GM
Welcome to issue #60 of Dune Digest.
Before we get into this week’s datafest, let’s catch up on some Dune news.
Fantom
We’re excited to announce that Fantom data is now live on Dune v2
Fantom is an ultra-fast L1 chain, with a lively ecosystem of apps and protocols.
Now Wizards can explore Fantom through 7 new tables and share their findings with the crypto world!
Read on for some Fantom data in this week’s issue…..
Dune’s vision
Bear markets and rough macro environments are a good time to take stock of what matters, and think about the long-term vision.
This week Dune’s CEO Fredrik published an essay on Dune’s long term vision - to empower the curious, through data.
What do things look like if Dune succeeds?
“The world has a collective homepage for understanding on-chain activity. Instead of falling prey to dubious narratives and hype, the curious can check the chain and make informed decisions based on hard data. We want to give anyone with an internet connection better access to data than the big tech engineers and hedge fund managers of the legacy world could have ever dreamt of”
Check out Fredrik’s thread, and read about the big vision in the article!
Gas spells part 2
On Tuesday in-house data Wizard @soispoke published part 2 of his Fuelling Gas Spells on Dune v2 series.
Part 1 kicked off the series by looking at gas mechanisms on major L1 chains like Ethereum, BNB & Avalanche.
Part 2 is a deep dive into Optimism, how the network functions, and how to understand its gas mechanisms.
If you’re curious about Optimism or want to cast gas spells of your own - you should check it out.
Now, let’s get into the data…….
NFT Wash Trading
When it comes to crypto data, things aren’t always as they seem.
Figures are often thrown around that are misleading at best, and it takes the trained eye of a Wizard to see through to the truth.
There’s no better example than NFT marketplace volume.
In an amazing new article, @hildobby takes aim at wash traders, and uncovers some troubling truths.
Let’s take a look through his new dashboard………
Firstly, what is wash trading?
Wash trading has a long history in traditional markets. It’s a form of market manipulation where traders create fake transactions to gain some kind of advantage.
According to @hildobby:
“Back in 1936 the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) was enacted in the USA. It provided federal regulation of all commodities and futures trading, and also officially made wash trading illegal. Fast forward to today - and cryptocurrencies and NFTs still sit outside of the remit of the CEA”
Wash trading is also nothing new to crypto.
In 2019, Bitwise explained to the SEC that out of $6 Billion in $BTC spot volume reported on CoinMarketCap - 95% was fake………
Now let’s circle back to NFTs.
According to @hildobby, NFT wash trading typically involves:
“Trading your own NFTs between two wallets you control for the highest amount of ETH possible. The goal is to accrue token rewards with a value in excess of the gas fees you pay”
@hildobby outlines an ingenious new method for detecting wash trades in Dune analyses.
It comprises 4 new filters that flag for all the dead giveaways, and they’re open-source and free for all Wizards to use!
When the filters are applied, we get some shocking figures…….
Historically, only 1.49% of all individual trades have been wash trades. This peaked in late 2018, and has never exceeded 10% of weekly trades in 2022:
When we get to volume though, it’s an entirely different story.
$30 Billion of historical NFT trade volume on Ethereum has been wash trades. That’s almost 45% of the total:
Wash trading volume absolutely exploded at the beginning of 2022.
In early January it accounted for ~80% of the total at one point, and it has consistently been a large slice of the total since:
NFT wash trading seems to be inextricably linked to marketplaces which incentivise trading through token rewards…..
Which ones, specifically?
The vast majority of wash trading volume comes from LooksRare and X2Y2.
These two platforms are wash trade central - with 98% and 87% of their respective volumes driven by the activity.
It’s a similar story on Element and Sudoswap, although not as extreme.
On Element, 66%+ of volume and 18.5% of trades are washes, and on SudoSwap it’s 11% of volume and 14.5% of total trades.
Newcomer Blur has almost 8% of volume washed, while market leader OpenSea sees only 2.4%.
On these platforms, which do not offer obvious token rewards, the motivation of wash traders is likely to be gaming the algorithms to make certain collections appear higher in rankings.
So, to sum things up, wash trading on Ethereum is massive, particularly on platforms which offer token rewards for trading.
The “huge” volume of certain marketplaces is a complete mirage.
This distorts key metrics used by analysts to compare different marketplaces, and can mislead the wider crypto public.
Going forward we should keep this in mind, be suspicious of token incentive schemes, and use @hildobby’s excellent set of filters to cut through to the truth.
Check out the full dashboard, and read the full article with far more depth (and all the filters) on our blog…….
Fantom
Fantom is known as a particularly fast and scalable L1 chain that currently hosts a range of decentralized apps.
Dune wizards can now explore them - along with the entire ecosystem!
Team put out an excellent dashboard tracking high-level Fantom stats, let’s check it out……
As we said, Fantom is known for speed.
It processes a block every 2 seconds, and its total block count has exceeded 52 million:
Fantom is a relatively new chain.
It didn’t see significant usage or transaction volume until mid 2021, but saw massive growth over the past 15 months:
Since then, Fantom has processed almost 430m transactions for 4.77m users.
Fantom’s native token $FTM also went on a tear in late 2021, rising several 100x before dropping just as sharply as 2022 dawned.
The price of $FTM hasn’t been doing anything particularly interesting since Summer, but some other key metrics have been trending up.
Active & new users had been steadily dropping through 2022.
In late October though, there was a massive spike in users, coinciding with some high profile announcements and launches:
Contract creation has also been trending up dramatically.
Almost 23m contracts have been created in total, the large majority of those over the past couple of months:
Fantom seems poised to become an important L1, and we’re excited to have them live on Dune for Wizards to analyse.
The first Fantom contracts were decoded over the past couple of days, so we’ll be able to peek further under the hood in the coming weeks.
For now, check out the full dashboard for more - and take a look at this one by @bravenoob21 that covers Fantom Gitcoin grants!
Punks
@cat made a great new dashboard this week focused on CryptoPunks.
It goes into more detail on the legendary collection than any we’ve seen before.
Because of CryptoPunks’ OG status, they predate the ERC-721 token standard and have their own marketplace. Let’s see what has been going on there…….
Through their history, CryptoPunks have seen an incredible total sales volume of over $2.4 Billion:
The highest ever sale was a crazy 8000 $ETH - over $23.7m - but these days the floor price is down to “only” 63.7 $ETH…..
Speaking of the floor, it absolutely ripped in 2021, rising 10x through late summer.
It dropped in both $ETH and dollar terms through late 2021 and early 2022, but has remained relatively stable for the past 5 months:
Since these highs 18 months ago, the number of listed Punks has been steadily declining. Today there are ~1k listed, down from 1700 at the 2021 peaks:
On the other hand, unique collectors have been steadily growing - and are now at 3.66k!
Punks are the most lindy NFT collection out there, so we’re confident that they have an interesting future ahead.
For far more context, check out @cat’s Twitter thread, and dive into the full dashboard for much more data…….
Trump Cards
In news that nobody was waiting for, Donald Trump this week announced the launch of his own NFT collection.
The digital trading cards feature the former president in a variety of poses and costumes, often with a superhero theme.
The announcement was met with widespread disbelief, dismay and mockery.
Dune Wizards were there to give us the cold data as always though.
Let’s see how the collection has been doing through a dashboard by @springzhang.
Starting yesterday, thousands were minted in the first few hours with users paying $99 per mint.
The entire collection of 45k has now sold out, with almost 13k wallets minting an average of 3.5 each:
All this has driven over $4.35m in revenue…..
The secondary market is already hot.
Trump cards have been traded over 10 thousand times, with total volume topping $1.58m:
Over 18% of the entire collection have already been traded for an average of $151.5.
Some are going for a lot more though, with a top sale of over $7.6k!
This whole story is a little surreal, but it can’t be denied that it was a successful launch.
From Reddit NFTs to Trump trading cards, Polygon really seems to be the place for more experimental NFT projects.
For more, check out the full dashboard by @springzhang……
APE Staking
Earlier this year the APE token launched and was airdropped to holders of Bored Apes and adjacent collections.
ApeCoin in general is covered very nicely in this dashboard by @Marcov.
Recently, ApeCoin staking officially went live. Let’s take a look at how things are going through a great new dashboard by @thedatanerd…..
81 million APE is now staked, worth a shade under $300m.
Staking peaked on Monday with 18m staked - with the total growing more slowly throughout the week.
A lot of big players have been staking.
The ApeCoin foundation themselves have staked almost $47m worth, and Binance is in on the action too:
It’s not all rosy though. APE has been heavily dumped this week on DEXes, and this afternoon has seen record reward claims.
To learn more check out this detailed dashboard by @philosophia_ventures and this overview by
.And of course - check out the full dashboard by @thedatanerd…….
More Dashboards
GN
Thank you for reading this issue of Dune Digest.
We hope you enjoyed it, and have a great weekend.
As always a special thanks to all the Wizards for your amazing contributions to crypto data through yet another week.
See you again next Friday.