If you are curious about how many ethereum (ETH) accounts there are in 2022, you are at the right place. Over 71 million Ethereum addresses now contain some amount of ETH. Over time, this number has been rising gradually. Similar to this time last year, the number of Ethereum addresses with a balance greater than zero has risen to a new record high.
According to blockchain analytics provider Glassnode, there are currently 71,364,788 addresses holding some money from the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
That number also reached a new all-time high of 51,491,730 on December 30 of last year. Since then, it has increased 38%. We attributed such at the time to a robust market fueled by institutional investors and the impressive rise of DeFi (decentralized finance).
However, this time, the NFT (non-fungible token) market is probably playing a significant role. This year has seen a huge increase in the use of NFTs, blockchain-based tokens that can be used to verify ownership of virtually anything, especially in the art industry. There is a good reason why the NFT explosion was selected by Decrypt as the largest crypto story of the year. This phenomenon undoubtedly attracted more attention to Ethereum as well as the rest of the larger crypto community.
The majority of NFTs are created on the Ethereum blockchain (although other blockchains like Solana are coming up), and you need an Ethereum address—or wallet—in order to purchase and trade NFTs.
"NFTs played a big part in attracting new wallets and users to the Ethereum ecosystem," said Matt Aaron, project lead at UniWhales DAO, which develops DeFi analytics data tooling and research. Transactions from OpenSea were using more gas than any other dApp for a significant portion of the year.
Since 2017, the number of non-zero ETH addresses has been continuously increasing, whereas the number of non-zero Bitcoin addresses has fluctuated over time.
