GM
Welcome to Issue #26 of Dune Digest! We have some exciting news for you this week!
For starters:
Dune Analytics is now………. Dune
We’re rebranding as “just” Dune, and you can now find us at dune.com!
Announcing the move in a blog post, Dune CEO Fredrik Haga said that:
“Our mission is to make crypto data accessible and we’ve long known that eventually this day would come when analytics is too limiting for describing what we’re up to. It’s a long and clunky word that is too cumbersome. Therefore, we’re today changing our name to simply Dune”
You can read the full post here if you’re interested in learning more.
Secondly, Mario Gabriele wrote an incredible piece about Dune in The Generalist. He breaks down our entire history, our business model, successes and challenges, and how on-chain data fits into the bigger picture in crypto. He also interviews several team members and Wizards.
Give it a read - a truly great write up!
Now of course it’s time to get into the meat, and enjoy some of the excellent dashboards of the week. Let’s goooooooo…..
Ethereum 2.0 Staking
As you likely know, Ethereum 2.0 is a long-awaited upgrade to Ethereum aiming to improve the network’s speed, scalability and security by switching from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
The Ethereum foundation actually retired the term “Ethereum 2.0” a while back on the basis that it could be misleading (implying a separate network as opposed to an upgrade), and now refers to it as the “consensus layer”.
It’s a process with clearly defined steps. The first phase was called the Beacon Chain, which went live on the 1st December 2020.
Beacon introduced native staking to Ethereum on a separate chain to the Ethereum mainnet, laying the ground for a key part of the network’s pivot to a PoS consensus mechanism.
The next phase, The Merge, will involve merging the Beacon Chain with the Ethereum mainnet. The exact schedule for this happening gets frequently pushed back, but it’s expected sometime in mid to late 2022.
For now, what has been going on with Beacon Chain and Eth 2.0 staking so far? Thanks to a new dashboard released by @hildobby this week - we can get a good idea. Let’s take a look.
In total, there are now:
367,995 Validators
71,344 Depositor Addresses
The total $ETH deposited is an impressive amount approaching 12 Million:
This amounts to 9.91% of the total $ETH supply 🤯
Total $ETH deposited to Beacon Chain was especially high in the lead up to, and immediately after, the official launch in December 2020. Since then it remained steady with regular peaks and dips - but has been significant over the past 6 weeks:
When we look at the actual number of depositors themselves, the picture is different. After a small initial spike, there was relatively little activity until Summer 2021 when depositors rushed in. Things have been steady since - with approximately 500 - 1500 new depositors a week:
How is this being deposited?
Becoming an individual validator isn’t easy for everyone. For a start you need a minimum of 32 $ETH to deposit. Your $ETH is also locked up for an indefinite period (until transactions are enabled), and there are responsibilities involved in running a validator.
Liquid Staking made things easier and more open, and allows participants to sidestep the major downsides.
Users can stake any amount of $ETH without locking it up, by receiving a tokenized equivalent of their staked funds (like a derivative) - which they can use like a regular token.
More than 32.3% of staked ETH is liquid:
Let’s dive into Liquid staking a little more through another excellent dashboard, ETH2 Liquid Staking by @eliasimos.
According to the dashboard, Liquid staking is a big deal.
4,045,510 $ETH is staked in liquid pools. That’s over $12.2 Billion in value.
The market leader is Lido, which has accounted for the vast majority of liquid staking since inception in early 2021 - as the overall ecosystem has grown significantly:
Lido accounts for 28.95% of all staked $ETH on Beacon.
To investigate further and get a load more stats, check out the dashboards yourself:
0x NFT Market
On Wednesday, Coinbase announced the beta launch of Coinbase NFT, their long-discussed NFT marketplace.
The much anticipated marketplace will be powered under the hood by 0x Project, a P2P exchange for Ethereum-based tokens. On their blog, 0x stated that:
“With powerful multi-chain NFT swap support and the most robust feature set of any NFT exchange protocol, 0x was the obvious choice to power the new marketplace. Additionally, with 0x Protocol v4 being up to 54% more gas efficient, Coinbase marketplace users will enjoy low trading costs”
Even though it’s only two days old, Dune Wizard @Markov already has a dashboard out to track the project.
So far there have been 376 total transactions, with a volume of 16.62 $ETH or $50,957.
With a relatively small amount of buyers and sellers:
The project is still in its infancy. It faces stiff opposition with entrenched giants like OpenSea and a host of competitors.
That said, you can’t underestimate a behemoth like Coinbase, and this will be one to watch.
Keep an eye on @Marcov’s dashboard to follow the platform’s growth.
Moonbirds are mooning
Moonbirds - a collection of 10,000 pixelated owls - has been all the rage in the NFT space over the past week.
Behind the project is the Proof Collective, a group of 1000 NFT collectors including notable figures like Beeple and Gary V.
@sealaunch put together a great dashboard this week uncovering the key metrics.
Moonbirds quickly sold out last weekend in a fixed-price drop. Since then, a lot of action has been going down.
In under a week, volume has reached a whopping 119,417 $ETH - more than $350 Million - from 7,895 sales.
The floor is now at 33 $ETH, having risen from 7.5 a week ago:
There are 6,477 unique owners. Holders seem like a healthy split, with 75% holding 1, 15% with 2, and only a small sliver holding 11-50.
The top sale price so far is 205 $ETH.
An impressive launch and project for sure. A new blue chip? Decide what you think by checking out the full dashboard.
Cooltopia
Cooltopia is Cool Cats’ new gamified NFT experience:
“The Cool Cats ecosystem, including all of the components within Cool Cats that talk to one another: the Cool Cats NFT collection, Cool Pets NFT collection, the gamified and tokenized economy driven by $MILK”
A great dashboard by @chuxin explores the project. There’s a ton of data in there about Cool Cats and Cool Pets, but we’re going to look at the $MILK token and the gaming action today.
$MILK is a utility token for Cooltopia. Cool Cats holders automatically earn $MILK, and it can also be earned by sending Cool Pets on “quests”. A lot was minted in the first week:
To a current circulating supply of 181 Million at a price of $0.01.
The majority of $MILK has come from quests so far, and in just the past 24 hours there have been over 88,000 quests, with almost 9,000 Pets questing from more than 5,000 wallets.
So over 25% of Pets in existence have been on a quest in the past day!
Cumulative marketplace volume is almost at $300,000, and overall the project seems to have had a successful launch.
Check out the full dashboard for much more.
BendDAO
Bend is another interesting NFT collateralization protocol.
It’s a “decentralized peer-to-pool based NFT liquidity protocol” which allows depositors to provide ETH liquidity to pools for rewards, while borrowers are able to take out $ETH loans by using NFTs as collateral.
@cgq0123 put out a dashboard this week on Bend.
There has been some impressive growth so far. Collateral is now at 10,974 $ETH, from a total of 187 NFTs.
Over 50% (94) of the NFTs used are Mutant Apes, but there are also Bored Apes (49), Wrapped CryptoPunks (25), and some Clone’s, Azukis and Doodles.
The Bend reserve has been growing healthily over the past month, now sitting at 6,835 $ETH and utilized at 54.28%:
Although Mutant Apes were the most used NFTs, Bored Apes account for the highest share of value with 55% or 6,113 $ETH!
It’s interesting to see all the new ways for collectors to put their NFTs to use emerging. Check out the full dashboard for much more data.
More Dashboards
GN
Thanks for reading as always - and a special thanks for all the Wizards and their weekly wizardry.
We will see you again next week - enjoy the weekend and remember that the data must flow.