GM
Welcome to another issue of Dune Digest.
We have plenty of data for you this week. Plenty and plenty.
Before we get into it - some Dune news…..
Labels Hackathon
We’ve reorganised labels to make them easier than ever before to contribute to.
Now, we’re hosting a mini-hackathon to see how creative you can be making new ones - and there’s $1500 USDC and some swag up for grabs!
This is a great opportunity to contribute, earn some prizes, and help improve Dune for everyone.
Read the full details in this page, and this thread.
Traces & Logs
We just made traces_decoded & logs_decoded views public for all EVM chains!
Go take a look next to the raw tables!
Community Takes
@hildobby on NFT Royalties & Fees [link]
@sealaunch explains the unique burning mechanism of Checks VV Originals [link]
@twindoges outlines a degen trading strategy based on a @defimochi dashboard [link]
Now, let’s get into the data…..
Airdrops, Blur, and Wash Trading
Last week a very detailed dashboard dropped, by one of the best on-chain sleuths in the game - @jhackworth.
The dashboard investigates a key question:
“At the beginning of 2022, OpenSea had a market share of around 95%. Following the launch of LooksRare, this dropped to 25-35% (Higher excluding wash trading). Within less than 2 months, Blur became the leading marketplaces in terms of volume. Most of this volume was driven by the $BLUR airdrop. OpenSea still has 6 times as many users and traders in a given week than Blur. So what is happening here?”
What indeed? Let’s find out…..
The first question - how valuable is the average user to these platforms? As it turns out, not very.
On OpenSea - 75% of users have done <1.4k in volume, generating just ~$34 or below in platform fees. The 99th percentile have each generated $37.15k of volume, and ~$1k in platform fees.
It’s a similar story on other platforms. There’s a real power law in effect. Everyone wants those top traders…….
In early 2022, LooksRare & X2Y2 made a move for them. LooksRare was first with an airdrop that targeted over 124k OpenSea users with 3+ $ETH in volume.
67% claimed, and there was much hype around the drop.
A month or so later, X2Y2 pulled off a similar launch, airdropping their token to anybody who’d traded an NFT on OpenSea previously. The airdrop was less initially “successful”, with only 23% of tokens claimed.
How did this turn out for them? Did they succeed in sucking valuable users away from OpenSea?
Like many airdrops, the results were a mixed bag.
For starters, the majority of recipients (of both drops), just dumped the tokens. With $LOOKS, ~60% dumped immediately. With $X2Y2 it was a crazy 86%.
And that’s with lucrative staking rewards for both tokens!
So as with most airdrops, the majority didn’t care and immediately dumped the token. How about the ones who held though? Did they convert to loyal users?
When it comes to LooksRare, only 24% of recipients - ~30k wallets - actually bought an NFT on the platform. They rapidly churned, with less than 10% of wallets still active 4 months on:
The figures were slightly better for X2Y2, but a similar pattern ultimately played out.
It’s not all negative though.
Airdroppers still drive a decent (though declining) share of weekly volume on LooksRare at ~10%, and are ~20% of unique buyers on a given day:
As usual, it’s a similar story for X2Y2……
With all this in mind, what can we say about the latest big marketplace NFT drop - $BLUR? Did it succeed?
@jhackworth has some interesting conclusions. For a start, almost 80% of recipients dumped:
Even out of those who dumped though, 38% have been active on the platform since the drop. Of those who sold some, or most, of their tokens - over 60% have been active on Blur since…..
So far, it’s early to say how successful Blur’s drop was, but the signs point to some traction and continued interest by recipients.
Worse still, it’s clear that top traders engaged in wash trading to maximise their rewards. According to @jhackworth:
“The top 5 traders had a wash volume % of their total volume at 37%, and the majority of the top traders participated in some form of wash trading. Even notable wallets that claimed millions of dollars worth of $BLUR, had 25%+ of their volume on Blur marked as wash trades. Wallets with 90% or higher wash trading claimed substantial rewards of $100k or more in $BLUR”
This calls Blur’s incredible recent volume and dominance over OpenSea into question, considering a lot of whale traders have clearly been gaming the system and there are more airdrops to come…..
So just like with DEXes, the usefulness and effectiveness of airdrops for NFT marketplaces is questionable. Most users still dump the token, and it doesn’t seem to have much impact on their long term loyalty.
Though Blur does seem to have improved on this with its concurrent airdrop model, it’s too early to say how successful this will be in the long run, and how much organic usage will remain long after the drop……
For much, much more analysis - check out this awesome article written by the Wizard himself.
And of course, check out the full dashboard for far more data…..
Ordinals
One month ago when we first covered Ordinals, the new breed of Bitcoin native NFTs, many thought they were just the fad of the day.
Since then though, they’ve seen serious traction. This week Yuga Labs, owners of BAYC and CryptoPunks, even announced their first 300 piece Ordinal collection!
Let’s check in on the Ordinals data with a recent dashboard by @dgtl_assets…..
The total number of Ordinal inscriptions passed 200k this week, and now sits at over 230k:
This has driven almost 60 $BTC - or $1.34M - in fees!
Fees themselves peaked in mid February and have dipped since. Inscriptions themselves dipped at the same time, but have come roaring back over the past week:
Unlike on Ethereum, where NFTs typically require off-chain data storage, Ordinals are inscribed directly onto a single satoshi.
A large range of different file types have been inscribed so far. The most popular are images and text:
But we can also see audio, video, and even applications!
People are certainly having fun with it - could these early Bitcoin NFTs be the future blue chips?
For more, check out the full dashboard.
AttestationStation
Optimism recently released a very interesting smart contract called the AttestationStation.
According to Optimism:
“The goal of the AttestationStation is to provide a permissionless and accessible data source for builders creating reputation-based applications. By enabling anyone to make arbitrary attestations about other addresses, we can create a rich library of qualitative and quantitative data that can be used across the ecosystem”
An attestation is essentially a statement made by a creator about a subject.
Once a rich enough web has developed, Optimism believes the system can be used to create sybil-resistant identities capable of powering tricky applications like decentralized credit scoring and undercollateralized loans.
A new dashboard by @oplabspbc dives into the data, let’s take a look.
So far, over half a million attestations have been made:
This is all from just 468 attestors, so the average activity is high.
Indeed, this has been 1.4% of all transactions for the past 7 days.
Attestations actually peaked in mid-January, before slowing to a crawl through most of February. Over the past week or so though, they’ve started to pick up again:
Which kind of organisations are using the protocol so far?
Clique is an interesting platform attempting to bring web2 social behaviour on-chain. They’ve accounted for ~90%+ of attestations so far, for over 67k addresses.
The majority of their attestations so far have concerned the Twitter and Discord activity of addresses.
It will be interesting to see what Clique and other reputation platforms build with AttestationStation. We can imagine some cool use cases emerging over time.
It’s still early days, and you can check out the full dashboard for much more……
$USDC Money Printer
Circle’s $USDC is now the largest stablecoin on Ethereum by market cap.
@stablecamel recently released an interesting dashboard covering this important token - let’s take a look at the highlights…..
The $USDC supply overtook USD 0.00%↑ T in early 2022, and peaked at ~$48 Billion almost exactly one year ago.
Though it dropped through the rest of the year, it remained higher than any point pre-2022:
$USDC supply is currently at ~$40 billion. But where is it specifically?
Only around $2B is deployed in liquidity & lending pools, down from over $6B one year ago:
More specifically, $USDC liquidity in DEX pools peaked at the end of 2021 at almost $4B.
After May 2022’s market crash, liquidity on Curve dropped rapidly and never recovered, while a similar story played out on Balancer.
The only place where $USDC stuck around even somewhat consistently was Uniswap:
When we look at lending protocols, we can see that $USDC liquidity peaked way back in Summer 2021 before dropping later that year.
The two largest platforms by far are Aave & Compound, which held steady through most of 2022. Since last October though, we can see a noticeable drop on both these platforms:
CEXes follow a relatively similar pattern - peaking in late Q1 ‘22 at almost $5 Billion and slightly dropping since. Right now total CEX balances are at $4.3B, not far off the peak.
Particularly large balances can still be seen on Binance & Crypto.com:
An interesting dashboard covering this important token. To learn more - check it out!
Bitcoin Security Budget
Bitcoin’s security budget is an extremely important, and contentious, topic.
Basically - the higher the budget, the more secure the network. All that hash power must be paid for, by both fees and block rewards, for it to remain the unbreakable honey badger of networks.
@niftytable released an insightful dashboard this week on the topic - let’s look at the highlights…..
First of all, when we look at $BTC terms, the monthly security budget has been sliding since 2010.
This is because of the halvening - an event which occurs roughly every 4 years and cuts the block reward in half.
Satoshi knew that eventually, the unit price of bitcoin would have to be very high, and/or there would need to be a significant demand for block space and willingness to pay fees in order to pay for security.
This has somewhat played out, at least when it comes to the price of $BTC.
We can see that the security budget, in $ terms, steadily rose right through to the beginning of 2022:
This is directly tied to the price of $BTC, which also peaked in late 2021 at over $65k.
When it comes to security budget, transaction fees are still a drop in the ocean compared to the block reward itself.
As the block reward is progressively slashed, we’ll need either a sky-high, Sayloresque $BTC price or increased block space demand to stay sustainable.
Recently, Ordinals have driven up to 20% of daily fees:
The Bitcoin security budget is a very important metric to keep an eye on. Check out @niftytable’s highlight thread here, and the full dashboard here.
More Dashboards
GN
Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoyed this issue.
As always, a special thanks to all the Wizards for your amazing work this week.
We’ll see you again next time for more data, dashboards & Wizardy.
Enjoy your weekend. The data must flow.
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