GM
Welcome to Issue #29 of Dune Digest!
Well, it has been a dramatic week in crypto markets to say the least.
A Dune Wizard named @mhonksasalo wrote an excellent article investigating events, using several dashboards to help understand the Terra / $UST implosion. It’s a great piece that helps explain part of what happened.
We also recorded a podcast interview with the legendary Dune Wizard Andrew Hong from Mirror.xyz. We talk data, Web3 education, and how crypto can disrupt Medium and Substack. A great and knowledgeable guest - check it out.
Finally, a new set of BOUNTIES are out for Raydium. If you’re looking to earn an extra 3000 $USDC check them out and jump in.
Perpetuals are Big on Optimism
Smart contract implementations of perpetual derivatives are complex with specific requirements, making them somewhat impractical on networks like Ethereum.
On fast and low cost L2s like Optimism though, things are a lot more promising.
@rplust made a dashboard this week covering perpetual trading on Optimism, and the three main protocols - Perpetual, Synthetix & Pika.
Overall perpetual trading activity is significant:
21,045 total traders
2,477,954 total swaps
$10.5 Billion total volume
Perpetual Protocol has had the most total traders at almost 12k, followed by Pika at 8.1k and Synthetix at 2.26.
When it comes to trading volume, Perpetual is super dominant with around 6x the volume of the other 2 combined:
When it comes to total trades it’s even more stark - with 2.4 Million total trades compared to 57k and 16.5k on Pika and Synthetix respectively.
Perpetual Protocol’s original home was the xDAI chain since 2020, but it launched on Optimism in late November 2021.
Since then it swallowed up the market share of incumbent Pika, with Synthetix making some inroads in terms of volume:
When it comes to traders - things are more equal.
Though Perpetual has generally lead - Pika moved to position #1 on several occasions over the past few weeks as overall perpetual activity boomed:
The last few days have seen all time highs in volume. It makes sense - in times of volatility and turbulence, speculative assets like perpetuals see increased interest.
Over the past 24 hours, there was $262 Million worth of volume and 92,681 total swaps. Wednesday was even higher - cracking $310 Million. What was it all about?
A cool thing about this dashboard is that it tells you the total trading volume per asset and what positions traders took. For example - over the past week the most shorted assets have been:
$ETH - $102.5m
$LUNA - $53.1m
$BTC - $35.3m
In 2022 perpetuals on optimism became much more interesting. In January you could only really speculate on $BTC, $ETH, $LINK and $SNX.
Since February though the possibilities have opened right up - with 20+ assets ready to short/long!
Overall - Perpetual is the clear market leader. Pika has an established position and seems to be used more by smaller traders. Synthetix is carving out its own niche.
All three have benefitted significantly from the development and scaling of L2s like Optimism, and we expect to see more innovation in this field in the future. Check out the full dashboard for more.
State of Ethereum
When there’s a lot of FUD about it’s good to take a step back and see how far the crypto space has come.
A new dashboard by @agaperste - State of Ethereum Network Quarterly Report - helps us to do just that.
Let’s take a look at Ethereum’s performance in Q1 of this year. Firstly, revenue.
Ethereum is a big earner - generating 834,874 $ETH or $1.61 Billion in network revenue in Q1. This is down almost $400m from Q4 of 2021 though!
Since the London Upgrade in 2021, the tokenomics have changed and the protocol now burns $ETH with transactions.
In Q1 728,729 $ETH was burned:
Making for a Net Emission of 404,657 $ETH…….
While you wouldn’t quite call Ethereum “mainstream” yet, a lot of people use the network every day.
In Q1, Ethereum averaged 392,901 daily active addresses. This is down somewhat from the peak of the bull market in Q2 of 2021 - when there were 426,519 average daily active addresses.
Still, users grew through the quarter - crossing the half million daily mark several times in March:
How about builders? In Q1, there were 1.44 Million new smart contracts. This is significantly down from the high in Q2 of last year, when there were almost 6 Million. Still, the number is in line with the average over the past 18 months.
There were an impressive 105,580,971 Transactions. The transaction king for the Quarter was OpenSea, followed by Tether and Uniswap V3. Check out the top 10:
Overall, there is little evidence of extreme growth since the beginning of 2021 - perhaps due to users and capital experimenting with alternative L1s. But Ethereum is a beast that keeps ticking along and this is the best dashboard for tracking it.
Optimism After Bridge
Optimism is well loved for its fast transactions and low fees. But what do people actually use it for?
A new dashboard by @Marcov - Optimism After Bridge - tracks where funds flow after bridging to Optimism through the HOP or Standard Optimism Bridge.
Bridge transactions grew significantly in late April after being steady from early February:
Over the past few months, most users bridged to Optimism for a trade. We can see that Uniswap V3 is the key first stop after bridging for most of that period.
Over the past few weeks though Quixotic, Hashflow and Slingshot all became more popular:
A pretty cool dashboard - check it out for much more data on Optimism after bridge activity!
Lil Nouns
Lil Nouns are “younger” versions of the pixel-art style Nouns NFT collection.
Unlike usual collection drops - a Lil Noun is generated and minted every 15 minutes through a unique mechanism that will continue forever.
Lil Nouns went live on Wednesday - and 103 have now been minted. A dashboard by @sealaunch tells us more.
Lil Nouns are sold in a continuous auction as they’re minted through the day. Over the past few days, they’ve mostly gone for 0.2 - 2.2 $ETH, with one going for a whopping 14 $ETH (for #69).
100% of Lil Noun auction proceeds go to the Lil Nouns treasury - which is already sitting at 58.94 $ETH.
Most auctions have only 3 - 9 unique bidders, so Lil Nouns could have a lot of room for growth. Check out the full dashboard here, and another from @ilemi here.
Syndicate Investment Club
Syndicate is a venture-backed DAO services startup that earlier this year launched “Web3 investment clubs” - tooling that allowed users to spin up DAOs of up to 99 people to pool capital and vote on where to invest it.
@gm365 built a dashboard showing that there are currently 540 total clubs with 2,208 investors.
New investors were slow but steady over the past few months, but hit a high last week:
daily users also peaked. So far, $1427 $ETH has been invested.
It’s interesting to see some of the ideas that come out of the popular “DAO tooling” sphere. Will Syndicate clubs make it big?
Check out the full dashboard and decide.
More Dashboards
GN
Thanks for reading, we hope you have an enjoyable weekend whether you’re planning to relax or go wild. See you next week for more data, dashboards and Wizardry.