Ethereum is the biggest gainer for the second quarter of 2020, according to latest compilation by Asian crypto data aggregator CoinGecko.

The Vitalik Buterin-led network gained the highest (+1.6%) of the top 30 assets by market cap, the analysis shows, followed by Bitcoin (+0.3%), and Tether (+0.2%) while the rest lost their shares of the market with Ripple (XRP) losing the most ground (-1.3%).

Markets around the world declined in Q1 2020 except for Ethereum which gained by 1.4%, CoinGecko had noted in its previous report, after a 116% gain up till mid-February.

Now, by Q2, Ethereum continues the slow growth, beating the 78% rise in Bitcoin’s average monthly price after the March 12 plunge – which saw the top cryptocurrency fall by 35% (over US$3,000) in 24 hours – from doing much to get it to be the top gainer. The roughly 48 days of markets recovery from the vertical drop points to Bitcoin’s average total spot trading volume as having been on a downward trend since May as the price recovers but still down by 20% quarter-on-quarter.

There’re some tiny pointers that seem to support Ethereum’s steady rise thus far.

Weiss Crypto Rating attributes the recent observed increase in the activity on the Ethereum blockchain – nearing levels last seen at the peak of the ICO bubble of 2017 – as well as a six-month high record of ETH withdrawal from exchanges to the growing decentralized finance (DeFi)-related activities.

Ethereum has a burgeoning DeFi ecosystem as well as thousands of tokens for different use cases running on its network. A supposed market shift towards DeFi and derivatives trading was hinted by CoinGecko to be a possible factor for the total crypto market capitalization growing by 44.5% by the end of Q2.

There is also a claim that the volume of Ethereum-hosting decentralized exchanges (DEXs) grew month-on-month by June while the volume of centralized exchanges saw a 32% drop – total DEXs volume in USD as at end of May touched the ~$3 bln mark according to Dune Analytics.

Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2) is supposed to be coming out soon too. If its multi-client testnet gets launched and runs smoothly for at least two months with no major bugs by the end of the summer, then phase 0 will likely be finalized before the end of the year to usher in phase 1 by 2021. Eth2 seeks to carry the evolution and improvement of the public Ethereum network from a Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus algorithm leading to improved scalability, security, and usability for the network.

Blockchain data platform, Santiment, shows that the number of daily addresses of Ethereum has hit a two-year single-day high on June 29, with 486,000 addresses interacting on the blockchain.

However, as the overall dApp ecosystem activity seems to have grown by 22% when comparing Q1 to Q2 2020, a June 2020 DappRadar report says Ethereum had a 6% drop in its daily dApp activity in Q2 due to high gas prices leading to a decline in games category activity.