One Article Roundup: Public Chains with Outstanding Performance at the Start of 2022

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In 2021, driven by the crypto bull market, the public chain track ushered in a golden era of flourishing development. Ethereum's total market cap continued to hit new highs, while Solana, Avalanche, and Terra fiercely competed for the title of "second-best public chain." The two major super application scenarios of DeFi and NFT further highlighted the fundamental infrastructure role of public chains. We discussed this in detail in our article 《2021 Year-End Roundup | The Flourishing Public Chain Track》.

As we moved into 2022, as the crypto market gradually turned bearish, the hype around public chains began to cool down. According to the latest data from DappRadar, the total TVL of public chains in January 2022 was approximately $178 billion, a decline of 23% compared to the end of December. However, consistent with the overall crypto market performance, the public chain sector also exhibited certain structural characteristics, which were reflected in the first two months of 2022.

During this period, although the overall market was sluggish, some public chains managed to buck the trend and stand out in terms of TVL, price performance, attention, and ecosystem strategy. Below, we will give you a general overview of the major public chains that performed exceptionally well since the start of 2022. Most of them rank outside the top 10 in TVL, and many遗憾地 were遗憾地 left behind during the 2021 bull market. However, studying the logic behind their recent strength may help us grasp the general direction of the public chain sector and the entire crypto market in 2022, thereby informing personal investment decisions.

1. Cosmos:

Cosmos and Polkadot are collectively known as the "twin giants of cross-chain." However, in 2019 and 2020—two critical years—Cosmos was deeply mired in internal team conflicts, which led to stagnant development progress. It's worth noting that those two years were key for many technical developers as they蓄势待发 for the breakout of this market cycle. Unfortunately, Cosmos遗憾地 missed both the DeFi summer of 2020 and the NFT summer of 2021.

Of course, as the total TVL of major public chains continued to hit new highs, the demand for cross-chain transfers surged. However, Polkadot clearly attracted the vast majority of attention and funds through its parallel chain slot auctions—a phenomenon-level event—leaving Cosmos with a dim silhouette.

It wasn't until the end of 2021, when the Terra public chain rapidly exploded and consistently held the second-place TVL position, that public attention shifted back to Cosmos. The reason is simple: Terra is built on Cosmos's SDK, which enabled its relatively high performance. Additionally, Cosmos's exclusive cross-chain communication protocol IBC was also highly anticipated by cross-chain enthusiasts. Furthermore, Cosmos's technical design philosophy resonated with the modular blockchain concept that the industry was热烈讨论 at the start of the year, earning it recognition as a reference point among developers.

Of course, all expectations must ultimately be reflected in concrete data. Cosmos's token ATOM rose from around $20 at the end of December the previous year to a high of $44 on January 7th, marking a gain of nearly 100%. Additionally, Osmosis—the first native DEX on Cosmos—saw its total TVL climb steadily, reaching a peak of $1.27 billion, making it a star project in the industry.

2. Cardano:

Similar to Cosmos, Cardano has been in the spotlight since its inception. Founded in 2015 as a self-proclaimed third-generation blockchain platform focused on solving on-chain scalability, interoperability, and sustainability issues, its core founder Charles Hoskinson is also a co-founder of Ethereum. However, it wasn't until September 13, 2021, that Cardano's mainnet successfully underwent the Alonzo hard fork upgrade to support smart contract deployment—by which time the crypto market had already passed its peak of this cycle. One might say they got up early only to miss the bus.

However, it's important to note that Cardano has a high level of developer activity on-chain, which is the fundamental basis for all the project's positives. According to a report published by Santiment in early January, throughout 2021, an average of 53 contributors submitted GitHub code to Cardano daily—the highest activity level among all public chains. Another report by Outlier indicated that from July 2020 to June 2021, Cardano submitted the most code to GitHub repositories on a monthly basis, with 701 submissions—a 24% increase over the previous year—with Ethereum ranking second at 447 submissions.

Of course, ultra-low gas fees are a prerequisite for Cardano to attract developers, and this is one of its core selling points. According to an announcement from Cardano in January, its gas fees are 568 times cheaper than Ethereum, which is more enticing for average users against the backdrop of a bear market. As of February 18th, the average daily number of new addresses on Cardano reached 112,500—a 167% increase over three months. On February 10th, the number of transactions on the Cardano network exceeded 30 million, and TVL exceeded $120 million, with most of it parked on the native DEX SundaeSwap. However, contrary to Cardano's火热 on-chain activity, its token ADA has been consistently sluggish since the start of the year, drawing dissatisfaction from holders.

3. NEAR:

NEAR was launched to solve Ethereum's scaling issues. As the Ethereum Layer 2 track heated up in 2021, industry expectations for NEAR一度 exceeded those for many high-performance public chains that were surging ahead. NEAR excels in sharding technology, but its ecosystem development lagged behind, leaving it largely unnoticed. It wasn't until the second half of 2021, when NEAR launched an $800 million developer incentive program and promoted Aurora—an Ethereum EVM-compatible scaling solution—that NEAR began to gain momentum.

Aurora allows developers to transfer ERC20 assets to the NEAR chain without code modifications, and at zero cost. At year-end and into the new year, well-known cross-chain projects Celer cBridge and Synapse Protocol, as well as ConsenSys (MetaMask's parent company) and Math Wallet, successively partnered with Aurora to achieve efficient cross-chain asset transfers and user cross-chain access. Terra—the red-hot public chain—also announced the integration of its stablecoin UST into the NEAR and Aurora ecosystems.

Entering early January, NEAR's total daily active accounts exceeded 2 million, its market cap broke through $10 billion, and it achieved daily trading volume growth exceeding 30% for a period of time. At that point, the daily trading volumes of the top five public chains by TVL were all declining.

NEAR's sharding technology employs a horizontal scaling mechanism. In theory, every 10 shards can achieve 10,000 TPS, and so on—with no upper limit. However, whether NEAR's sharding technology can ultimately deliver, or whether it can be more attractive than ETH 2.0, remains to be seen.

4. The Twin Giants of NFT Public Chains — Flow + WAX:

By analogy with Polkadot + Cosmos, Flow + WAX can be regarded as the twin giants of NFT public chains. As NFTs further broke into the mainstream in 2022, this duo fully benefited from this trend.

Let's first look at Flow. Flow gained widespread attention on the eve of the 2021 NFT summer through NBA Top Shot—a blockbuster IP game. However, the irrational frenzy in the NFT market subsequently催生了大批 developers building applications on Ethereum and Solana, causing Flow to一度被市场遗忘. This was also reflected in the data. On January 1, 2022, Flow's total NFT sales were overtaken by Solana. Additionally, during the GameFi wave that began in fall 2021, the Flow public chain also failed to nurture any hot blockchain gaming projects. This is related to Flow's consistent positioning: focused on tokenizing traditional entertainment IPs, while merely dabbling in pure crypto gameplay. However, a turning point came from recent strategic adjustments.

Dapper Labs—the development team behind Flow—announced that in 2022, they would continue to increase investment in DeFi ecosystem development and blockchain technology optimization. In terms of the DeFi ecosystem, Flow introduced the stablecoin USDC into its ecosystem at the start of the year, with the circulating supply exceeding $9 million by February 11th. Meanwhile, Chainlink oracle also began supporting Flow. Flow's native Blocto wallet also launched its own cross-chain bridge and Swap functionality, with other foundational cross-chain infrastructure already in the planning.

In terms of technology, surprisingly, Flow's on-chain activity ranked highly. According to a Santiment report, Flow's on-chain activity ranked ninth across the entire track in 2021, which may explain Flow's intent to further embrace crypto in technology.

Of course, what can bring the most traffic to Flow is the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics—a mega event. The officially licensed mobile game "Olympic Games Jam: Beijing 2022" was released on the Flow chain, and the IOC-licensed Bing Dwen Dwen digital blind box was also launched on Flow's NFT trading marketplace nWay Play on February 12th. For Flow, this represents another excellent brand exposure opportunity. On February 6th, Flow's NFT trading volume exceeded $900 million, reaching a record high.

Now let's look at the WAX public chain. WAX actually explored NFTs earlier than Flow, but WAX is more focused on tokenizing traditional online games, after all, its founding team spun off from OP Skins—a globally leading online game skin trading platform.

WAX's EOS-based characteristics and its focus on the NFT track give it unique advantages in NFT development. Through WAX's NFT creation protocol Atomic Hub, average users can create their own NFTs in just 4 steps, at zero cost. This is also why a large number of developers have been spurred to deploy GameFi applications on the WAX chain.

According to incomplete statistics, the total number of GameFi projects on the WAX chain has approached 140. However, quantity does not guarantee quality—some projects have fewer than 10 daily active users. But scale advantages can still be reflected in data performance. By the end of January, WAX's daily on-chain transactions exceeded 18 million, ranking fifth in total NFT sales—just behind Flow.

5. OKTC Public Chain:

As expected, Web3 will be the biggest trend throughout 2022. Although the current Web3 narrative is overly grand, players who have been deeply cultivating key segments of the crypto world for years can always get a head start. In mid-January 2021, OKX—a globally leading digital assets trading service provider—announced the upgrade of its brand name to OKX, using this opportunity to achieve strategic transformation and comprehensively deploy Web3 technology and application ecosystems.

Simplifying the brand, expanding the business. Compared to its previous brand name, OKX downplayed its exchange attributes, meaning this ever-vibrant crypto veteran will, while consolidating its leading position in CEX and fully leveraging its traffic portal advantages, complete a comprehensive layout of crypto ecosystem applications, covering Meta X, DeFi, NFT, DApp development, metaverse, OKTC public chain, multi-chain wallets, and crypto unicorn incubators—basically meeting all product needs of crypto enthusiasts and developers.

Under this favorable situation, the OKTC public chain will fully enjoy the multiple benefits from OKX's Web3 ecosystem, generating synergies with various applications within it, thereby better fulfilling its role as foundational technical infrastructure and prospering the on-chain ecosystem. Based on this, the multiple competitive advantages of the OKTC public chain—such as high performance, security, and EVM compatibility—will be continuously strengthened, forming a positive interaction with OKX's entire Web3 ecosystem. In 2022, the performance of the OKTC public chain is worth anticipating.

Conclusion:

Looking back, the public chains that performed exceptionally well at the start of 2022 generally share the following characteristics:

1. Mostly older projects that lagged behind during the 2021 bull market, but leveraged their technical accumulation to address specific market pain points, such as cross-chain difficulties and poor scalability. At the same time, by riding the momentum of one of the top five public chains by TVL, they briefly became the new favorites when market hot topics were scarce at year-end;

2. NFT popularity has not diminished in 2022. Due to its powerful breakout attributes, it can deeply integrate with content from traditional internet, thereby playing the role of an initiator for newcomers to the crypto world. Therefore, NFT public chains still have potential in 2022, but it should be noted that the irrational prosperity of 2021 has come to an end;

3. Web3 may become the keyword for competition in the public chain track throughout the year. OKTC's layout in the Web3 ecosystem is comprehensive and multi-dimensional, which is determined by the strong platform backing behind it. For public chain players with less strength, anchoring a specific niche application within the Web3 ecosystem to build their ecosystem may be a path to overtake through lane change.

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