What did you use the BSV blockchain for in 2024? How does it compare to the Big Data use cases we’re always hearing about, and how does it compare to the actual usage stats? Thanks to blockchain explorer and data source WhatsOnChain, we can now look back over the years we’ve just had and find some answers.
WhatsOnChain added tags to its blockchain statistics pages in February 2024, clarifying who’s using the BSV blockchain for what and how much. Looking back over the year is equal to nostalgia for apps no longer with us and curiosity to see what’s up and coming.
Before we start, though, there’s one important point: WhatsOnChain’s tag statistics only show projects that have enabled identifying tags. That means other projects are racking up volumes that don’t appear on the charts. HandCash‘s multi-purpose wallet is one notable example of this, yet it’s used quite commonly for gaming, social media, and other apps. Please take this article more as a quick romp through readily available data rather than a definitive record of BSV usage over the past year. As more projects come online and make better use of WhatsOnChain’s tagging system, the better data we’ll have at the end of next year and beyond.
The tagged stats are displayed in real time and various projects have added their tags throughout 2024. There are now about 130 to choose from, which means the more recent data will yield more granular results. However, it’s possible to view tags for BSV’s different protocols going all the way back to the start of 2021, giving us charts that look like this:
As things stand at the time of writing (late December), OP_RETURN dominates the end-of-year chart and has done so since the start of December, when transactions began appearing on-chain at a rate of ~30-80 million per day and began a month of speculation over who it might be.
Unfortunately, the stats themselves don’t reveal much more about that since OP_RETURN is a common opcode in Bitcoin Script telling us a transaction contains extra data. So, let’s look at some tags with clearer descriptions.
Who ‘won’ 2024? It depends on how you look at it
The project with the highest number of transactions in a single day (excluding unnamed OP_RETURNs) was Rekord IoT, with a whopping 28,774,815 on January 8—but it disappeared from the charts in February. Of the more consistent performers, the “winner” was 1Sat Ordinals tokens, which logged 6,974,074 transactions on chain on June 3. The biggest day for a more specifically focused project was Proof of ESG on May 27, with 4,875,786, with both projects remaining prominent throughout the year.
Other projects with notable day peaks, and which sustained high transaction throughputs over 2024, were: My2Cents (peaked on February 19 with 919,326); CERTIHASH (on January 22 with 298,829); Peergame (on January 19 with 109,805); TimeOfTx (peaked November 18 with 85,050); TDXP (March 4 with 20,397); and mintBlue (January 22 at 65,460).
WhatsOnChain has a leaderboard for the most transactions in total, but it doesn’t have a tab for a single year. However, in the last three months of 2024, the kings of the Total Transactions hill have been: 1Sat Ordinals (7,720,198); My2Cents (924,895); Certihash (696,343); TimeOfTx (636,257); and Peergame (297,402).
Which token protocols are BSV’s favorites?
In 2024, the clear winner here is 1Sat Ordinals, which first appeared in March 2023 and has been in the top 3 for most of the time since. The high water mark for 1Sat Ordinals in 2024 was the aforementioned June 3. However, after a couple of peaks of around 3-4 million transactions per day from August to October, 1Sats experienced some decline. On November 11, the STAS protocol grabbed the top spot with 13,885 transactions and held the crown for over a month. The other notable token protocols are Badge, Tokenized, and even RUN (BSV’s former no.1), which still appears sporadically. Trivia: on March 25, RUN recorded 65,145 transactions, beating 1Sat Ordinals (55,430) for a single day.
Social media and gaming
We’ll be honest: the stats show a bit of a disappointing year for these flagship use cases for the BSV blockchain and the future of Web3 in general. On BSV, the three leaders were My2Cents, Twetch, and Memo.cash. Twetch sadly left this earthly realm in May, leaving only the other two players on WoC’s leaderboard.
On this note, we should mention that Treechat has filled much of the empty space Twetch left behind and is probably the most interesting social network currently running on BSV. It also managed to resurrect all the social archives from Twetch and fellow former social network Hodlocker, proving that immutable, on-chain data and indexers play a vital role. Treechat doesn’t yet have an ID tag on WhatsOnChain, but anecdotally, it’s getting a lot of traffic.
In gaming, Peergame was the undisputed leader all year and, along with TimeToParty, the only gaming platform that recorded transactions every month in 2024. Haste on RUN appeared briefly mid-way through the year, but has since changed its format.
The top BSV wallets by transaction volume on WhatsOnChain were Centbee, DotWallet, and RelayX before its shutdown around March. However, we need to repeat the disclaimer that not all wallets were recorded this way, and there’s probably a lot of helpful information missing from this section. We also only have a little information on trading/exchange platforms (other than TDXP and DXS), so that’s something else we’re interested in learning more about in 2025.
We’re curious to hear what you’ve got to say about this, too, so please share this article and let us know if these statistics match what you expected or if you think there’s anything important the charts aren’t showing.
Other than that, let’s look forward to 2025, and may Teranode bring ever-larger and ever-more-exciting data for us to look at next year.
Watch: Onboarding enterprises onto BSV blockchain via AWS
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