Have you heard of disguised unemployment? It refers to a situation where a portion of the workforce appears to be employed, but isn't contributing to the economy's output. Consider the massive capital expenditure loss from ghost cities, which represent unoccupied infrastructure.
Something similar can be said for the top smart contract blockchains, which hosts hundreds of decentralized protocols. Of these, only a minority are generating revenue, while the rest produce no yield, loosely representing ghost digital cities and a form of disguised unemployment.
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According to DeFiLlama, Ethereum is the world's largest smart contract blockchain, hosting 1,271 protocols. Yet over the past 30 days, a staggering 88%, or 1,121 projects in total, generated no revenue.
Ethereum's rival, Solana, has a much smaller ecosystem, hosting 264 protocols, of which 75% have not generated revenue in the past few days.
In other words, a large number of protocols on the two chains haven't captured any value lately, much like the workforce that draws a salary but does not contribute to the output, or ghost towns that are not being utilized to generate a meaningful economic return.
Key AI insights
Inactive projects are not necessarily a direct burden on the network's processing power in the same way that a congested network is, but they do pose an indirect burden in the following ways:
Storage Burden
Every smart contract, active or not, is stored on the blockchain forever. This immutable data adds to the size of the blockchain, and all nodes in the network must store and maintain this history. As the total number of contracts grows, so do the storage and bandwidth requirements for running a node. While the effect of a single inactive contract is minimal, a "ghost town" of thousands of them adds up over time, increasing the network's long-term operational costs.
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