Have you heard of disguised unemployment? It refers to a situation where part of the workforce seems to be used, but does not contribute to the production of the economy. Consider the massive loss of capital expenses in ghost cities, which represent unoccupied infrastructure.
Something similar can be said for the best chains of intelligent contract blocks, which hosts hundreds of decentralized protocols. Among these, only a minority generates income, while the rest does not produce any return, vaguely representing digital ghost cities and a form of disguised unemployment.
According to Defillama, Ethereum is the largest smart contract blockchain in the world, welcoming 1,271 protocols. However, in the last 30 days, a total of 88%, or 1,121 projects in total, has generated any turnover.
The rival of Ethereum, Solana, has a much smaller ecosystem, welcoming 264 protocols, 75% of which have not generated any income in recent days.
In other words, a large number of protocols on the two channels have not captured any value in recent times, as is the workforce that attracts a salary but does not contribute to production, or ghost cities which are not used to generate a significant economic yield.
Inactive projects are not necessarily a direct burden on the power’s treatment power in the same way as a congested network, but they represent an indirect burden as follows:
Storage load
Each intelligent contract, active or not, is stored on the blockchain forever. These immutable data add to the size of the blockchain, and all the nodes of the network must store and maintain this history. As the total number of contracts increases, the storage and bandwidth requirements to execute a node. Although the effect of a single inactive contract is minimal, a “ghost city” of thousands of them is added over time, increasing the long -term operational costs of the network.
Safety and vulnerability risks
The existence of a large number of inactive or abandoned contracts creates a larger attack surface. An intelligent contract, even if it is no longer used, can contain a vulnerability which, if it is exploited, could have unforeseen consequences for other parts of the ecosystem or the funds locked up inside. This introduces a systemic risk layer for the network which must be permanently followed by researchers and safety auditors.
Economic ineffectiveness
This is where the analogy of “disguised unemployment” is the most appropriate. Although these projects do not cause congestion, they represent a collective failure of capital time and developer to create a productive asset on the network. The funds, time and efforts spent to deploy these projects are actually locked in a non -productive state, which is an obstacle to the overall efficiency of the ecosystem.
