Traffic proxies like Similarweb (or SEMRush, Ahrefs) help, but are not the best signal on measuring crypto usage at a protocol level
The fun thing about blockchain is its public and open, anyone can see daily use. Front ends are also increasingly getting abstracted because everything is composable meaning in this example, you could be using uniswap without visiting their website
I took the same dates used (Oct 2024-2025) in shkreli's chart from similarweb and found this @Dune dashy by @UniswapFND
Chart shows unique swaps and # of swaps going up over the last year.
This also isn't the right signal though because it only shows Uniswap V4 - it makes sense it starts to get used more post launch
Ideally we find data that shows:
- Total swaps over time for all versions
- # of unique wallets (without double counting multiple chains) - also obviously not fully accurate as one user could have multiple wallets but still higher signal than traffic proxies
- Volume over time for all versions
- Volume per unique wallet over time for all versions
- Returning wallets over time
I found fees and volume on @DefiLlama for all Uniswap versions here. It doesn't show an up and to the right chart, but it's not dying usage:
To measure if masses actually "care" about crypto, sometimes I will use Google Trends. This only measures search terms on google for crypto
In all honesty I did think this was going to be a down only chart lol (if you look at the 5 year for search term "crypto" we never hit the same highs as in 2021) but it looks similar to the fee and volumes
Note on this, using Google Trends to measure search terms as a signal for demand will change as more people use chatgpt and other LLMs for search
Uniswap also has a mobile app, if one wants to go deeper they could look at Sensor Tower and track app downloads and even look at crypto category as a whole to measure mobile-first usage
TLDR for blockchain protocols just look at onchain data, it's public and open
