GM
Welcome to issue #68 of Dune Digest
What an issue we have for you this week……
We’ve got data, dashboards and Wizardry galore - but first some Dune news!
Table Previews
We shipped table previews!
Now you’ll see an icon in the data explorer that allows any signed in user to preview raw tables, decoded tables and even spells!
This should be helpful for Wizard workflows!
Fuelling Gas Spells on Arbitrum
In-house data Wizard @soispoke has published the latest article in his gas series.
It focuses on Arbitrum, explaining the fee mechanism in great detail…..
Before teaching you how to create Arbitrum gas spells of your own!
If you’re interested in fee mechanisms or optimistic rollups, you should definitely check it out - along with the accompanying dashboard.
Wizard Takes
In an interesting thread and Substack piece, @sealaunch profile BAYC holders in depth [link]
@pandajackson42 explains Blur’s recent game changing move [link]
@crypthoem shares the Ultimate Dune Research Toolbox [link]
@hildobby looks at recent Ethereum gas trends [link]
@0xdatawolf explains his updated NFT business metrics dashboard [link]
@pandajackson42 dives deep into Jack Butcher’s Checks [link]
Now, let’s get into this week’s data!
Blur: No Platform for Wash Traders
Towards the end of last year gigawizard @hildobby published groundbreaking research on NFT wash trading.
He shocked the NFT world with his findings:
At it’s height in 2022, more than 80% of NFT volume was wash trading
Wash trading was 58% of all NFT trading volume for 2022
Only 1.5% of all trades were washes, but they drove for ~44% of all time volume
Wash trading isn’t a universal problem across platforms, some are much worse for it than others…… The two prime culprits are LooksRare and X2Y2:
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. While these two are almost completely dependent on wash trades for volume, note that only a (significant) minority of their total trades are washes - 25% for LooksRare and 22% for X2Y2.
With most platforms relatively unaffected, the top 5 were LooksRare, X2Y2, Element, Blur, and Sudoswap……
Notice Blur there - with only ~11% of volume from wash trades.
Blur has seen explosive growth in recent months, even overtaking OpenSea in weekly volume at times. It also has airdrops and a $BLUR token launch underway.
To the skeptical eye - this suggests that wash trading could be a larger part of the Blur story than the ~11% figure above suggests.
Indeed, several commentators and analysts expressed surprise and even doubt over the figures.
In a new article, @hildobby dives deep into Blur data to answer this question. His findings vindicate Blur, suggest that the original figures are accurate - and show that they’ve found a strong product market fit as well as executed a effective go-to-market strategy.
He gives 6 core arguments to Blur’s case…..
1. Wash trader %
@hildobby’s wash trading filters show that while ~11% of volume is from wash trading, this is only from 1.56% of trades:
“1.56% is in the same range as other marketplaces known for their organic activity, including CryptoPunks marketplace (1.45%), Gem (1.38%) and Foundation (1.83%)”
2. User Acquisition
@hildobby analysed 122.4k Blur users and classified them into 4 categories.
“62.9% of users are came from OpenSea and 3% from Gem. Both of those marketplaces are known for their organic usage and negligible wash trading. It’s also worth noting that 22.2% of Blur users are completely new to the NFT market.”
This again strongly suggests organic user acquisition and a successful launch.
3. User numbers
Blur has had a ton of users, topped only by OpenSea and Gem.
“With a recent high of around 52.9k weekly users, X2Y2’s high of 14.2k and LooksRare’s high of 9.1k pale in comparison. Only real organic usage and product market fit would reach such high numbers”
4. Incentives =/= activity
Blur’s airdrop is being rolled out in three phases. It incentivised listings up until December 12th, then switched to bidding.
“In a great sign for organic activity: not only did listing activity remain steady since December 12th, it actually grew. This activity has no inorganic incentive and until proven otherwise should be considered organic usage”
The same can be said for royalty fees, which had little effect on volume after being introduced.
5. Different patterns
Wash trading hubs like LooksRare & X2Y2 see huge spikes in volume followed by complete droughts.
On the other hand Blur’s volume shows a consistent pattern.
“Blur’s hourly volume is what you’d expect from a healthy protocol with organic activity and a diverse user base”
With the upcoming $BLUR airdrop, it’s clear that Blur took specific steps to incentivise liquidity and organic usage….. but not wash trading.
@hildobby’s analysis confirms that ~90% of Blur’s usage is indeed organic, and the wash trading that does occur on the platform is not related to incentive mechanisms.
“After looking into Blur’s data through many angles and comparing it to other marketplaces, all signs point towards high organic activity being a direct result of a product that people enjoy using”
Perhaps they learned from previous platforms’ mistakes. Either way, Blur’s success is undeniable and the upcoming airdrop will be an important event to watch and analyse.
$USDC vs Treasury Yields
Though Tether was traditionally the boss of centralised, fiat-collateralised stablecoins - over the past couple years Circle’s $USDC has risen to prominence.
It now has ~43% of the entire market!
A new dashboard by @cryptuschrist tracks some fascinating stats, let’s take a look.
The first query compares the circulating $USDC supply vs the 1 yr US Treasury yield. We can see that in mid-2020 - total supply was a little under $1 billion while treasure yields were at 0.2%.
From early 2021 supply started to rocket up - exceeding $47B by early 2022. Yield rates followed an almost identical trajectory, just delayed by one year:
There are almost 1.2 million holders - the vast majority of which are user wallets as opposed to contracts.
When we look at the amounts held though, it’s a little more even, with approximately 1/3 of $USDC held in contracts:
The largest contract holders are familiar names.
More than $2.1 Billion is held by MakerDAO’s peg stability module, almost $900m is in Polygon’s ERC-20 bridge, and hundreds of millions more are held in a variety of bridges, treasuries and pools:
Through early 2021 $USDC onboarded almost 1 million new users.
This slowed down through 2022 and even reversed for a couple of months - but the overall trend is still healthy:
There’s a lot more in this dashboard, including a useful filtering feature to investigate individual transactions - some of which are huge.
So what are the takeaways?
According to the Wizard himself:
“I started with the theory that increased US treasury yields could be correlated with the total supply of USDC. However the research has left me with more questions than answers”
To investigate for yourself - Check out the full dashboard!
Ondo Finance
Ondo is another DeFi platform bridging the gap between crypto and “real world” assets by developing tokenized investment funds.
They’ve launched three products:
$OUSG will invest in short-term US Treasuries and earn 4.2%
$OSTB will invest in short-term corporate bonds and earn 5.45%
$OYHG will invest in high-yield corporate bonds and earn 8%
These funds will process daily subscriptions and redemptions in stablecoins, with investors receiving ERC-20 tokens representing their ownership.
@steakhouse put out an interesting dashboard tracking things. Over $28 million of total value has been minted so far:
So far only $OUSG is live, and the market cap has been growing in large jumps since launch:
Many see tokenised ETFs as a major piece of the long term crypto vision, and appealing to many investors looking to earn relatively low risk yield on idle stablecoins.
Ondo and its sister project Flux Finance will be important platforms to watch these trends playing out - check out the full dashboard for more.
Nexus Mutual
Nexus Mutual is crypto-native insurance on Ethereum.
The protocol offers users a way to protect themselves against the various risks of interacting with DeFi protocols, custodians, and yield tokens.
Soon, Nexus V2 is launching - bringing a host of new features for staking, claims, and more. Let’s take a look inside Nexus through a recent dashboard by OG Wizard @rchen8…..
The total active cover amount is huge - almost $170 Million:
It’s way down from its peak though.
Back in mid-2021 at the height of the bull market it crossed $1 billion - before steadily declining through 2022:
A portion of premiums paid are distributed to $NMX stakers, who can also participate in governance and assess claims submitted by others.
Over $23 million worth of premiums have been paid in total:
As with most insurance businesses, premiums earned exceeded claims paid out for 90% of months.
Exceptions were May 2022 with a deficit of ~$4m, and November with $650k:
The worst month was May ‘22, not because of the market crash, but because of a major hack of Rari Capital’s Fuse platform. Over $90m was stolen in total.
We can see that over $5m was paid in claims directly related to this attack.
Nexus was a great addition to DeFi infrastructure, and allowed thousands of users to manage their risk better while keeping things decentralized.
With the launch of V2 we expect to see more interesting dashboards and analyses. For much more data, check out @rchen8’s full dashboard!
Türkiye Donations
As you have probably heard, this week saw Türkiye, Syria and other countries in the region hit with devastating earthquakes leading to a humanitarian disaster.
According to a new dashboard by @davy42, the crypto community have been doing what they can to help out, donating almost $5 Million so far to NGOs providing aid and help:
Donations have been coming in steadily throughout the week, and there have now been more than 9.5k individual contributions so far:
@davy42 commented:
“Thanks for your support! If you wanna help you can find information at https://turkey-relief-dao.vercel.app"
We’re glad to see community members donating to a good cause - check out the full dashboard for more.
More Dashboards
GN
Thanks for reading - and special thanks to all Wizards for their epic contributions this week.
See you next time for more Data, Dashboards & Wizardry.
In the meantime, as always……