Daily active addresses suddenly skyrocketed from 59 to 312, a fivefold increase. Such data fluctuations are impressive on any public chain, but the underlying logic is worth a deep dive.

The real driver of the overall growth is Sozu, this liquid staking protocol. Since its launch in mid-December, in less than a month, the locked-in amount has surged to $25.9 million. The average daily net inflow is nearly $900,000, which is quite unusual in this market environment. The annualized yield remains around 30%—not particularly exaggerated just based on the interest rate, but few projects can sustain continuous growth.

Staking participation rate reflects user stickiness. Over 30% of the circulating tokens across the network are already staked, roughly 150 million tokens. This ratio is healthy for an L1 project—it prevents liquidity from drying up due to over-staking and is enough to disperse to ensure network security. Sozu’s service wallet accounts for 15% of the entire active addresses, in other words, 1 in 7 users is using it.

The network growth index is even more impressive. On January 16, this indicator soared to 95, compared to 13 previously. Although it dropped back to 32 the next day, this 300% activity increase already indicates a problem. Such explosive growth usually results from a surge of new users or major events catalyzing activity—especially considering the upcoming mainnet upgrade, with speculative demand accounting for a significant portion.

Price and trading volume also reflect this directly. A price of $0.117 implies a market cap of around $59 million. With a maximum supply of 100 million tokens, the fully diluted valuation is about $117 million. Compared to similar privacy-compliant projects, this valuation is relatively low. The 24-hour trading volume has broken the $100 million mark, with a turnover rate approaching 200%, indicating obvious short-term speculation, but also showing that market attention is genuinely heating up.

The token release mechanism is well-designed. 500 million tokens are linearly released over 36 years as rewards, halving every four years. This long-term inflation model helps control short-term selling pressure while providing long-term holders with stable return expectations. In terms of flexibility, unlocking only takes about a few days (roughly two epochs), with no penalty mechanism, offering decent freedom.

On-chain data ultimately doesn’t lie. From the surge in daily active users to staking depth and the explosive growth of the network growth index, a series of indicators tell the same story.