GM
Welcome to Issue #42 of Dune Digest!
We have some juicy data for you this week. First though a few pieces of news.
Arbitrum & Avalanche Decoding
You can now submit contracts for decoding for Arbitrum & Avalanche! We’re excited to explore these two ecosystems further….. submit here.
Dune Arcana
We’re launching Dune Arcana. Every 2 weeks, our in-house Wizards @agaperste and @0xBoxer are going to be running live sessions teaching you all their Dune tips and tricks.
We’re going to teach Dune analysis concepts through exploring current events & trends in the crypto world. It’s going to be great!
Join us for our first session next Thursday at 14:00 UTC (we’ll tweet the link early next week).
DuneCon
Places are filling up for DuneCon, just a month to go now!
You can still join us though on the 15th September in Berlin for a day of learning, connecting and fun (and a cool afterparty).
We’ve announced some amazing speakers so far - check them out.
Tornado Cash
Transactions on blockchains like Ethereum are public by default. This presents a privacy issue in the minds of some.
One of the most prominent privacy protocols to spring up was Tornado Cash.
Tornado Cash is a “mixer”. At a high level it works by breaking the cryptographic link between deposits and withdrawals. The contract allows users to deposit $ETH or ERC-20 assets, then withdraw to a new address.
There’s no (easy) way to link the withdrawal to the original deposit.
Tornado Cash was created in 2019, heavily inspired by open-source research by the team behind Zcash.
A dashboard by @poma shows that it has been a very popular protocol since - with millions of $ETH worth Billions of $ deposited:
There have been 12.24k unique depositing wallets - and 59.1k unique withdrawing wallets. In total, there have been 150.7k deposits.
This racked up over $18.2 Million in fees. But how to pay fees while remaining anonymous? This was a tricky problem solved with relayers.
A relayer acts as a third party handling withdrawals, paying gas fees from the withdrawal amount and taking a fee for their services. We can see that more than 80% of withdrawals used a relayer:
Tornado Cash didn’t do much until Q3 of 2020, then really started to boom in 2021 through to mid 2022, regularly hitting $100m+ daily in withdrawals and deposits:
The amount of $ETH in the pool was close to ATHs just last weekend at 225.7k.
Something happened this week though, and now there’s 35k less.
The US Office of Foreign Assets Control is responsible for economic sanctions against international terrorists, criminals and individuals generally deemed to be hostile/enemies.
They have a list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN). If you’re on it, you’re basically screwed if you want to do business in America or with Americans.
On Monday, Tornado Cash and all Ethereum addresses associated with it were added to the list.
This means that it became immediately illegal for US persons to withdraw from Tornado or to exchange tokens which were in Tornado. This is serious stuff, the US Government considers its sanctions program an extremely grave matter.
So, what’s the fall out so far?
Firstly according to analysis by @iguana - 871 wallets have withdrawn from Tornado Cash since sanctions were imposed. Most withdrawals were 1-10 $ETH but many there were many 100Ξ + withdrawals too.
In fact, according to @Marcov’s query, this week has seen the largest outflow of $ETH in Tornado’s history with over $71 Million’s worth withdrawn:
Other tokens also saw large candles, check out @Marcov’s full dashboard for more.
Was it Americans pulling their funds out (illegally) or non-Americans panicking and trying to get out while they can?
Either way, there’s still 189kΞ in Tornado and as well as Millions of $ worth of other tokens.
Another consequence - Circle blocked the $USDC in wallets associated with Tornado. That’s right, centralized stablecoins can block your funds just as easily as your bank can!
Although we’re less than 2 weeks into August we’ve seen by far the most banned $USDC addresses than any month in the past 2 years - 38 in total according to this query by @k06a:
There’s 74.9k $USDC stuck in Tornado!
Another strange thing happened….. After the sanctions were announced, any addresses that interact with sanctioned ones are in violation. This lead to the “salting” of people’s wallets by withdrawing small amounts of $ETH to them from Tornado.
Anybody can do this anonymously to a doxxed wallet, perhaps of somebody they don’t like or just as a “joke”. It can be serious though, since sanctions are generally strictly enforced regardless of intent.
There’s a dashboard here by @lewi showing salted addresses - showing some well-known figures that appear to have been victims like Anthony Sassano and Ryan Sean Adams.
Some characters seem to have been quite committed to this:
We hope there are no negative ramifications for those who had their wallets salted through no fault of their own.
All in all, this was a big move by the US Government to crack down on what they see as a pure money laundering tool but others see as simply a privacy technology.
It will be interesting to watch how the consequences play out, and what precedent it will set for the new generation of crypto privacy applications that are emerging!
Check out the key dashboards:
Element NFT Marketplace
Element is an Asia-focused NFT marketplace with some interesting characteristics.
They bill themselves as a “three-in-one NFT platform” - allowing users to mint, discover and exchange NFTs.
Team @sixdegree released a dashboard this week examining the platform…..
So far - 12.8k unique users have made 83.5k trades. Trade volume has exceeded $35 Million:
The majority of that volume is from Ethereum at $22.6m, with an additional $1.8m from Ethereum aggregators.
Element is multichain though, and a further $10.18m comes from BNB and $890k from Avalanche.
It has been a rough few months for most NFT platforms, but Element has seen volume shoot up over the past month:
Though Ethereum accounts for the most volume, when it comes to trades we see a different picture.
Out of the 83.5k total trades, almost 60k have been on BNB.
This appears to be because Ethereum trades didn’t begin until the second week of July. Things have been more evenly split over the past month:
In terms of new users, recently the majority have come from Ethereum and Ethereum aggregators - but a healthy amount are still coming in from BNB.
An interesting new NFT Marketplace that seems to be getting some traction. Check out the full dashboard for more!
Radiant
Radiant Capital is a booming Omnichain lending protocol which recently launched on Arbitrum.
Radiant has a similar model to platforms like Compound or Aave, but seeks to be completely multichain - so users can deposit collateral on one chain and borrow across another or multiple chains.
@shogun has given us a neat dashboard, let’s see what Radiant has been doing so far……
Firstly, things have been off to a great start.
Less than 3 weeks after launch Radiant is already the #2 protocol on Arbitrum by TVL, growing by more than 55% over the past week alone!
Current reserve markets are as follows:
$USDC - $208.79m
$USDT - $158.85m
$DAI - $127.06m
$wETH - $73.69m
$wBTC - $23.08m
After an initial surge and dip, total borrow value has been growing nicely over the past week and now exceeds $300m:
V1 launched on Arbitrum, but the plan seems to be to use Stargate’s tech to go completely omnichain in future iterations. If their track record so far is anything to go by, they could become an important player!
Check out @shogun’s full dash for lots, lots more data.
CrudeBorne
We’ve been quite DeFi focused in Dune Digest recently and haven’t covered many individual NFT projects.
So let’s take a quick look at CrudeBorne Eggs through a dashboard by @duck.
Launching last week with a free mint, this 10k egg collection has already done 568 $ETH in volume - with over 152Ξ on the first day:
2,410 wallets hold an average of 4 - and the top sale so far is a pretty significant 4.04Ξ.
The project is still keeping up steam, with 670 sales and 58Ξ in volume over the past 24 hours!
Floor is also rising nicely:
It’s good to see that despite some of the dooming in the NFT market there are still random projects popping up and generating some buzz!
Check out the full dashboard for more….
Solana Extra Fees
Recently Solana introduced “fee-based execution priority”, allowing users to pay a higher fee to get priority in a block.
How many have been opting for it? Thanks to a new dashboard by @crypto_notte, we can find out.
The feature was fairly slow to start off, but soon got going, hitting 5% of total transactions in late July:
We wonder if this trend will grow on a chain known for its fast transactions and low fees!
Check out the full dashboard for more.
More Dashboards
GN
Thanks for reading friends, and thanks to all the Wizards featured this week for their amazing work.
See you again next Friday. Enjoy your weekend.
One last reminder - come and join us for DuneCon!
The data must flow……….