Dune Digest #27
Flashbots, Polygon, $DAI, OK Bears & More!
GM
Hello and welcome to the latest Dune Digest. Let’s begin with a little news….. This week we announced that Flashbots data is now live on Dune!
Flashbots is an R&D organization that investigates Miner Extractable Value (MEV) and builds tools to mitigate it.
MEV is like the crypto equivalent of high frequency trading and allows miners on Ethereum to use their power to extract value from user activity by arbitrarily reordering, including or excluding transactions on the blocks they produce.
It’s a complex topic, and you can read more about it in this piece by Dragonfly.
Flashbots is the first 3rd party dataset we’ve brought to Dune, and we’re launching it on our new data platform, like we did with Solana. Very excited to see what Wizards make of it.
We also recorded a new episode of The Weekly Wizard this week with Dr Ethereum from Rabbithole.gg.
It’s an interesting episode with a very cool and knowledgeable guy, with some great insights about onboarding new users into crypto - check it out!
Now, speaking of MEV, let’s get into some data for this week.
Flashbots MEV
After announcing the new Flashbots MEV data on Dune, some dashboards started appearing within a day.
This one was created by the flashbots team to showcase some of the data that can be surfaced. We’ll look at a few highlights.
Firstly, MEV can be extremely profitable. This graph shows several successful arbitrageurs - many of whom have made tens of thousands of profitable arbitrages and millions of $ in profit:
It’s possible to make hundreds of thousands or even millions in a single arbitrage. Take a look at the most profitable ones:
The top protocol for this is Uniswap V2, with 1324952 occurences. After that other versions of Uniswap, Balancer, and Curve all feature frequently.
Liquidation is another part of the MEV world, where searchers will find loans to liquidate and get a % of the liquidation fee. Read more about it here.
Again we see that there are several top liquidators making profits in the millions, and in excess of $10 Million in several cases. The number of liquidations themselves is markedly lower than in the case of arbitrages:
The majority of liquidations are occurring on Aave, with significant minorities on Compound V2 and Cream.
Some liquidations are very profitable - earning Millions in a single event.
Generally, miners make significantly more revenue from arbitrage - but in times of serious market volatility liquidations can take center stage:
Overall, MEV is very important. We’re excited to have this data live on Dune and are looking forward to see what Wizards do with it.
Check out the full dashboard for more.
Also, check out this dashboard by @niftytable which covers high level metrics, sandwich attacks, and more in detail!
DEX Activity on Polygon
This week @hildobby released a new dashboard covering DEX activity on Polygon which has some interesting insights.
Over the past month - volume has exceeded $4.3 Billion - and is recently hitting almost $1 Billion weekly.
Total volume is down from summer 2021 highs, but has been relatively consistent over the past 6 months:
With such a juicy market up for grabs, it’s no surprise that there’s a shifting competitive landscape.
Back in early-to-mid 2021, Quickswap and Sushiswap were the only real players.
Towards Q3 though others started to gain market share like Kyber, Balancer and Clipper.
At the end of the year though, a proposal was submitted to deploy Uniswap V3, which started to rapidly gain market share as soon as it went live, biting into the shares of both Quickswap and Sushi:
Over the past week, Uniswap took 54.7% of market share!
So Uniswap is crushing in terms of volume.
Quickswap maintains a strong lead in other metrics with 6x the weekly users, and more than double the weekly transactions.
Aggregators currently account for 17.1% of volume, dominated by 1inch trailed by Kyber.
An interesting dashboard, check it out.
$DAI
$DAI has been a crucial part of DeFi for years. The first of several algorithmic stablecoins, Dai is produced by the Maker Protocol by leveraging collateral assets.
Let’s look at a dashboard by @kdivic to find out more.
$DAI volume is huge, over the past 12 months almost reaching $1 Trillion:
And hitting $8.64 Billion over the past 7 days alone. Weekly transfer volume through 2022 so far has fluctuated in the $8 - 20 Billion range. This is down from massive highs in December when weekly volume hit a crazy $143 Billion.
Current supply is at $8.85 Billion!
Check out the full dashboard for more. To dive deeper into stablecoins in general, take a look at this dashboard by @hagaetc.
Polyflip
The low gas fees and speed of Ethereum scaling solutions has enabled interesting new use cases that would have been impractical previously.
One of these is on-chain gambling. An interesting one is Polyflip, a “decentralized casino” on Polygon - that @articoloquinto made a dashboard on recently.
Polyflip is interesting because it integrates NFTs, a DAO, and Chainlink VRF. Holders of Polyflip NFTs are “the house” and collect 75% of the platform profits in $MATIC while the remaining 25% goes to the platform.
Total volume is at 2,896,626 $MATIC, and there have been 4,689 unique players.
Since launching in late February, daily usage was steady before surging on April 12th.
In total, these on-chain gamblers have made 423,346 bets, with an average punt of 6.85 $MATIC.
The majority seem to play for fun, with 88.4% making bets in the 1-10 $MATIC range - and less than 5% of bets for more than 50.
There are three games: Coinflip, Crash and Roulette - with Coinflip as the consistently most popular.
There’s more interesting stats in this dashboard if you want to learn more about Polyflip - check it out!
OK Bears
OK Bears is a Solana-based NFT project featuring 10,000 bears “building a virtuous community”.
Many have noted impressive volume this week, and there has been a lot of interest on Twitter - as well as a dashboard by @brownboy!
The total number of sales is now at 13,739 - and total volume exceeds 345,000 $SOL ($33m +)!
Trading hit a high on Wednesday - and has held steady yesterday and today:
The all time highest sale is at 469 $SOL - that’s over $45,000 - and most recent sales are in the $12-18k range.
Most of this action is going down on MagicEden, the leading Solana NFT marketplace. OpenSea, only recently launched on the chain, is also seeing a significant minority of trading action.
It’s interesting to see a Solana NFT project take off like this - check out the full dashboard for more!
More Dashboards
As usual some more great dashboards this week. With Yuga Labs announcing the launch of the Otherside metaverse and a drop this weekend - we’ve seen a ton of related dashboards popping up which we’ve assembled here - check them out:
GN
Thanks for reading everyone. Enjoy the weekend - and we’ll see you again next week.
Special thanks to all the Wizards of the week 🧙
The data must flow.