DappRadar says on-chain blockchain gaming and DeFi activity up in Q1

DappRadar’s decentralized applications (dApps) and DeFi ecosystem report for the first quarter of 2023, shows the leading blockchain gaming chains like Wax, BNBChain, and others saw increased on-chain activity, with the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols also increasing significantly. 

Blockchain gaming dApps dominate

After attracting more than $320 million in investments during the last quarter of 2022, the blockchain gaming ecosystem has continued its strong bullish momentum this year, if DappRadar’s latest Q1 report is anything to go by.

Blockchain gaming-supporting chains like Wax (397k), BNBChain (449k), Polygon (197k), Hive (133k), and Ethereum (126k) had the highest on-chain activity, while Solana, EOS, and Optimism had the rough quarter.

Per a Twitter thread by DappRadar, despite a 9.7% decrease in daily unique active wallets (dUAW) in the global dApp ecosystem, the blockchain gaming sector still maintained a 45.6% market share, with DeFi and social dApps holding a 23% and 12% share respectively. 

Similarly, Arbitrum, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution that recently executed its ARB token airdrop, saw a 125% increase in dUAW to 45,000 during the quarter. 

DeFi TVL surged in Q1

Moreover, despite the millions of dollars lost to hacks and security breaches in q1, the DeFi sector continued to attract investors. The ecosystem’s combined TVL rose to $83.3 billion during that period. 

The DeFi ecosystem growth in q1 was partly fueled by the Arbitrum airdrop, which injected $1 billion in liquidity, with projects like Ethereum, Uniswap, Aave, and others also playing key roles.

The NFT industry also had a decent performance in Q1, with $4.7 billion in sales. Blur dwarfed OpenSea with its trading volume of $2.7 billion and market dominance of over 57%.