Over 44 Million Contracts Deployed on Ethereum Since Launch
On Wednesday, August 3rd, Emre, an Electrical Capital Engineer, reported that since the Ethereum network came into life, 44 million contracts have been deployed. The engineer broke down various functionalities of the deployed contracts.
44 Million Contracts Deployed on Ethereum
According to a Twitter thread by Emre;
Over 44 MILLION contracts have been deployed to Ethereum since genesis. I analyzed all 44M using InsightsFlow so you don’t have to. Turns out, 70% of live contracts (~15M) are copies from one of 15 templates.
A chart accompanying this tweet indicated the steady rise in the number of contracts in the Ethereum network. For instance, the chart suggests that the number of contracts deployed cracked 10 million for the first time in 2019. In 2020, the number of contracts rose to over 15 million, doubling in 2021 to over 30 million.
By hitting 44 million contracts, the adoption of this network could appear to be on the rise. Accordingly, the engineer showed that 70% of the live contract, 15 million are mere copies of one of 15 templates.
Breaking Down The Numbers
After tweeting about the 44 million contracts, Emre gave a breakdown of the contracts on Ethereum. Emre mentioned that 22 million contracts, 50% of total contracts, were destroyed to save gas, while 10% of live contracts are gas token contracts.
According to reports, the Ethereum virtual machine often refunds gas to users who destroy their contracts. Hence, such high numbers of destroyed contracts are a mere ploy to earn from the network. Many users deployed empty contracts when gas charges were low and destroyed them when gas prices were higher, accumulating refunds.
Crypto exchanges deployed around 12 million live contracts to serve as PO Box addresses. According to Emre, this allows exchanges to collect the ERC-20 tokens sent to users. About NFTs, Opensea deployed about 1 million smart contracts to sell the digital assets, with around 150 thousand using the ENS deeds. Emre noted that this lot was created as part of the old Ethereum Name Service domain registration system. But, they are not in use at the moment.
About 200k contracts were created by “@Dapphub, can be considered a smart contract wallet.”
In another tweet, Emre talked about the ERC 20 tokens and NFTs, saying;
What about ERC20s, NFTS? They didn’t make the list! This is not to say they aren’t popular, but there is enough variation in their code, making them not _exactly_ the same. Hint: there are over 400k ERC20s.
Investors Quite Impressed by Analysis
Many people were quite impressed by Emre’s analysis and insight. One user, Ryan Bozarth, said, “Super interesting analysis. And blown away by the 44M deployed contracts.”
This analysis is vital to developers within the ethereum network and the average investors since it indicates an increasing adoption of the Ethereum contracts. But the study also exposes the many contracts created just for earning gas refunds.
