the front page and as more subtle sparkline-style graphs in social feeds.

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Reading the blockchain

In most cases people will interact with blockchain technology indirectly through (web-based) applications and interfaces. An application provides a certain set of functionalities through a set of pages and visual interfaces, building a narrative and use case for people to take a certain action. The blockchain itself is in principle an underlying layer of technology that enables application designers and developers to provide de-centralized data persistence (.i.e. state management) and interoperability with other applications within the same blockchain.

In the traditional sense of software, different types of data require an application to provide the necessary context and affordances to make the data valuable and meaningful towards the user. At the current stage blockchain applications and the underlying operations in most cases can be categorized as socio-economic interactions between people and groups of people. Developers of decentralized applications (dApps) can create smart contracts that allow people to add data to that blockchain in the forms of transactions. In the code of the contract, developers can define what are called endpoints. Which are the actions people can perform directly through a tezos node CLI or through a web interface with wallet integration.

Instead of relying on the framing of the specific website, we can directly extract the contract and the data linked to that contract from the blockchain to discover how people have been interacting with each other.

What to learn from these visualizations

Tezos contracts create a social structure through on-chain transactions between wallets and people. Looking at the current top trending contracts we can quickly see what the top applications are which are enabled by the Tezos ecosystem. Going into the contracts and looking at the endpoint verbs of the contract, we can see the types of interactions people are having with each other through the contract. Are people trading, minting, bidding, transferring, swapping etc in terms of the currently popular NFT contracts.

On top of that looking to the number of lines in chart we get a first impression of the contract and application complexity for that specific app. In the above charts for example the FXHash and HicEtNunc marketplace contracts provide a very basic offer & trade functionality whereas the objkt.com contract encapsulates a number of auction types and the ability to place bids on each others NFTs.

In future articles we’ll dig deeper into this new domain of reading blockchain data. That’s it for this weekly and see you for the next one.

If you see something interesting yourself in the above charts, go ahead and download/share them & don’t forget to tag @thestackreport!