User Acquisition and Retention Across EVM Chains

Key Insights

• Ethereum’s new user month-on-month adoption fell at an average of 5% which is attributable to the rise in popularity of its Layer-2 scaling solutions, Arbitrum and Optimism.
• Among mature EVM chains, Ethereum DEXs tend to have about 5% higher long-term user retention, largely because of their deeper liquidity and more robust DeFi ecosystem.
• Arbitrum and Optimism claim the majority user share for perps platforms with an average of 10% higher long-term user retention as well as rapidly increasing new user bases.
• Lending platforms across EVM chains have witnessed a decline in new users, which can be partly attributed to the rise of alternative forms of leverage.
• When it comes to the consumer sector, Ethereum carved out a niche for itself with high-value, blue-chip NFT collections while Polygon and BNB dominated the GameFi user base.
  

2022 brought out the Layer-2 (L2) narrative in full force, replacing what was a competitive alternative Layer-1 landscape. Chains like Arbitrum and Optimism brought in hundreds of thousands of loyal users and created booming DeFi ecosystems. As each of these chains attempts to carve out its place within the wider crypto environment, they create a testing ground that can be used to identify which user acquisition strategies are the most effective.