Have you heard of disguised unemployment? It refers to a situation where a portion of the workforce appears to be employed, but isn’t contributing to the economy’s output. Consider the massive capital expenditure loss from ghost cities, which represent unoccupied infrastructure.

Something similar can be said for the top smart contract blockchains, which hosts hundreds of decentralized protocols. Of these, only a minority are generating revenue, while the rest produce no yield, loosely representing ghost digital cities and a form of disguised unemployment.

According to DeFiLlama, Ethereum is the world’s largest smart contract blockchain, hosting 1,271 protocols. Yet over the past 30 days, a staggering 88%, or 1,121 projects in total, generated no revenue.

Ethereum’s rival, Solana, has a much smaller ecosystem, hosting 264 protocols, of which 75% have not generated revenue in the past few days.

In other words, a large number of protocols on the two chains haven’t captured any value lately, much like the workforce that draws a salary but does not contribute to the output, or ghost towns that are not being utilized to generate a meaningful economic return.

Key AI insights

Inactive projects are not necessarily a direct burden on the network’s processing power in the same way that a congested network is, but they do pose an indirect burden in the following ways:

Storage Burden

Every smart contract, active or not, is stored on the blockchain forever. This immutable data adds to the size of the blockchain, and all nodes in the network must store and maintain this history. As the total number of contracts grows, so do the storage and bandwidth requirements for running a node. While the effect of a single inactive contract is minimal, a «ghost town» of thousands of them adds up over time, increasing the network’s long-term operational costs.

Security and Vulnerability Risks

The existence of a vast number of inactive or abandoned contracts creates a larger attack surface. A smart contract, even if it’s no longer used, can contain a vulnerability that, if exploited, could have unforeseen consequences for other parts of the ecosystem or funds locked within it. This introduces a layer of systemic risk to the network that must be continually monitored by security researchers and auditors.

Economic Inefficiency

This is where the «disguised unemployment» analogy is most apt. While these projects aren’t causing congestion, they represent a collective failure of capital and developer time to create a productive asset on the network. The funds, time, and effort spent to deploy these projects are effectively locked in a non-productive state, which is a drag on the overall efficiency of the ecosystem.

Just as a physical ghost city represents a massive investment of capital and labour that yields no economic return, the multitude of non-revenue-generating protocols on blockchains represents wasted developer effort and capital that does not contribute to the network’s productivity.

Hindrance to User Experience

A large number of inactive projects can make it difficult for new users to find and trust legitimate, active protocols. Sifting through a sea of defunct or failed projects can be confusing and might detract from the overall user experience.

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