Ethereum handle creation hit a 35-month excessive on December 14 when 177,000 new addresses have been added to the community in accordance with analysts from Santiment.

The analytics supplier reported that its community progress metric confirmed Ethereum including 177,500 addresses in a single-day on Saturday, Dec. 12.

The variety of energetic addresses additionally surged on Dec. 14 to 714,081, although its all-time excessive got here in the course of the crypto growth in January 2018 when it topped 1.1 million in accordance with Bitinfocharts.com.

There could possibly be numerous causes for the uptick in handle creation and energetic addresses in current months together with the surge in DeFi liquidity mining providing good returns with ETH as collateral.

The anticipation of staking rewards on the newly launched ETH 2.0 Beacon Chain could have additionally pushed handle progress as buyers purchase ETH to stake on the brand new blockchain. And naturally Bitcoin costs are again close to all time highs, serving to mild a hearth beneath different cryptocurrencies too.

However a Reddit thread in regards to the milestone, mentioned the chance {that a} token airdrop from Flare Networks for XRP holders was an enormous contributor to the handle creation spike. Flare is a brand new protocol that intends to deliver decentralized finance to the XRP ecosystem by making it appropriate with present good contracts with the Ethereum Digital Machine. Redditor SoundofCreekWater mentioned:

“Might be bc of the XRP/Spark/Flare airdrop, which requires an ethereum-compatible handle”

Flare’s native FLR token will probably be used to collateralize the issuance of FXRP, a completely trustless illustration of XRP on the community. The airdrop took a snapshot of XRP balances on Dec. 12, which coincided with the Ethereum handle creation spike.

Flare explained that 45 billion Spark tokens will probably be distributed, with 15% claimable on the time of community launch which has been slated for 3 to 6 months’ time. The remaining will probably be distributed over the subsequent two years.

“If you happen to self custody, the strategy of claiming the Spark token is solely to set the Message Key discipline in your XRP Ledger handle to your Flare handle.”

It goes on to clarify that the Flare handle is an ‘Ethereum appropriate handle’ which should be created inside six months of the snapshot date.

Whereas main exchanges akin to Coinbase and Binance are supporting the airdrop and automating the method, those who maintain their XRP off a centralized change may have wanted to create a Flare handle so as to be eligible for the airdrop. XRP costs have tanked 22% because the snapshot occurred.