CoinDesk releases the report on the state of the second quarter 2018 blockchain

To use encryption, the second quarter was a painful time if I was HODLing – but productive if you were BUIDLing.

This is perhaps the biggest to take from the CoinDesk report on the state of the second quarter 2018 blockchain.

For a second consecutive quarter, the main blockchains have highlighted negative market indicators. Most of these bearish trends concerned trading activities, with volumes declining for most trading pairs. but yetutside of exchange numbers, use and work of the developer charged forward, with goals achieved around both bitcoin and ethereum.

Released today, the State of Blockchain report provides an analysis of over 100 industry news and data slides. It covers market interest in public blockchains with a snapshot of the ten larger than the bitcoin at the end of the quarter.

The report also presents a profound immersion in quarterly interest around bitcoin is Ethereum, followed by news and data that highlight developments around trade, OIC, SAFTs, risk capital, distributed ledger technology (DLT) security breaches, Attacks of 51%, regulations, quarrel, business developments, occupationand a close look EOSICO of one year and the subsequent launch of the EOS blockchain.

Finally, the report shares the results of our 60+ application survey on sentiment of over 1,200 Coindesk readers.

Here are some key aspects of the relationship:

Bitcoin

Trading bitcoin trading activity declined over the quarter, with a weighted combination of crypto-cryptographic volumes, fiat-to-crypto volumes and total trading pairs down 26%. Also the use of bitcoin blockchain for the on-chain transaction saw less interest in the second quarter, down 28 percent. Even lower revenues (-22 percent) and commissions (-19 percent) decreased.

Hashrate: the amount of computing power spent making transaction inversion transactions expensive, a key measure of blockchain security, countered this trend, but with slow growth (+26 percent in Q2 compared to +47 percent in the first quarter ).

However, while the bearcoin market continued, development activities continued without distraction.

Hidden behind the negative trend in the use of bitcoin blockchain have been important changes in development: part of the reason why chain transactions have decreased due to the growth of the lightning network.

In fact, the use of payment channels – in which small and frequent transactions between two parties are conducted out of the chain and the blockchain is reserved for definitive settlement – exploded in the second quarter when the lightning network pushes its solution to certain scaling problems.

Ethereum

The rest of the industry has largely followed the bitcoin script. Trading on the ether (ETH), the native currency of the ethereum network, was down 37%. The Ethereum blockchain was used at about the same levels as in the first quarter, which in turn was a record quarter. However, mining revenues increased by 22%, with the equivalent of over $ 1.1 billion paid to miners, only $ 300 million less than bitcoin mining revenue for the quarter.

More significant events occurred beyond the ethereum network and exchange interests. On the regulatory front, ETH finally got some clarity: a US Commission Securities and Trade Commission official said that ETH, in its current form, was by no means a security.

Perhaps more important than normative clarity, a clear picture of the ethereum development roadmap has emerged.

Vitalik Buterin shared details on the scaling solution known as sharding and more on the future of ethereum with several posts, along with the following illustration on Twitter.

investments

Investments in the sector have continued to grow, with a significant increase in the size of fundraising for projects, as well as the sophistication of how offers are structured.

The average size of ICO increased steadily from $ 6 million in the third quarter of 2017 to $ 16 million in the fourth quarter to $ 31 million in the first quarter of 2018 to $ 39 million in the second quarter of 2018. The numbers in the first and second quarters were boosted from the mega-ICO of Telegram ($ 1.7 billion) in the first quarter and EOS ($ 4.2 billion) in the second quarter.

However, it is important to note that the total ICOs closed a month reached their highest after their peak in 2017, so larger rounds were collected from fewer total projects. These trends, taken together, suggest perhaps the beginning of a "take-all" environment in which large projects attract most of the funds invested.

Even the legal sophistication of some Ico has grown. The new legal structures have potentially allowed accredited investors combine the traditional legal infrastructure of registered securities with certain characteristics of an ICO encrypted using simple agreements for future tokens (SAFT).

Data from the ESA's EDGAR database revealed that 37 companies had filed documents containing the phrase "Simple contracts for future tokens". The SAFT collected a total of $ 304 million over the three months.

Sentiment survey

Our survey was able to discover a particularity among the people who closely follow the bitcoin.

The mystery of 21e8, in which an unlikely hash bitcoin seemed to suggest an unearthly authority, came at the end of the quarter. In the sentiment survey, we asked readers about different explanations on the agreed phenomenon.

A plurality of our 1200 respondents stated that it was a coincidence that the obvious references to the limit of 21 million bitcoins and the theory of physics known as E8 had appeared in the hash. Another 25 percent had no idea what the question was.

The peculiarity was that while only 3% said that time travel was the explanation, it was still a percentage point more than those who believed that the bitcoin had been violated (2%).

While the answers to this question can be taken ironically, they say that more people in the community consider time travel a plausible possibility of bitcoin hacking success.

These stories and much more are available in our full report on a busy district for industry.

Data and analysis provided by Peter Ryan and Adam Hart.

Construction image through Unsplash