Shortly after the $UST/$LUNA death spiral that brought the Terra ecosystem to its knees back in May 2022, a new version of the blockchain went live in an attempt to salvage anything that was still standing, named Terra 2.0. Now, months after the events and the launch of the second version of the blockchain, we’re going to have a look at the users that transact on it and compare it to the last quarter of the now Terra Classic blockchain before its first halt.

The observed time frame is of 90 days. For Terra Classic that means the last 90 days before the first blockchain halt on May 12 2022. For Terra 2.0 that means the last 90 days to the current date.

The default granularity we will be using is set to date_trunc = day, but it can be changed to week or month using the parameter field in the dashboard.

☝️ The dashboard can be updated on-demand by pressing the refresh button 🔄 in the top right corner of the page.

I. Terra Population

Over the last three months, the daily number of users transacting on Terra 2.0 did not at any point even come close to the number of users Terra Classic had during its last 90 days. In total, Terra 2.0 had close to 70k distinct users active over the observed time frame, but that only represents around 5% of the 1.282M users that used Terra Classic over the same length of time.

This shows that despite Terra being praised by developers and users as being a great blockchain, the events of May 2022 resulted in a loss of trust for a huge share of the community and that has not yet been restored.

What stand out however is that two thirds of the addresses that have used Terra 2.0 over the observed time frame have also been using Terra Classic before its crash. While this can stand to show that there still are a handful of users who have remained loyal and still see the blockchain as viable, it also reveals that it’s been unable to attract a lot of new users ever since its speedy launch on May 28.

With the exception of the days of May 8 onward, when people were understandably trying to remove their assets off the chain, the average number of transacting users on Terra Classic ranged between 40k and 50k with a slight uptrend. That is far higher than the sub 2k range the average on Terra 2.0 has been in, with just a few exceptions.

Looking at the number of Weekly Active Users (WAU), the difference is even greater. While Terra Classic saw counts of over 13k consistently, Terra 2.0 is still far behind and only has a few hundred WAU every week. This means that Terra Classic users used to transact more often than Terra 2.0 users, which is not a big surprise considering the much smaller ecosystem users can interact with.

There is however a light of hope as the count has been consolidating slightly higher over the last few weeks at around 500 WAU.

Even at its height, Terra Classic would still be a attracting a lot more new users than Terra 2.0 does. Overall, in its last 90 days before the crash, less than a quarter of users had already made a transaction outside of the time frame. In the case of Terra 2.0, users are split between new and existing, showing once again that it has lower success in attracting new users to the chain.

II. Blockchain Activity

The number of transactions confirms once again that Terra 2.0 is still far behind its predecessor, with 644k transactions executed over the last 90 days, around 1% of the transactions on Terra Classic.

We can see however that a slight uptrend is forming in the number of transactions executed on the Terra 2.0 blockchain, although in earlier weeks things were going in the opposite direction. Surprisingly, the chain behaves more like a new chain in this regard, where it does have a small but loyal user base that uses it, yet its fate is not yet decided and activity can radically change course over short periods of time.

While most of the other indicators compare the quantity of either users or transactions, there is another aspect about the activity on both blockchains that has shifted.

The activity on Terra Classic was more evenly spread throughout the day, with higher average transaction counts usually during weekdays between 12:00 and 20:00 UTC and not as much during weekends. For Terra 2.0 however, a lot of the transactions are concentrated on Fridays between 10:00 and 16:00 UTC. For the rest of the weekdays activity also shifted earlier in the day but there is still not much activity during weekends.

Although it’s unclear why so much activity is concentrated on Fridays, the shift in activity to earlier time intervals suggests that activity shifter from a more heavily US-located user base, to one that could be located in Asian countries.

Conclusion

The Terra Classic blockchain outperforms in all aspects the current state of the Terra 2.0 blockchain. This applies to the number of users transacting, WAU, acquisition of new users, transaction counts and diversity of user base. Undoubtedly Terra has not been able to overcome the overall sentiment of users following the events of May 2022 that led to the collapse of a once thriving ecosystem.

Its speedy efforts to salvage anything that was still standing resulted in a small but active user base that migrated over from the original chain, but it is hard to tell how likely they are to remain active in such great numbers if the ecosystem does not engage more users and dapps to come transact on the blockchain.

There are a few signals that things could be moving upwards, but the trends we can spot are still very early and fragile. In many ways the Terra 2.0 behaves like a new chain, presenting both opportunity and risk for those who choose to come join in early.