GM
Welcome to Issue #74 of Dune Digest.
This week we made a special announcement. Let’s summarize before diving into this week’s data stories…..
Dune SQL is LIVE
Our mission: make crypto data accessible.
We took a major step toward this mission earlier this week, by officially launching Dune SQL.
Dune SQL is our brand new, homegrown query engine specifically tailored for crypto data. It’s going to change the game and serve as the foundation for a faster, more powerful, more usable Dune.
We released it in Alpha at the end of 2022, and since then it has become our most popular query engine:
Since then we’ve shipped some cool improvements, like a 30% speedup and the ability to use other queries as views.
That’s only the start though. Because we built Dune SQL internally, we have full power to optimize, fix and ship improvements fast. We’ve got an exciting roadmap for the next few months that will allow Wizards to:
Use other queries as materialized views
Contribute user-defined functions
Query your own data sources
Upload your own data
And much more……
Dune SQL combines the best aspects of both our legacy platforms - Postgres and Spark:
On that note - we’ll be sunsetting both in the not-too-distant future, and Dune SQL will be our only query engine.
We’re still working out timeframes, and you will have plenty of notice and support for the migration, including a new GPT4 enabled tool that we’ll be sharing more on soon.
To learn more:
Read this article by co-founder and CTO Mats
Read about Dune SQL in our Docs
Check out this dashboard with the new functions
Read our announcement thread
Soon, the data will be flowing like never before……
Now, let’s get into this week’s data
The ZkEVM Race
As @21shares_research note in their latest dashboard, zkEVM is the “holy grail” of scaling.
Multiple projects are racing to launch, but two in particular have been causing a buzz in recent weeks:
Let’s take a look at the dashboard, and see who is coming out on top so far.
For starters, activity on ZkSync is happening on a much greater scale than Polygon Hermez.
ZkSync has reached a TVL of over $140 million, with ~292k depositors…..
Polygon Hermez on the other hand has “only” reached 11.68k depositors and a TVL of $2.63M….
Both have seen a steady march of deposits over the past few weeks, the majority in $ETH and $USDC for both platforms.
Who are the depositors? When we look at Polygon Hermez, 65.6% were ARB airdrop recipients, and almost 90% have previously used either Optimism or Arbitrum.
76% had used both L2s:
These are clearly experienced DeFi users - and remember there are only ~11.9k of them.
When we look at the 300k+ ZkSync depositors, these metrics are flipped. ~68% did not receive the ARB airdrop, and over 36% have never used another L2 before…..
When we look at top depositors - 70% on Polygon Hermez have also used DEXes or NFT marketplaces before, with ~44% having used both.
When it comes to ZkSync Era, again this in inverted. 62.6% of the top 100 depositors have never traded on a DEX or NFT marketplace, and only 16.7% have traded on both…..
So we can see that on average, Polygon Hermez depositors are a more experienced and seasoned group of degens.
Or, are they?
Remember that in crypto, we can only track the wallet, not the user per se.
The average wallet age for ZkSync depositors is much younger. In fact, 37% of depositing wallets (112k), are completely new.
On Hermez, it’s just 12.9% (1.5k). Polygon Hermez deposit wallets are older and more experienced across the board.
Who are these wallets really owned by…… ?
We can take a reasonable educated guess that a far higher % of ZkSync Era depositors are airdrop farmers, who control multiple “sybil” wallets to boost their chances of receiving future airdrops.
There will be some of this going on with Hermez too, but there is clearly relatively less - perhaps because Polygon already has a native token?
Still, the overall action is positive. We now have live ZK EVM rollups, with real users - this is certainly an area to watch closely in the near future.
Check out the full dashboard for more…..
Bitcoin Halvings
Bitcoin undergoes a “halving” every 210k blocks, roughly every ~4 years, when the block reward for miners is cut in half.
Halvings are a crucial aspect of Bitcoin’s design, and will continue for more than 100 years into the future.
Many commentators make a connection between halving cycles and price action, and this phenomenon is explored by @lindyhan in a recent dashboard……
Bitcoin is currently in its fourth halving cycle:
In a Twitter thread, @lindyhan notes that for one year before and after each halving, the price was relatively flat.
Also, the price jumps following each of the three halvings were relatively smaller each time.
Back in 2012, Bitcoin jumped a crazy 9204% from ~$12 to $1135 between the halving and its peak roughly one year later.
After the peak there was an 82% drawdown, before price rose again as we approached the next halving in Summer 2016…..
After 2016’s halving, things were fairly quiet for almost one year until the bulls came roaring back. The peak came almost 17 months later at the tail end of 2018 at ~19.5k, a 2888% jump from the halving itself……
We saw another ~83% drawdown over the next year, before a familiar bullish pattern toward the next halving…..
Finally, we get to the most recent halving in May 2020. At the time, Bitcoin was trading at around ~$10k.
Over the next 18 months, it rose +675.24% to a peak of $67.6k!
As we all know, things got choppy through 2022 and $BTC dropped 76.4% to just under $16k, almost exactly one year after its peak.
From @lindyhan’s analysis, we can see that Bitcoin has been following a reasonably predictable 4 year cycle around halvings, with lagging price jumps shrinking - in relative terms - in the year following each.
We can also see that after bottoming, price action tends to moderately pick up in the year leading up to a halving.
We’re around one year away from the fourth halving in 2024, and we’ve been seeing some positive momentum building. Will the trend play out the same this time - putting us approximately 2 years out from major price movements?
There are no guarantees, take a closer look at the dashboard and decide for yourself.
Smart Contracts Across Chains
Ethereum was the first smart contract chain, but it definitely wasn’t the last. These days there are plenty of players.
A new dashboard by @pcaversaccio investigates smart contracts across chains, with some interesting findings.
It covers the following chains:
BNB
Ethereum
Avalanche
Arbitrum
Fanton
Gnosis
Optimism
Polygon
For starters, the total number of smart contracts, across chains, has crossed half a Billion:
Wow - that’s a lot!
The two leaders, in terms of contracts deployed, are Polygon & BNB. Together they account for almost 80% of all smart contract deployments.
The OG smart contract chain Ethereum is in third place with “only” ~56 Million contracts, followed closely by Fantom with ~44 million.
Beyond these, the remaining chains account for a small slice of the total:
An interesting dashboard - check it out for more…..
Stealcam
Stealcam is an interesting new app, recently launched on Arbitrum. It’s a mobile camera app that allows users to create, share and “steal” (buy) and reveal “memories” aka photos - each of which is minted as an NFT on upload.
@pandajackson42 covers the platform in a new dashboard, let’s take a look…..
Stealcam is less than one month old, but it has seen 1952 users, the majority of whom joined in late March:
The majority of these users, roughly 3/4, have uploaded “memories” (images or videos) - almost 15k in total!
1115 users have made 17247 “steals”, for a total volume of 394 $ETH…..
A quite novel idea, that seems to have had a decent first month. Check out the full dashboard for much more data…..
EURe
After the almighty Dollar, the Euro is the second most traded currency in the world - seeing a daily volume of over $1 Trillion - so it’s no surprise that euro pegged stablecoins have followed in the wake of their dollar pegged cousins.
One such stablecoin is EURe. It’s issued by Monerium, a regulated institution operating in the European Economic Area.
It has an interesting mechanism. Each user gets a personal IBAN, and when they send fiat there an equivalent amount of EURe tokens are automatically minted on Ethereum, Gnosis Chain or Polygon. The process can also run in reverse, with EURe automatically burned and fiat sent to any bank account.
Convenient!
Let’s take a look at the platform’s adoption so far through a dashboard by @dcooper.
EURe has been around since 2020, and has facilitated ~23.5k transactions and ~44.2 million in volume since….
Considering that, there are relatively few token holders:
Currently with ~5.4 Million Euro’s worth outstanding.
All metrics have been rising sharply over the past six months though - mostly thanks to the Polygon and Gnosis integrations.
The vast majority of EURe tokens entering circulation in recent months have been minted on these chains - with Gnosis currently accounting for ~63%:
When it comes to transactions and users though, Polygon is king. Transactions on Gnosis too have eclipsed Ethereum by a significant margin:
Overall, it seems like adoption has been slow for EURe. That said, integration with Polygon and Gnosis was a smart move, and has sparked impressive new growth.
Check out the full dashboard for more…..
More Dashboards
GN
Thanks for reading, and as always a special thanks to all the Wizards for your great work this week.
Have a great weekend, see you next week for more data, dashboards and Wizardry.
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bitcoin halving best of market