Ecosystem areas for impact measurement

Areas that can measured to identify what impact has been generated within an ecosystem

Impact could be generated for ecosystems in a number of ways. Some quantitative and qualitative examples help to highlight some of the potential considerations an ecosystem could make when measuring the impact that has been generated in different areas for different initiatives. These areas for measuring impact are relevant to both priorities and ideas.

Quantitative

• Network - Active users or wallets, transaction volume, growth rates, number of deployed smart contracts and smart contract execution frequency.

• Decentralisation - Number of nodes or validators, geographic distribution of nodes, coin supply distribution, average coin holding duration and governance participation diversity.

• Financial - Market capitalisation, trading volume, liquidity metrics, total value locked, staking rewards, DeFi yields and stability of liquidity pools.

• Scalability & stability - Number of security incidents, total lost value from security incidents, number and scale of any network issues, total network issue resolution time, network uptime and network fees generated.

• Usability - Average onboarding time, active users on protocols and DApps, user retention rates, user generated content volume, number of ecosystem use cases and number and usage of privacy preserving features.

• Development - Number of active developers, code update frequency and number of development tools and developer tools and libraries usage metrics.

• Governance - Number of participating governance users, total network percentage participating in governance, distribution of influence and voting power and average time taken for decision making processes.

• Community - Views and engagement for ecosystem news and updates, number of educational initiatives and speed and availability of any community support.

• Interoperability - Number of interconnected ecosystems, time and cost to transact across chains and DApps, number of ecosystem partnerships and number of cross-chain transactions.

• Research - Number of novel innovations and research findings.

Qualitative

• Questionnaires & surveys - Capturing community experiences, sentiment and feedback through targeted questions about the ecosystem and network.

• Interviews & focus groups - Conducting interviews and focus groups with different stakeholders across the ecosystem to understand different viewpoints, perceptions and experiences, especially regarding usability, challenges, and community dynamics.

• Usability feedback - Network and DApps ease of use feedback, support satisfaction and feedback.

• Narrative & sentiment analysis - Analysis of current community sentiment from different communication channels and analysis of any user stories that help to highlight different themes and user perspectives and experiences.

• Ethnography studies - Investigations that explore how a Web3 ecosystem has integrated into people daily lives and what societal impact these ecosystems are having.

• Case studies - Case studies that cover different Web3 ecosystem topic areas such as finance, identity, governance or any other relevant areas to identify success factors, ongoing challenges and any opportunities that exist.

• Observational research - Observing network and user behaviour to look for any correlating trends and patterns and analysis that looks into which of those trends and patterns could be influenced by changing user behaviours or cultural changes.