Measuring on-chain activity via distinct stake addresses — a new free dashboard.

Dashboard ->

One of the harder questions in blockchain analytics is deceptively simple: how many people are actually using this network?

Price is easy to measure. Transaction count is easy to measure. Active users are not. Most "active user" metrics in crypto conflate wallets, bots, exchanges, and UTXO change outputs. On Cardano the situation is better than most, because the staking architecture gives us a stable long-lived identifier: the stake address.

The methodology

We count distinct stake addresses that owned at least one transaction output in a given time window — per day, and per epoch. A stake address persists across wallets and is directly attached to a person's ADA holdings. It's not a perfect proxy for a human, but it's the most durable signal the on-chain data provides.

The data is queried directly from our db-sync PostgreSQL database on an automated daily schedule.

What the data shows

Over the last five complete epochs (632–635), Cardano had roughly 25,000–33,000 distinct active addresses per epoch. Daily, the baseline runs around 6,000–8,000, with occasional spikes to 10–12k.

Epoch 635 (June 3–8) showed a notable jump to 33,265 — roughly 25% above the prior three-epoch average of ~26,000.

The activity heatmap covers the last 30 days. Peak activity reaches 2,796 distinct addresses in a single weekday–hour bucket, with an average of 1,880 across all buckets. There's no strong weekend drop — activity is broadly distributed across all days and hours UTC. This points to a genuinely global, non-work-hours user base, different from typical web2 consumer apps.

The dashboard

The full dashboard is free and public at dashboards.blockchain-applied.com/cardano/active_users. It shows:

  • Daily active users over the last 30 days
  • Active users per epoch (last 5 epochs), with a detail table
  • A weekday × hour heatmap (last 30 days)

No login required. Data updates daily.

What this doesn't measure

Stake addresses are reused across UTXOs, so one person can appear once even if they made 50 transactions. Conversely, a single exchange hot wallet counts once even if it represents thousands of users. This metric undercounts custodial users and overcounts UTXO-heavy scripts. It is best understood as a lower bound on engaged individual participants.

The underlying data

If you want to run your own queries — segmenting by pool, stake key, or epoch range — the dataset is available at blockchain-applied.com.

The dashboard stack

The dashboard runs on Evidence, an open-source framework for building data products with SQL and Markdown. Rather than a drag-and-drop BI tool, Evidence treats reports as code: you write SQL queries, embed the results into Markdown pages, and Evidence renders a static site from them. Charts, tables, and the heatmap are all defined this way — no proprietary config, everything lives in version control. For a technical product like this one, that's the right fit: the dashboard definition is as auditable as the data it shows.