CoinDesk Releases Q2 2018 State of Blockchain Report

That's perhaps the biggest takeaway from CoinDesk's State of Blockchain Q2 2018 report.

Released today, the State of Blockchain report provides a 100+ slide analysis of industry news and data.

The report also features a deep dive into the quarterly interest around bitcoin and ethereum.

Bitcoin trading activity on exchanges dipped over the quarter, with a weighted combination of crypto-to-crypto volumes, fiat-to-crypto volumes and total trade pairs down 26%. The use of bitcoin's blockchain to transact on-chain also saw less interest in Q2, declining 28%. Miner revenues and fees dropped as well.

Hidden behind the negative trend in the use of bitcoin's blockchain was important development news: part of the reason why on-chain transactions fell was because of the lightning network's growth.

The use of payment channels - in which small, frequent transactions between two parties are conducted off-chain and the blockchain is reserved for final settlement - boomed in Q2 as the lightning network pushes its solution to certain scaling issues.

Exchange activity around ether, the native currency of the ethereum network, was down 37%. Ethereum's blockchain was used at about the same levels as Q1, which itself was a record-setting quarter.

Average ICO size has steadily grown from $6 million in Q3 2017 to $16 million in Q4 to $31 million in Q1 2018 to $39 million in Q2 2018.

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