As per a Twitter post shared on by Delphi Digital, the decentralized exchanges on the Ethereum network saw a great increase during 2022. A possible reason behind this progress could be the mistrust spread among the investors in the case of centralized exchanges. This mistrust rose to its heights after the decline of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX.

DEXs on Ethereum Network Experienced an Elevated Activity over 2022

From 2020’s January to 2022’s November, the volume of the decentralized exchanges on Ethereum witnessed an upsurge of nearly 402.4%. This progress witnessed its peak during some of the recent months.

Ethereum network was effective in capitalizing on the respective elevating DEX operations on its platform. In addition to this huge increase in DEX activity, retail investors also have been taking great interest in the decentralized finance sector.

After being disappointed by the centralized space, they have been flocking toward Ethereum DEXs. As per Glassnode, the total figure of addresses that have non-zero balances touched its all-time high at that time.

At their peak point, the addresses were up to 91.97 million. Apart from the retail investors, the validators operating on the network of Ethereum also expanded in number to a great extent.

Over the previous 30 days, the Ethereum validators’ number has elevated by a 2.71% proportion. Nonetheless, the revenue made by Ethereum went through a decline over the same time, as indicated by the data offered by Staking Rewards.

Adding up to the gradually spreading validators, growth was also beheld in the sum of big addresses existing on the Ethereum network.

Nevertheless, Ethereum had not remained effective in generating interest from the latest addresses. This scenario was manifested in the decreasing network growth. An important thing that was indicated this way was that the sum of unique addresses involved in transacting ETH for the 1st time had minimized. Moreover, the speed of Ethereum plummeted at the same time.

This indirectly disclosed that the frequency of ETH transfers between the addresses additionally dropped. Although the big investors have consistently remained optimistic irrespective of the dropping network activity of Ethereum, a different viewpoint has been presented by the crypto traders operating in the industry.

As per the statistics provided by Coinglass, the sum of short positions being kept against Ethereum rose.

Analyst Says Ethereum Network Is Controlled by the US Authorities

At the moment, a 51.07% ratio of traders took short positions against ETH. Willy Woo, an on-chain analyst, has shared a Twitter post noting that Ethereum is in advance being controlled by the US authorities according to him.

He claimed that the decentralized apps developed on the Ethereum blockchain do not have a decentralized status anymore. The analyst considers that the transfers made on the network cannot resist censorship currently.

In his post, Woo shared a screenshot taken from “inclusion.watch” which mentioned that Ethereum’s 69% blocks are in advance compliance with the regulations specified by the OFAC. This figure has been achieved during the recent 3 months following the accomplishment of the Merge upgrade of Ethereum in September 2022.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (or OFAC) is the organization that is devoted to enforcing the sanctions specified by the United States. In October this year, the ratio of OFAC-compliant blocks on Ethereum abruptly rose from just nine percent to the astounding fifty-one percent. The respective compliance is related to the MEV-Boost relays.