Abstract

Ethereum’s scalability issues have prompted the development of L2 solutions to facilitate faster and cheaper transactions. In 2021, notable L2 networks such as Arbitrum and Optimism, both based on Rollups, were launched. Recently, Coinbase introduced the Base network, an L2 solution utilizing zkEVM technology. This report delves into a comparative analysis of these L2 solutions, focusing on their performance across three key metrics — Reach, Retention, and Revenue. Our findings are supported by data visualizations generated with the Increment tool from Covalent.

Reach

Active Addresses

Arbitrum leads with the highest number of active addresses. Despite being a newcomer, Base saw a significant increase in active addresses starting March 2024 but still trails behind Arbitrum, which peaked in this month (May 2024).

Transaction Count

In the past three months, Base recorded the highest transaction count, attributed to its growing user base. Nonetheless, Arbitrum maintains the overall lead in transaction count (in the past 6 months).

Smart Contract Creation

Smart contract creation is a vital indicator of dapps activity and ecosystem growth. Here, Base leads, likely due to the influx of developers eager to explore this new platform. In contrast, Arbitrum and Optimism, being more established, show steadier but slower growth in this area.

DEX Activity

Decentralized Exchange (DEX) activity is a crucial aspect of blockchain ecosystems. Base is currently limited to Baseswap, while Arbitrum and Optimism show more diversified activity across several DEX platforms. Notably, Uniswap dominates DEX transactions on both Arbitrum (88%) and Optimism (99%).

Overall Reach Conclusion:

While Arbitrum currently leads in terms of reach, the rapid ascent of Base suggests potential for it to become a major rival. So far, Optimism appears to be the Layer-2 solution with the lowest growth in terms of reach compared to Base and Arbitrum.

Retention

We analyzed Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) over the last six months. Both Base and Optimism peaked in April, while Arbitrum showed the highest activity in May, which is not yet complete.

DAU and MAU Insights:

Base: In April, reached 350k DAU and nearly 4 million MAU.
Optimism: In the same month, recorded 130k DAU and 2.4 million MAU.
Arbitrum: Reported 300k DAU and 4.6 million MAU in April, with May projections showing an increase to 650k DAU and 5.5 million MAU.

Additionally, we plotted the growth of new versus existing users across these platforms, revealing distinct patterns in user engagement and retention.

Revenue

For the revenue analysis, we have turned to the Dune platform and Token Terminal to compare the revenue metrics for Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

The dashboard for the figure above can be viewed at this link.

Let’s start by examining the average transaction fees for these Layer-2 networks. As of May 19, 2024, the fees are as follows:

Arbitrum: $0.005
Optimism: $0.0278
Base: $0.032

From a user’s perspective, Arbitrum offers the most cost-effective option due to its lower fees.

Next, let’s delve into the revenue trends. Not surprisingly, revenue patterns closely mirror transaction counts since L2 network revenues depend on the volume of transactions processed. At its peak, Base has achieved $10 million USD in weekly revenue, which is quite impressive.

It’s important to note that a portion of this revenue is allocated to the Ethereum network, as these are Layer-2 solutions that incur costs from their reliance on Ethereum.

Upon reviewing data from Token Terminal, it becomes evident that after deducting costs, Base leads with the highest gross profit for the year, totaling nearly $30 million USD. In comparison, both Arbitrum and Optimism have grossed around $9.5 million USD each.

Below is a chart detailing the revenue and gross profit figures sourced from Token Terminal.

This dashboard also serves as a reference to assess how much gas spent by L2s contributes to the total Ethereum gas expenditure. You can view the specifics in charts titled “Gas Used by L2 Contracts” and “Percentage of Total Gas Used by L2 Contracts.

In conclusion, Base has emerged as a true rival in the Layer-2 space. Although Arbitrum offers the lowest transaction costs, Base is the clear winner in terms of gross profit, achieving three times the profit compared to both Arbitrum and Optimism.

Higher profits suggest that a project can be more sustainable. Additionally, it’s important to note that Base utilizes zero-knowledge proof technology and is backed by Coinbase.

Let’s see who will be the winner in this battle! Only time will tell.

I was really surprised by my recent finding that the volume of DEXs on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) outperformed the volume of DEXs on Ethereum in the last 30 days. This raises more questions: Why did this happen, and when did it start? Which DEX dominates this volume, is it PancakeSwap? What about other DEXs? Why is the volume of Ethereum’s DEXs slowing down? Is it because Uniswap, the king of DEXs on Ethereum, and other DEXs are shifting their focus to Layer 2 (L2) solutions? Is it because of the growing trend of DEX aggregators? Of course I would not answer all those questions in this article.

From the three tables above, we can see and understand the reach and revenue of PancakeSwap (BSC only) versus Uniswap (ETH only) over the last 30 days, this year, and last year. In terms of reach, indeed, PancakeSwap outperformed Uniswap. Even in terms of net liquidity added, PancakeSwap also outshone Uniswap, despite Uniswap posting negative net liquidity added. Finally, one of our hypotheses seems to be correct — it appears that the volume of DEXs on Ethereum is migrating to DEX aggregators, likely due to the growing trend of DEX aggregators.

Let’s focus on PancakeSwap, as the title of this article suggests unboxing PancakeSwap in terms of reach, retention, and revenue. The main goal of this article is to present an approach I would take if PancakeSwap contracted me to build analytics that profile and segment the users of a DEX. I would then devise a strategy to distribute $100,000 in liquidity rewards to enhance user engagement.

Note: All reports in this article were generated using the DEX model provided by the Covalent tool, Increment. Here is the link to the dashboard.

The figure above shows that, as we expected, PancakeSwap accounts for more than 97% of DEX volume on the Binance Smart Chain network. Amazing!

These figures show that DEX activity on PancakeSwap has skyrocketed recently. Could this be because Binance-US stopped their deposit/withdrawal services? I’m not sure yet. Let’s cross-check with the most traded pairs and then conclude at the end of this article.

Wow, look at those figures? just got peaked recently.

The net liquidity seem positive so far in the past of 30 days.

Let’s examine the stickiness ratio of PancakeSwap. Although it slowed down recently, it picked up again in June 2023.

Let’s look at the trade size range then!

Both figures indicate the trade size range for addresses trading on PancakeSwap DEX. They reveal a similar pattern: most trades fall within the $0-$100 range.

Let see what the most active traded pairs.

To cross check the data, I also check it on PancakeSwap website, here is the last 7 days top traded pairs from the website.

So, to address the question, if I had to distribute $100,000 in liquidity rewards to enhance user engagement on PancakeSwap, my strategy would be based on the analysis results of PancakeSwap’s trading activity. It seems that PancakeSwap’s user base primarily consists of small-scale traders who engage in transactions valued between $0 and $100. These users tend to favor less popular trading pairs as well as native to stable pairs like WBNB/BUSD or WBNB/USDT.

Given this information, here is a strategy to distribute the $100,000 in liquidity rewards to enhance user engagement:

1. Incentivize Small Trades Across Numerous Pairs: Most transactions fall in the $0-$100 range. Therefore, distributing the rewards throughout the entire DEX would likely benefit a larger user base and encourage them to engage in more trades.
2. Reward Transactions in Unpopular Pairs: A large portion of trades are conducted in less popular pairs, often those unavailable on CEX. Increasing rewards for these pairs could stimulate more activity and diversify the trading ecosystem, making the platform more resistant to sudden changes in any single market.
3. Support More Native/Stable Coin Pairs: PancakeSwap users seem to prefer trading in WBNB and stable pairs such as BUSD or USDT. Boosting liquidity rewards for these pairs could lead to a greater trading volume and provide traders with the confidence that they can enter and exit positions with minimal slippage. With Binance-US halting its deposit and withdrawal services in the US, it’s plausible that these stable coin DEX traders are users who can no longer use CEX.

My Twitter Thread is here

0xGembus on Twitter: "🧵1/12: @PancakeSwap is a leading DEX on Binance Smart Chain. Here are things that you must know about PancakeSwap. pic.twitter.com/82sOeKYlHf / Twitter"

🧵1/12: @PancakeSwap is a leading DEX on Binance Smart Chain. Here are things that you must know about PancakeSwap. pic.twitter.com/82sOeKYlHf

The year 2023 has been quite rough for cryptocurrencies. Ever since the massive digital asset exchange FTX collapsed back in November 2022, regulators in the United States have been cracking down hard on the industry. As a result, several companies have been forced to shut down. Just recently, on June 6th and June 7th, the SEC sued both Coinbase and Binance, particularly focusing on the unregistered offer and sale of securities. This has had a devastating impact on all alt coins, causing quite a chaotic situation in the market.

The objective of this report is to compare the 3R metrics (reach, retention, revenue) between these two prominent blockchains, with a focus on the events of the 7 days after the SEC lawsuit and of course to some days before the lawsuit as well. To establish the necessary context, the report will commence with a brief introduction comparing these two blockchain giants in terms of competitive advantage from retail user perspective.

I really like that figure, and of course, the explanation as well. As a retail user, some of us might prioritize decentralization, while others value speed. Personally, when I need to send money overseas, I choose to use the Binance platform (BSC network, for instance BUSD instead of USDT eth network) because of its low transaction fees. If you want to learn more about the scalability trilemma, transaction fees and throughput, and the consensus model, this article might be helpful in comparing these two blockchain giants.

Let’s get started with the analysis. These are my research questions for this analysis:

1. Since the SEC lawsuit, both ETH (the native coin of the Ethereum network) and BNB (the native coin of the BSC network) have experienced price drops. However, how have they performed in terms of 3R metrics (reach, retention, and revenue)?
2. Do they exhibit similar patterns in terms of the 3R metrics, considering that BNB has been classified as a security in the SEC lawsuit, while ETH has not?

Note that in this report, the result is generated from Increment tool powered by Covalent, so if you want to change the aggregation to be like this quarter, last year, this year, it’s really easy, you can just update it using the drop down menu and see the results. The full dashboard can be accessed through this link.

Key takeaways: So what happened after the SEC lawsuit for ETH and BSC?

1. We know that both blockchains suffered a loss in price. BSC has been slightly decreasing in terms of active users and transactions recently, but not significantly. Conversely, ETH has been slightly increasing, also not significantly.
2. The stickiness ratio for both blockchains has been increasing, especially for BSC in the month of June. I suspect this might be because Binance US stopped deposits and withdrawals, prompting BSC users to potentially move their assets.
3. The revenue (gas paid) of both blockchains has dropped, but this trend began in mid-May, not after the SEC lawsuit.
4. We found some interesting facts in the last 30 days: BSC has outperformed ETH in terms of total DEX volume, whereas in terms of NFT sales volume, Ethereum is still leading.

Let’s get started from the overall reach and revenue comparison of ETH and BSC.

As I mentioned earlier, if we take speed into account, BSC is the superior option. When we examine the reach metrics, BSC surpasses Ethereum in terms of average transactions per day and average active addresses per day. That’s why BSC attracts a large number of users. However, if we turn our attention to revenue metrics, it becomes clear why Ethereum ranks second in the blockchain network, only behind Bitcoin. This becomes apparent when you consider the total USD spent on gas and the total NFT sales volume. Honestly, I was really surprised to see that BSC’s total DEX volume surpasses Ethereum’s, wow (please note that this is only based on the past 30 days!). But in terms of NFT sales, BSC is still lagging far behind. Will BSC catch up in the future? That’s a truly intriguing question.

Let check it through the visualizations!

Daily active users (DAUs), weekly active users (WAUs), and monthly active users (MAUs) are important metrics for understanding the patterns of active users on blockchains, especially when we want to compare two blockchain networks. Please note that we might not consider the month of June for MAU calculations, since today is the 15th, which is only halfway through the month. However, we can analyze the DAUs and WAUs of both ETH and BSC. Overall, they appear to be performing well. For ETH, the DAU has been increasing in June compared to previous months, while BSC shows the opposite trend. Let’s delve deeper with more visualizations!

In terms of patterns, BSC has seen a slight decrease in the number of daily transactions recently, but it hasn’t been significant. On the other hand, Ethereum has remained constant.

The figure above confirms that the number of active addresses on BSC has seen a slight decrease recently. Now, let’s look at the Ethereum blockchain.

Ethereum displays the opposite pattern, as the number of active addresses has been slightly increasing recently. This finding confirms the overall DAU chart.

Interestingly, the stickiness ratio has been increasing recently for both blockchains. I suspect that this may be due to Binance starting to halt USD deposits & withdrawals for Binance-US, which could cause many BSC users to move their assets.

Let’s see what’s going on in terms of number of transactions.

Overall, the patterns of the number of transactions mirror the patterns of active addresses.

Therefore, our conclusions for the Reach and Retention aspects in order to answer the research questions are as follows:

1. Recently, BSC has experienced a slight decrease in the number of daily transactions and daily active users, but the decrease hasn’t been significant. Conversely, ETH has seen a slight increase in the number of active addresses and transactions.
2. The stickiness ratio has been on the rise for both ETH and BSC. I suspect this may be a result of Binance starting to halt USD deposits & withdrawals for Binance-US, potentially prompting many BSC users to move their assets.

Let’s examine the revenue aspect!

Those figures above show that in terms of revenue (Total Gas Paid in USD, Total Gas paid per active address and total gas paid from NFT Sales), Both Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain revenue is decreasing!

The two figures above confirm the overall finding that BSC outperforms Ethereum in terms of DEX Volume, while in terms of NFT Sales Volume, Ethereum is leading.

Our summary for the revenue aspects in order to answer the research question is as follows:

1. In the last 30 days, the overall revenue for both ETH and BSC has been decreasing! Not since SEC lawsuit.
2. In the last 30 days, ETH’s revenue has been dominated by NFT sales volume, while BSC’s revenue has been dominated by DEX volume.
3. In the last 30 days, BSC has outperformed ETH in terms of total DEX volume, whereas in terms of NFT sales volume, Ethereum is leading.
4. There was unusual DEX volume on BSC around May 23–25 and May 31 — June 1, and unusual NFT sales volume on ETH on May 23. I’m not sure what caused these fluctuations.

My Twitter Thread is here:

0xGembus on Twitter: "1/10 🧵Research question: Since the SEC lawsuit, both ETH and BNB have seen price drops. But how do they compare in terms of 3R metrics (reach, retention, revenue)? Especially considering BNB is classified as a security, while ETH isn't. #ETH #BSC #SEC pic.twitter.com/E8RcipLMjW / Twitter"

1/10 🧵Research question: Since the SEC lawsuit, both ETH and BNB have seen price drops. But how do they compare in terms of 3R metrics (reach, retention, revenue)? Especially considering BNB is classified as a security, while ETH isn't. #ETH #BSC #SEC pic.twitter.com/E8RcipLMjW

Read until the end because Covalent may launch the next Data Alchemist Bootcamp batch at the beginning of next year!

The story began when I was scrolling through my Twitter timeline in early October of this year. I noticed someone had liked/retweeted a blog post from the official Covalent blog. I was so excited that I immediately registered and subsequently got interviewed by a Covalent data scientist. I was then accepted into the program. There were 1200 applicants, and only 250 were accepted into the bootcamp. Unfortunately, not everyone could complete each module. In the end, only 125 data alchemists finished the bootcamp and received rewards.

Here are some questions about how to join the Covalent boot camp that I received on Twitter (I received a bunch of questions because I shared my analysis as a Twitter Thread)

So what should be prepared for the next batch of Covalent data-alchemist boot camp? SQL and EVM knowledge! at least you understand how to join tables using SQL and are able to read Etherscan.

What document is needed and what are the interview questions?

1. Fill out the application form
2. Upload CV
3. 1-minute video

The interview is just a short interview, it’s just a clarification and the questions such as what do you want to learn during boot camp and what’s your plan after completing the boot camp, build tool, or what?

All my efforts during the Bootcamp paid off

I received an award as an outstanding content creator and had a chance to share my learning experience at the data alchemist boot camp closing event.

So, what should be done to complete the boot-camp?

The boot-camp is a 4-weeks boot camp and there are four modules and four challenges, however, since this is the first boot camp and as the participants, we are dealing with the new analytic tool (increment, a powerful data analytics tool built by Covalent), the first module takes two weeks because some of us have to adapt with the new tool and environment. In the end, only three modules and three challenges are completed.

The first module is GameFi analysis. In this challenge, I compared STEPN vs Step app as the STEPN competitor in terms of reach, retention, and revenue. The detailed analysis can be seen through this link. I also did an analysis on FTX public wallets during the FTX meltdown, it can be read through this link.

0xGembus on Twitter: "STEPN on $BSC and $ETHA thread This thread shows the 3 most important metrics in business: 3R (Reach, Retention, Revenue). I learned these 3 metrics from @Covalent_HQ and these results are generated from increment (Covalent data analytic tool) #STEPN #BSC #ETH @Stepnofficial / Twitter"

STEPN on $BSC and $ETHA thread This thread shows the 3 most important metrics in business: 3R (Reach, Retention, Revenue). I learned these 3 metrics from @Covalent_HQ and these results are generated from increment (Covalent data analytic tool) #STEPN #BSC #ETH @Stepnofficial

0xGembus on Twitter: "FTX crypto exchange: Reach and Retention MetricsThe @FTX_Official new users vs existing users since the launching (on-chain data based on three FTX hot wallets on Etherscan)The results presented here are generated using Increment (@Covalent_HQ data analytics tool) pic.twitter.com/PC7CMf07VE / Twitter"

FTX crypto exchange: Reach and Retention MetricsThe @FTX_Official new users vs existing users since the launching (on-chain data based on three FTX hot wallets on Etherscan)The results presented here are generated using Increment (@Covalent_HQ data analytics tool) pic.twitter.com/PC7CMf07VE

The second module is DEX analysis. In this challenge, I compared APE/WETH pool on Uniswap vs Sushiswap. My full report can be read through this link.

0xGembus on Twitter: "🧵I am really excited to have been enrolled on @Covalent_HQ 's Data alchemist BootCampCheck out my second report comparing APE/WETH pool on Uni V2 vs Sushiswap generated from Increment (a powerful data analysis tool built by Covalent)@apecoin @Uniswap @SushiSwap pic.twitter.com/ruFTH6b0tP / Twitter"

🧵I am really excited to have been enrolled on @Covalent_HQ 's Data alchemist BootCampCheck out my second report comparing APE/WETH pool on Uni V2 vs Sushiswap generated from Increment (a powerful data analysis tool built by Covalent)@apecoin @Uniswap @SushiSwap pic.twitter.com/ruFTH6b0tP

The last module is NFT marketplace analysis. I compared LooksRare vs Opensea and X2Y2. This is the most exciting since I am an NFT guy! Here is the full report.

0xGembus on Twitter: "Is LooksRare dead? The battle of NFT marketplaces@LooksRare @opensea @the_x2y2If we look at the num of sales of 3 NFT marketplaces in the last quarter, LooksRare seems in danger. Let's deep dive together. Results are generated by Increment @Covalent_HQ 🧵 pic.twitter.com/w7TO0EqrUL / Twitter"

Is LooksRare dead? The battle of NFT marketplaces@LooksRare @opensea @the_x2y2If we look at the num of sales of 3 NFT marketplaces in the last quarter, LooksRare seems in danger. Let's deep dive together. Results are generated by Increment @Covalent_HQ 🧵 pic.twitter.com/w7TO0EqrUL

The challenges must be done using Increment, the data is provided, and only SQL is needed. In every challenge submission, we have to fill out the form and provide feedback for the increment. Increment is really awesome, I love the increment parameters, we can just easily change the chain name, date range, and aggregation. So no need to re-write a query, if we want to do analysis in a different chain, date range, or aggregation!

So what do you think? cool right?

At the Covalent data alchemist closing, I had a chance to share my experience during the boot camp, and here are my slides

Twitter Thread of this blog post

0xGembus on Twitter: "Learn Web3 Analytics and earn $2000In this 🧵, I want to share my experience joining Covalent Data Alchemist Bootcamp.Finally made it! I received a certificate in the form of NFT & 17,921 $CQT token ($2000 USD) as the reward.Thank you @Covalent_HQ @Luke_Harriman @gane5h pic.twitter.com/pFDoNcOc6a / Twitter"

Learn Web3 Analytics and earn $2000In this 🧵, I want to share my experience joining Covalent Data Alchemist Bootcamp.Finally made it! I received a certificate in the form of NFT & 17,921 $CQT token ($2000 USD) as the reward.Thank you @Covalent_HQ @Luke_Harriman @gane5h pic.twitter.com/pFDoNcOc6a

Resources:

1. https://www.covalenthq.com/blog/data-alchemist-announcment/
2. https://medium.com/@diteliti/stepn-analytics-dashboard-bsc-and-eth-8bcc3f23501b
3. https://medium.com/@diteliti/ftx-crypto-exchange-reach-and-retention-metrics-cd8c0ee11722
4. https://medium.com/@diteliti/apecoin-liquidity-pool-analysis-uniswap-v2-vs-sushiswap-dad9b27d790d
5. https://medium.com/@diteliti/is-looksrare-dead-the-battle-of-nft-marketplaces-496f0718aa42

Highlights:

1. Reach: When comparing Opensea, LooksRare, and X2Y2, Opensea continues to dominate the NFT market in terms of the number of NFT sales and volume. If the number of NFT sales from these three marketplaces is totaled from January 2022 until now, Opensea holds 97% of sales, while LooksRare and X2Y2 account for less than 2% each. In terms of volume, LooksRare does have significant volume, however, a large portion of it is suspected to be from wash trading.
2. Reach: Opensea is the healthiest NFT marketplace in terms of the number of buyers and sellers. Data from the last quarter shows that Opensea has an average of 50% sellers and 50% buyers. On the other hand, LooksRare has more than 60% sellers and less than 40% buyers, and X2Y2 has more than 70% sellers and less than 30% buyers. Both LooksRare and X2Y2 have had more sellers than buyers in the last quarter.
3. Retention: Opensea has the highest buyer and seller retention rates compared to LooksRare and X2Y2. However, the seller retention rate of Opensea is on a downtrend. In January 2022, it had a score of 13%, and 7% in November 2022. X2Y2 holds the second position, with both seller and buyer retention rates for this marketplace in the range of 6–8 %. The lowest is LooksRare, with both seller and buyer retention rates in the range of 4–6%.
4. Retention: Based on this year’s data on buyer/seller volume distribution, LooksRare lost more than 80% of its buyers and sellers between June-August 2022, as they moved to X2Y2 and Opensea. Conversely, Opensea had its peak loss in January 2022, when around 70% of its buyers migrated to LooksRare, and in September 2022, 50–60% of its buyers moved to X2Y2. However, this loss appears to be temporary.
5. Revenue: Based on data from this quarter (beginning 1st October 2022), LooksRare has the highest revenue per buyer, averaging more than $100. Meanwhile, the revenue per buyer for Opensea and X2Y2 is around $5 and $6, respectively.
6. Revenue: LooksRare is the least healthy NFT marketplace in terms of volume, with 43% and 41% of its volume belonging to the Meebits and Terraforms collections, respectively. On the other hand, Opensea is the healthiest, with the highest volume of more than 60% belonging to other collections (see figure: Volume by Collection). BAYC on Opensea is in second place, contributing 12% of the shared volume.
7. Revenue: LooksRare is the prime location for wash trading, due to its trade mining feature. Trade mining on LooksRare becomes advantageous when trading rewards (LOOKS) exceed the 2% platform fee, resulting in traders artificially inflating volume by transacting between their own separate wallets to earn LOOKS. This suspicion is confirmed with examples including the Meebits and Terraforms collections, where the number of transactions is low, but the volume is extremely high.

Note: to understand the terms (reach, retention, revenue, and stickiness ratio), I explained those terms and how to calculate them in this post.

Background

Starting from 1st January 2022, the profit from revenue fees for Opensea has exceeded $500m, while LooksRare’s revenue fees amount to around $480m and X2Y2’s to less than $20m. Who wouldn’t want such a large sum of money? Hence, in 2022, the year of the NFT boom, a multitude of NFT marketplaces have emerged! The figure above shows the timeline of popular NFT marketplaces in the crypto industry since 2017.

In this article, I am going to present my analysis of one such NFT marketplace called LooksRare. In order to provide comprehensive results, I will also compare LooksRare with two other major NFT marketplaces: Opensea and X2Y2. Let’s delve deeper into what they are, what they do, and how they generate revenue.

Opensea vs. LooksRare vs. X2Y2

Opensea is akin to Coinbase for NFTs, functioning as a centralized platform where anyone can buy and sell NFTs. Opensea plans to follow in Coinbase’s footsteps by launching an IPO, but given the current market conditions, this may not happen anytime soon. Being a centralized business, this startup is backed and funded by a number of well-known venture capitalists. Therefore, it can be inferred that all profits made by this business go to them, without giving back to the community, a principle central to the spirit of Web3!

LooksRare was created as a counterpoint to Opensea, with 100% of the revenue fee shared amongst LOOKS token stakers, and it initiated a massive airdrop to NFT traders. If you recall the Vampire Attack conducted by Sushiswap on Uniswap, LooksRare executed a similar tactic against Opensea. A Vampire Attack in DeFi involves one protocol copying another, then offering better rates, thus poaching their customers and investors. At the start of this year, LooksRare issued a substantial airdrop to all NFT traders who had conducted at least 3 ETH worth of transactions on OpenSea within the previous six months. The higher the number of transactions on OpenSea, the more $LOOKS tokens a trader could claim. What makes LooksRare intriguing is its trade mining feature. Traders can farm $LOOKS tokens by trading on the LooksRare marketplace, and when trading rewards (LOOKS) exceed the 2% platform fee, it attracts whales and wealthy wallets to engage in wash trading (buying and selling NFTs between two different wallets owned by the same person). However, we suspect that as trading rewards continue to halve in the coming phases, trade mining may no longer be profitable, posing a potential threat to LooksRare.

X2Y2 embarked on a different strategy. The project initiated an inclusive airdrop without private sales or trading rewards and claims to avoid wash trading. X2Y2 offers a significantly low trading fee of just 0.5%, compared to Opensea’s 2.5% and LooksRare’s 2%. Similar to LooksRare, X2Y2 redistributes all revenue fees back to the community. To facilitate this, the project has a feature called ‘listing as staking’. When users list NFTs on X2Y2, they can regularly receive a certain percentage of X2Y2 tokens as rewards. If a trader lists a blue-chip NFT (one with a high transaction volume and market recognition) at a low enough price, they can earn higher rewards.

The figure below outlines the differences between these three NFT marketplaces.

Let’s get started with what I found…..

Reach

Reach refers to the total number of people who have seen and used the product. In this case, the number of NFT sellers and buyers, and the number of NFT collections are part of this metric.

The number of NFT sales is one of the important metrics to understand platform reach! The figure shows the most traded NFT collections on three NFT marketplaces. The number means the number of trades of NFTs during this year.

If we combine all trades from those three marketplaces, Opensea eats more than 95% of trades. Currently, Opensea supports 7 networks including, ETH, AVAX, OP, MATIC, Solana, etc. But the ETH networks still dominate the trades. So, in this analysis, I only consider ETH network only for those 3 NFT marketplaces.

Let’s move to the recent data (Last quarter: July/Aug/Sept).

Looking figure above, it seems that Looksrare is dead! the percentage of trades of Looksrare is so small, less than 2% on average compared to the Opensea which eats more than 80% of trades, and X2Y2 at around 15%.

Looking at the figure above, Opensea has the healthiest number of buyers and sellers compared to Looksrare and X2Y2. Opensea has 50% sellers and 50% buyers on average. In contrast, Looksrare has more than 60% of sellers and less than 40% of buyers and X2Y2 has more than 70% of sellers and less than 30% of buyers. Both Looksrare and X2Y2 have more sellers than buyers in the last quarter.

Retention

If a product has high customer retention, it means that customers return to continue using a product or service.

Looksrare has a peak number of new and existing users in January 2022 after launching and in May 2022.

Looking two figures above, we can see the percentage of new buyers and sellers coming to Opensea, Looksrare, and X2Y2. Both Looksrare and X2Y2 launched at the beginning of this year while Opensea was already here since 2018. New users pattern from both Looksrare and X2Y2 are quite similar to the pattern of Opensea at the beginning (in the year after launching 2018). The good news is, we see uptrends in the recent month! yeyeyee

Opensea has a downtrend pattern of stickiness score, 13% in January 2022 and 7% in November 2022. The second position is X2Y2, with both seller and buyer stickiness ratio for this marketplace in the range of 6–8 %. The bottom one is Looksrare, with both seller and buyer stickiness ratio in the range of 4–6%.

Based on this year's buyer and seller volume distribution, LooksRare lost buyers and sellers by more than 80% in June — August 2022, where the buyers and sellers moved to X2Y2 and Opensea.

Opensea has a peak loss in January 2022, where around 70% of its buyers moved to LooksRare, and in September 2022, where 50–60% of its buyers moved to X2Y2. The pattern of buyers and volume distribution is quite similar.

Revenue

Revenue means the total amount of money brought by the product, while in this case, how much Opensea, LooksRare, and X2Y2 make money.

This year, the profit of Opensea from revenue fees is more than $500m, while Looksrare’s revenue fees are around $480m and X2Y2 less than $20m. That is really huge Money! The detail can be seen in figures below:

In the last quarter, X2Y2 has a huge volume compared to its competitors. Another interesting thing here is, LooksRare has pretty much volume! Even though it has the lowest volume compared to Opensea and X2Y2. But, if we compare this Looksrare volume and the number of sales, Looksrare has around 15% in terms of shared volume, while the number of trades is just less than 2%. It means, Looksrare has very low trades, but that low trades still bring much volume.

Based on the data from this quarter (started from 1st October 2022), LooksRare has the highest revenue per buyer, its revenue per buyer is more than 100$ on average. While the revenue per buyer of the Opensea and X2Y2 is around 5$ and 6$ respectively.

LooksRare Volume is not healthy!

LooksRare is the most unhealthy NFT marketplace in terms of volume, 43% and 41% of its volume belong to Meetbits and Terraforms collections. Meanwhile, Opensea is the healthiest one, with the highest volume more than 60% belong to others (see figure Volume by Collection). BAYC on Opensea is the second one, it has 12% of the shared volume.

In this research, I collect the top 50% of BAYC buyer and seller wallets and see how the domination of those wallets to the total volume on Opensea, and here is the result.

From this figure, we can see that top 50% BAYC wallets only dominate less than 2% on average of total Opensea volume. Let’s compare this to what happened on LooksRare!

I collect the top 50% of Meebits buyer and seller wallets and see how the domination of those wallets to the total volume on LooksRare:

WoW! Look at the month of January, it’s crazy. So we can understand who controls this NFT marketplace, right?

LooksRare Wash Trading is Real!

The facts that make me conclude LooksRare is the best place for wash trading and it is about to die soon if the team does not do something extraordinary.

1. The number of trades on LooksRare is very small compared to the competitors. Considering data from this year's buyer and seller distribution, in June — August 2022, most of the buyers and sellers on LooksRare moved to X2Y2 and Opensea.
2. The volume on LooksRare is dominated by two collections: Meebits and Terraforms, and I suspect most of the wash trading happens on these collections. So we can assume that the volume of LooksRare is not organic and it’s artificial.

Look at this figure, the data is from November 2022 with aggregated hourly, and it’s very funny. LooksRare has a high volume at 9 AM every day! is this bot? We can compare it to the data from Opensea which seems more organic volume!

My recommendation to LooksRare:

1. Giving more incentives to buyers. Reducing fees might one of the options, X2Y2 has a 0.5 % fee, which is very small and it makes the traders move from LooksRare to X2Y2.
2. Having partnerships with more top collections! as we can see that LooksRare volume is dominated by Meebits and Terraforms.
3. Considering NFT launchpad maybe? Based on blockchain data indexed by Covalent, currently, LooksRare has 5,584 collections, while Opensea has 34,279 collections.
4. From my point of view, for the sustainability of the project, having organic volume is more important than being top in volume! find the best way how to minimize wash trading and improve the organic volume.

My Twitter Thread:

0xGembus on Twitter: "Is LooksRare dead? The battle of NFT marketplaces@LooksRare @opensea @the_x2y2If we look at the num of sales of 3 NFT marketplaces in the last quarter, LooksRare seems in danger. Let's deep dive together. Results are generated by Increment @Covalent_HQ 🧵 pic.twitter.com/w7TO0EqrUL / Twitter"

Is LooksRare dead? The battle of NFT marketplaces@LooksRare @opensea @the_x2y2If we look at the num of sales of 3 NFT marketplaces in the last quarter, LooksRare seems in danger. Let's deep dive together. Results are generated by Increment @Covalent_HQ 🧵 pic.twitter.com/w7TO0EqrUL

My Increment dashboard

https://www.covalenthq.com/platform/#/increment/pages/diteliti/is-looksrare-dead/

This article is part of my project for the Covalent Data Alchemist program. In this piece, I will conduct a comparative analysis between two liquidity pools: the APE/WETH pool on Uniswap V2 and the APE/WETH pool on Sushiswap.

Why focus on APE/WETH? APE refers to ApeCoin, an Ethereum-based token governed by ApeCoin DAO, with all APE holders qualifying as members of the ApeCoin DAO. It is associated with a non-fungible token (NFT) project known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), a successful and valuable collection launched by the Web3 company, Yuga Labs. On March 18, 2022, ApeCoin (APE) was introduced and airdropped to all investors of BAYC and related NFT collections, such as the Mutant Ape Yacht Club and the Bored Ape Kennel Club. In October 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it would be investigating Yuga Labs due to concerns that both the BAYC NFTs and ApeCoin might constitute unregistered securities. Following this announcement, ApeCoin’s value dropped by 10%. I believe that analyzing this successful project is worthwhile as it could provide useful insights, particularly on the performance of APE/ETH trades.

Why choose these two decentralized exchanges (DEXs)? Uniswap is currently the most popular DEX in the world. Meanwhile, SushiSwap has risen to be one of Uniswap’s primary competitors. Interestingly, SushiSwap originated as a fork, or copy, of Uniswap, albeit with a few modifications.

As depicted in the figure above, the most active APE/WETH pool by volume is on Uniswap, specifically Uniswap V3. However, for the purpose of this article, the results are based solely on Uniswap V2 compared to Sushiswap, due to certain limitations. The results derived from the complete Uniswap data (combining V2 and V3) will be shared in the coming weeks.

Limitation: This article is part of the Covalent Data Alchemist task. Currently, Covalent’s DEX views cover all DEX trades across more than 40 chain networks. However, only V1 and V2 data are presently available for Uniswap, while V3 data will be made available in the forthcoming weeks.

Now, let’s get started! In this article, we will explore certain research questions related to the performance of the APE/WETH pair on Uniswap V2 compared to Sushiswap, in accordance with the 3R metrics (reach, retention, revenue):

Reach

1. Compare the number of traders on APE/WETH pair over bothDEXs.
2. Compare the number of new traders on APE/WETH pair over both DEXs.
3. Compare the number of trades on APE/WETH pair over both DEXs.

Retention

1. Mint-to-burn ratio (the volume of added liquidity divided by the volume of removed liquidity) vs the price of the coin. Does price affect the mint-to-burn ratio? Compare the mint-to-burn ratio APE/WETH pair over both DEXs.
2. Compare Month over Month (MoM) trader retention on APE/WETH pair over both DEXs.
3. Compare trader stickiness ratio on APE/WETH pair over both DEXs.

Revenue

1. Compare the total value locked (TVL) of APE/WETH pair over both DEXs.
2. Compare APE/WETH pair pool volume over both DEXs.
3. Compare the median LP over time of APE/WETH pair over both DEXs.
4. Compare the liquidity utilization over the last 24 hours of APE/WETH pair over both DEXs.
5. Compare the traders' types based on the amount trades of APE/WETH pair over both DEXs.

Let’s deep dive together!

The number of traders and trades of APE/WETH pair over both DEXs (Uniswap v2 and Sushiswap)

Key takeaways:

1. Comparing two APE/WETH pools (Uni V2 vs Sushiswap) in terms of the number of traders and trades, Uni V2 has more traders and trades rather than Sushiswap.
2. In terms of the number of new vs existing traders (users), Uni V2 outperforms Sushiswap.

MoM, trader stickiness, and Mint-to-burn ratio

Running DEX such as Uniswap or Sushiswap is like running a business. The true success of a business is not in enabling a single transactional sale, but in building a customer relationship that spans for as long as possible. That makes customer retention a high-priority goal for any business. Why retention is so important? New customer acquisition is five times more costly when compared to the cost of retaining existing customers. Month over Month retention rate is the percentage of customers that are retained from month to month and it’s the opposite of your churn rate. In the case DEXs, the customers are traders and liquidity providers. The two cohort retention figures above show the user retention month over month on APE/WETH pair over Uniswap v2 and Sushiswap.

What is Mint-to-burn ratio and how to calculate it?

Automated market makers (AMMs) are part of decentralized finance (DeFi). By using AMM, digital assets can be traded permissionless and automatically by using liquidity pools rather than a traditional market of buyers and sellers. AMM users can supply liquidity pools with their tokens, whose prices are determined by mathematical formula. When users add liquidity to a pool, then LP tokens are minted and when users remove liquidity from a pool LP tokens are burned. Therefore, the mint-to-burn ratio is the ratio of tokens going into the pool and tokens leaving the pool. It can be calculated by the amount added to the pool divided by the amount removed from the pool. When more tokens are added to pool, then the mint-to-burn ratio will be higher. On the other side, when more tokens leave the pool, the mint-to-burn ratio will be lower.

What is traders' stickiness ratio and how to calculate it?

Stickiness ratio is the rate at which the users return to the product on a regular basis. Stickiness is equal to the ratio of daily active users (DAUs) to monthly active users (MAUs). Businesses or products with low customer stickiness soon run out of new customers and reduce the success rate. So, in the context of APE/WETH liquidity pool, the stickiness ratio is calculated by the average number of daily active traders divided by the total active traders in a month.

Key takeaways:

1. Uniswap V2 has better Month over Month performance of APE/WETH pair compared to Sushiswap based on both the cohort retention chart and DAU WAU MAU chart.
2. Mint-to-burn ratio chart shows that market volatility affects the mint-to-burn ratio. Moreover, the highest mint-to-burn ratio both on Uni V2 and Sushiswap happened on 17 March 2022 (when the Apecoin launched) and May 2022 when the Apecoin price was at its peak. Afterward, the mint-to-burn ratio decreased following the Apecoin price decrease due to the bear market.
3. In terms of trader stickiness ratio, overall, Uni V2 has a slightly better stickiness ratio compared to Sushiswap.

TVL, Swap Volume, LPs, Liquidity utilization, and trader groups based on the amount token they trade.

Other than marketcap, trading volume, and total and circulating supply, total value locked (TVL) is one crypto indicator that is popular in the crypto industry. Then what is TVL and how to calculate TVL? TVL is the overall value of assets (in USD) deposited across all DeFi protocols or in a single DeFi project. In the context of this work, TVL is the overall value assets on APE/WETH pool that can be calculated by the sum amount of deposit (add liquidity) minus the withdrawal (remove liquidity) + sum of swap volume, where the value is in USD.

The swap volume is calculated by the sum of the USD amount of APE token or WETH token traded on APE/WETH pool.

The goal of liquidity pools is to maximize the use of liquidity with the large and high trading volume and to minimize slippage. Since crypto relies on AMM, everyone who uses DEX must deal with slippage, you can read this article to understand more about slippage. How to evaluate the performance of the liquidity pool? One popular metric that can be used to evaluate the efficiency of a liquidity pool is liquidity utilization. This metric is the ratio of volume traded to TVL. Efficient pools tend to have high liquidity utilization. In the context of the result above, liquidity utilization is calculated by the volume traded in the last 24 hours divided by TVL in the last 24 hours. Seven and two percent look so small for liquidity utilization. Let’s dive into a longer timeframe such as 30 days.

Key takeaways:

1. APE/WETH pool on Uniswap V2 has higher TVL compared to Sushiswap. Note that the result is generated only based on Uniswap V2, APE/WETH on Uniswap V3 has much more TVL than on Uniswap V2.
2. The figure APE/WETH swap volume in the last 30 days shows us clearly how Uniswap V2 outperforms Sushiswap.
3. APE/WETH pool on both Uniswap V2 and Sushiswap have low liquidity utilization in the last 24 hours. APE/WETH pool on Uniswap V2 only utilizes 7% of its liquidity while Sushiswap only utilizes 2% of it’s liquidity.
4. When looking at the bigger picture, in the last 30 days, APE/WETH pool on Uniswap V2 utilizes 1,872% of its liquidity while Sushiswap utilizes 545% of its liquidity.
5. Both on Uniswap V2 and Sushiswap, most trade of APE/WETH is done by heavy traders. The heavy trader is a trader who made trades on decentralized exchanges and is in the top 1% in the number of trades or volume traded (but not both).
6. If I am the owner of this Apecoin project and I have $100,000 in liquidity rewards to start liquidity mining programs to increase Ape tokens traction in DeFi, while the available option is to choose either Uniswap V2 or Sushiswap, then I prefer to choose Uniswap! My considerations are 1) Uniswap V2 has higher liquidity utilization in the last 24 hours or even in the last 30 days; 2) If we look at the last 30 days' swap volume comparison between Uni V2 and Sushi, it’s clear that APE/WETH on Uni V2 outperforms Sushiswap.

My analytic dashboard can be accessed through this link https://www.covalenthq.com/platform/#/increment/pages/diteliti/apeweth-dex/

My Twitter Thread is here

0xGembus on Twitter: "🧵I am really excited to have been enrolled on @Covalent_HQ 's Data alchemist BootCampCheck out my second report comparing APE/WETH pool on Uni V2 vs Sushiswap generated from Increment (a powerful data analysis tool built by Covalent)@apecoin @Uniswap @SushiSwap pic.twitter.com/ruFTH6b0tP / Twitter"

🧵I am really excited to have been enrolled on @Covalent_HQ 's Data alchemist BootCampCheck out my second report comparing APE/WETH pool on Uni V2 vs Sushiswap generated from Increment (a powerful data analysis tool built by Covalent)@apecoin @Uniswap @SushiSwap pic.twitter.com/ruFTH6b0tP

Note: recall that the results presented in this article are based on Uniswap V2 vs Sushiswap. The figure below shows the volume and trade comparison between Uniswap V2 vs Uniswap V3.

I am very excited to wait for Covalent to provide Uniswap V3 data, I will make another post for analysis results based on Uniswap full data V2+V3.

Resources:

APEcoin contract address 0x4d224452801ACEd8B2F0aebE155379bb5D594381

Uniswap V2 APE/WETH pair 0xb011eeaab8bf0c6de75510128da95498e4b7e67f

Sushiswap APE/WETH pair 0x130F4322e5838463ee460D5854F5D472cFC8f253

There are several analytical dashboards on Dune and other analytic tools that provide an overview of the on-chain status of FTX wallets. One of the most comprehensive analytics on FTX hot wallets can be found on the dashboard from 21_shares. However, most analytics primarily focus on the recent inflow and outflow of ERC20 tokens from FTX hot wallets, balances, and the list of ERC20 token holdings.

In this article, I am curious about FTX’s growth, the number of new and existing FTX users, as well as user retention. The results presented here are generated by Increment (a data analytics tool from Covalent HQ), and the 3R metrics (reach, retention, revenue) are used.

The FTX hot wallets included in this analysis are:

0x2faf487a4414fe77e2327f0bf4ae2a264a776ad2

0xc098b2a3aa256d2140208c3de6543aaef5cd3a94

0x7abe0ce388281d2acf297cb089caef3819b13448

Based on the activity of those three FTX hot wallets mentioned above, we can check the number of new and existing active user addresses. But please note that the number of users here does not reflect the total number of FTX users. Some users might deposit to FTX and do trading (off-chain) and withdraw it without having an on-chain record. So only the company can release the records and the total number of FTX users.

There is interesting data on 29 November 2020, the number of new addresses suddenly peaked at 35,497 addresses. I have no idea what happened there.

Overall the growth was so good. Just imagine, in February 2020, the number of addresses is less than 20 addresses and it is just two years ago!

As we can see that FTX has more withdrawals rather than deposits in terms of amount (ETH) and the number of withdrawals within the recent 30 days. The longer timeframe can be seen in the figure below.

Let’s focus more on the reach and retention of FTX.

The MoM chart is really interesting, if we look at this on-chain data, since June 2022, we can see that FTX has had negative growth! only in July, it has positive growth but it was very small growth. We are still not sure, maybe it was because of the bear market? or other factors. Maybe next, I will try to check other CEX hot wallets, so I can compare this result to other CEX.

The DAU, WAU, and MAU chart describes the number of active on-chain users on the FTX exchange daily, weekly, and monthly in this year 2022. The data from the last year 2021 can be seen in the Figure below:

In 2021, MAU peaked in May, the same as the Bitcoin peak, and then went down following the Bitcoin price down. MAU went up again starting in July. As expected that the numbers of on-chain users correlate to the bitcoin price and hype.

To be honest, in terms of user traction and growth, there seems to be no problem at all. The growth of FTX has been quite impressive, going from nothing at the beginning of 2020 to becoming the third-largest crypto CEX. This could be why many people, including well-known investors and VCs, failed to see any red flags. Here is the official statement from Temasek regarding FTX

Please do not trust, verify instead! If you have any comments or feedback, please let me know.

The dashboard is available here https://www.covalenthq.com/platform/#/increment/pages/diteliti/ftx-3r-reach-retention-revenue/

My Twitter thread is here

0xGembus on Twitter: "FTX crypto exchange: Reach and Retention MetricsThe @FTX_Official new users vs existing users since the launching (on-chain data based on three FTX hot wallets on Etherscan)The results presented here are generated using Increment (@Covalent_HQ data analytics tool) pic.twitter.com/PC7CMf07VE / Twitter"

FTX crypto exchange: Reach and Retention MetricsThe @FTX_Official new users vs existing users since the launching (on-chain data based on three FTX hot wallets on Etherscan)The results presented here are generated using Increment (@Covalent_HQ data analytics tool) pic.twitter.com/PC7CMf07VE

In my opinion, I think it would be beneficial if Indonesian centralized exchanges also published their hot and cold wallet addresses, similar to what Binance did, as a way to demonstrate their proof of reserve.

So far I could not find any hot wallet label on Etherscan that belong to Tokocrypto, I suspect that Tokocrypto uses Binance hot wallets instead of owning hot wallet themself. Please let me know if I am wrong.

Two wallet addresses that I found from Etherscan are from Indodax. 0x51836a753e344257b361519e948ffcaf5fb8d521 (indodax1), 0x9cbadd5ce7e14742f70414a6dcbd4e7bb8712719 (indodax2)

Update 14/11/2022 Two additional wallets are provided by Indodax CTO

0x91Dca37856240E5e1906222ec79278b16420Dc92 (Indodax3), 0x7b8ffA4fE43d1B476cFf9D0787FC0019Ca54e421 (Indodax4)

Here are the results of my analysis based on those four Indodax hot wallets.

Conclusions:

1. The inflow and outflow of Ethereum and stablecoins in Indodax seem normal; there is no significant inflow or outflow during the FTX meltdown. The significant ETH outflow is due to transactions between two Indodax wallets.
2. The token held by Indodax with the largest USD value is Ethereum (around $26M). Since January 2021, the ETH balance peaked at the end of January 2021. Indodax had around 29,000 ETH balance on that peak date. In terms of ETH in USD value, Indodax peaked on May 14, 2021, with an ETH balance valued at around $60M USD.
3. At the beginning of November, Indodax had more withdrawal counts, however, the amount of Ethereum withdrawn was smaller compared to October 2022. The high amount of Ethereum transferred on November 13 was a transaction between Indodax wallets.
4. The five largest holding coins, excluding Ethereum, are USDT, SHIB, SAND, USDC, and MANA. There is also staked MATIC, totaling around $4.5M in current USD value.
5. In the last figure, we can also see the recent Ethereum transactions on Indodax and sort them based on the amount of ETH, as shown in the last figure of my dashboard.

So, what do you think?

The complete of my analytic dashboard can be found at this link https://dune.com/0xgembus/indodax-hotwallets-tracker

My Twitter thread is here

0xGembus on Twitter: "A thread Here are the results of my analysis based on two Indodax hot wallets.@indodax @OscarDarmawan In-out-flow stablecoin in Indodax recently seems normal, there is no significant inflow or outflow during FTX meltdown. #Indodax pic.twitter.com/EQwExZFxwQ / Twitter"

A thread Here are the results of my analysis based on two Indodax hot wallets.@indodax @OscarDarmawan In-out-flow stablecoin in Indodax recently seems normal, there is no significant inflow or outflow during FTX meltdown. #Indodax pic.twitter.com/EQwExZFxwQ

Any comments or feedback are welcome!

Two STEPN tokens can be explained as follow:

1. GST (game token) can be earned when a user moves and participates in in-game activities. GST has an unlimited supply and is earned when a user moves in Solo or Background Mode.
2. GMT (governance token) can be earned when a user moves with a level 30 NFT and participates in-game activities.

Limitation: Covalent currently (at the time of writing) only support EVM chains, while non-EVM chain such as Solana has not been supported yet. Hence, in this research, I could only use BSC and Ethereum. Solana network is very important for STEPN, since the native network of STEPN is actually on Solana. The STEPN metrics on Solana can be seen on other dashboard analytics from Flipsidecrypto or Dune (See: more resources) at the end of this article.

My research questions are:

1. Reach: a) Compare the number of active addresses STEPN vs Step app; b) Compare the number of transactions STEPN vs Step app c) Check the whale wallets in both STEPN and Step app.
2. Retention: a) Compare the average users active day by day in months STEPN vs Step app; b) Plot the chart of DAU, WAU, and MAU of STEPN vs Step app; c) Compare the active vs new users of STEPN vs Step app
3. Revenue: a) show the performance of coin price GMT+GST vs FITFI+KCAL; b) Platform fees STEPN vs Step app; c) NFTs sold STEPN vs Step app (the data seems not available on Covalent yet)

Here is some finding that we can discuss, while in this article, I am not explaining every plot that I generated based on my research questions. All plots are available on my covalent analytics dashboard and it can be accessed through these links:

1. STEPN Reach Retention and Revenue (BSC+ETH)
2. Step app Reach Retention and Revenue (AVAX)

My Twitter thread is here

0xGembus on Twitter: "STEPN on $BSC and $ETHA thread This thread shows the 3 most important metrics in business: 3R (Reach, Retention, Revenue). I learned these 3 metrics from @Covalent_HQ and these results are generated from increment (Covalent data analytic tool) #STEPN #BSC #ETH @Stepnofficial / Twitter"

STEPN on $BSC and $ETHA thread This thread shows the 3 most important metrics in business: 3R (Reach, Retention, Revenue). I learned these 3 metrics from @Covalent_HQ and these results are generated from increment (Covalent data analytic tool) #STEPN #BSC #ETH @Stepnofficial

Total active addresses and transactions STEPN vs STEP app

If we compare the number of active addresses and transactions STEPN vs Step from the launch, STEPN has 212,336 GMT active addresses and 157,659 GST active addresses. Meanwhile, the Step app has 109,910 active addresses. In terms of the total number of transactions, STEPN has 2,861,074 GST transactions and 1,121,125 GMT transactions. Meanwhile, Step app has 401,665 FITFI transactions. Note that those numbers are only based on BSC network for STEPN and AVAX network for Step app. Why does STEPN have more GMT active addresses but the total number of transactions of GST is higher than GMT? GST is easy to get since we are in level 1, while GMT only can be earned after the level 30 NFT game. GST is the native game token of STEPN, while GMT is native for governance.

DAU, WAU, MAU STEPN vs Step app

Some insights from the figures above are:

1. Bear market is real, both STEPN and Step app have a peak in the number of users and transactions in the middle of this year after their launch and went down following the crypto bear market.
2. STEPN on ETH launched on 17 July 2022, and so far the number of STEPN users and transactions on ETH is not quite significant compared to STEPN on BSC network. In this research, I mostly focus on BSC instead of ETH for STEPN.
3. Existing vs New Users are important retention metrics, if we compare STEPN vs Step app, STEPN is the winner. Step app had a really high number of new users around May 10 2022 (which I am not quite sure if it is an organic user), we can just have a look at the average of existing users on the Step app.

Revenue STEPN vs Step app

Regarding STEPN Revenue, there are many ways for STEPN to make money, here are some of them based on my experience using the app.

1. Selling NFTs (sneakers, gems, others), the NFTs are available on its marketplace, Magic Eden (Solana NFT marketplace), Opensea. Everyone who wants to join this game must purchase STEPN sneakers.
2. Platform fees, STEPN has two types of wallets (1. chain wallet (solana, bsc, or eth, this is the general wallet); 2. spending wallet (all tokens received from playing the game will go to this wallet). There is a transaction fee to do a transfer between those two wallets. In addition, upgrading the NFT level, opening the loot box, etc also need fees. Here are two important STEPN BSC wallets: 1) Fee pool wallet: 0xb7D0749a64345552Ef01fF54D6864202215A09a1 2) STEPN Hotwallet at BSC 0x6238872a0bd9f0e19073695532a7ed77ce93c69e. From those two wallets, we might understand how much STEPN makes money.
3. STEPN launch its own DEX on 17th August 2022 called dooar.com. Similar to other DEXs, STEPN can make money from its DEX (trade fee).

It seems the data that I need to answer these revenue questions have not been decoded yet on Covalent, especially for NFT’s transaction on Magic Eden. Here are the collections of Dune queries related to the STEPN revenue metrics on Solana. Please have a look at this link.

In this article, I going to share my results based on data on BSC and Ethereum. Here are what I found.

As mentioned in STEPN documentation that “The Platform Fee and Royalty Fee are reserved to the team to sustain its operation, no less than 5% of the Team’s profit will be sent to the Ecosystem fund. Following are the Team’s Profit on BNBChain, which will be taken on daily basis:

Fee on BNBChain: 0xb7D0749a64345552Ef01fF54D6864202215A09a1"

For the new STEPN DEX called dooar.com, I have not used it yet since it’s still beta. It supports Solana network, there are some analyses on Dune. I am not sure if today it’s already supported for BSC network.

For Step app revenue, it can be seen through the Step app covalent increment link as I posted above. Here are some results from Step app, the number of stakers, unstakers, and the amount of stFITFI.

It is quite hard to find revenue metrics on Step app since I could not find the contract for Step app NFT and there is also no contract address for Step network. Hopefully, they will provide that information in the Step app documentation soon. I asked them but have not gotten any response yet.

Thank you, please do not put your trust 100% in this analysis results, verify instead! I might be wrong in some parts and if you see that I am wrong please let me know. If you have any feedback, please just write in the comment.

More Resources:
Here are some useful dashboards about Move2Earn from different blockchain analytics platforms:

1. StepN Shoe Analytics and Dashboard (Solana and BSC)
2. StepN GMT, GST, NFT Metrics (Solana and BSC)
3. Tracking GMT on Solana
4. Moving to Earn in the Bear Market (StepN vs Genopets on Solana)
5. Sweatcoin Dashboard (Move2Earn on Near)

STEPN https://www.stepn.com/

GMT token

1. BSC 0x3019BF2a2eF8040C242C9a4c5c4BD4C81678b2A1

2. Solana 7i5KKsX2weiTkry7jA4ZwSuXGhs5eJBEjY8vVxR4pfRx

3. Ethereum 0xe3c408bd53c31c085a1746af401a4042954ff740

GST token

1. BSC 0x4a2c860cEC6471b9F5F5a336eB4F38bb21683c98
2. Solana AFbX8oGjGpmVFywbVouvhQSRmiW2aR1mohfahi4Y2AdB
3. Ethereum 0x473037de59cf9484632f4a27b509cfe8d4a31404

STEPN platform fee

1. Fee on BNBChain: 0xb7D0749a64345552Ef01fF54D6864202215A09a1
2. Fee on Ethereum: 0xb7D0749a64345552Ef01fF54D6864202215A09a1
3. STEPN Hotwallet at BSC 0x6238872a0bd9f0e19073695532a7ed77ce93c69e

Trade Fee holding address from DOOAR

ERC-20: 0x08b60476688D222473eaf360Da63d9627e73054C

STEPN NFT

1. BSC 0x69D60ad11fEB699fE5fEEeB16AC691dF090bfd50
2. Solana
3. ETH 0x2A036569DBbe7730D69ed664B74412E49f43C2C0

The contract address of DOOAR is:

Solana: Dooar9JkhdZ7J3LHN3A7YCuoGRUggXhQaG4kijfLGU2j

BNBChain: Factory: 0x1e895bFe59E3A5103e8B7dA3897d1F2391476f3c Router: 0x53e0e51b5Ed9202110D7Ecd637A4581db8b9879F

Ethereum: Factory: 0x1e895bFe59E3A5103e8B7dA3897d1F2391476f3c Router: 0x53e0e51b5Ed9202110D7Ecd637A4581db8b9879F

Dooar is officially released on 17th August 2022, the DEX address is dooar.com

STEPN marketplace https://m.stepn.com/

Multi-chains StepN DEX https://beta.dooar.com/swap/solana

Step App https://step.app/

1. FITFI (Governance token) 0x714f020c54cc9d104b6f4f6998c63ce2a31d1888
2. KCAL (Game token) https://stepscan.io/address/0x68b2DFC494362AAE300F2C401019205d8960226b

More info:

1. Step app DEX (Using Step Network) https://info.step.exchange/#/home
2. StepNetwork explorer https://stepscan.io/

A project such as Dune Analytics is really great for blockchain analytics. We do not need to think about how to do ETL blockchain data, or how to decode the Ethereum and EVM chain data since both raw and decoded blockchain data are available on the Dune data warehouse. If you are a data analyst then everything is provided. We can just start having our hypothesis and firing our SQL query using the Dune dashboard.

When our SQL query is not too complex or the data that we want to retrieve is not too huge, it’s really nice to have data analysis on the Dune dashboard. However, when we want to retrieve huge data or our SQL query consist of complex multiple aggregations with group-by, we will start to wait to run our query, if we are lucky then it might get run, if not it might get time out.

One way to deal with this issue is to useLIMIT on our SQL query. If we have a complex query then start with the small data first, make sure that our query and the output are right then we can run it on the larger data range.

I see the Dune team doing great jobs, I think they also feel exactly the same problem as what we are feeling right now. That’s why they start to have Dune Engine V2 (still Beta). Previously, Dune uses Dune Engine V1 which is based on PostgreSQL. Yes! exactly the PostgreSQL. The problem with Postgres is, this database engine is designed for OLTP (real-time transaction, fast and ideal for inserting, updating, and deleting), and the data is stored as row-based data storage. This DBMS is not for data warehouses. Meanwhile, what we need for blockchain analytics is a blockchain data warehouse, or we call it OLAP (storing historical data for analytical purposes, more read and fewer updates). OLAP is designed for data warehouses and it is column-based storage, so it’s optimized for queries with multiple aggregations.

That’s why the current Dune Engine V2 uses Databrick, the enterprise version of Apache Spark. As I understand, generally, Databrick is used for data lake, not for data warehouse and it’s really good for machine learning and data science stuff. However, the most important thing is, it’s much and much better than using PostgreSQL.

Okay, back to row vs column-oriented databases, here is the video that really good in explaining the difference between row vs column-oriented databases.

https://youtu.be/Vw1fCeD06YI

My conclusion from this article is, it is essential to pay attention when choosing a database engine. If we are building OLTP system, RDBMS such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL are options. However, if our purpose is to build a data warehouse, especially in this case Blockchain data warehouse, then data warehouse engines such as Snowflake or Databrick can be the options.

BTW, I saw on the FlipsideCrypto doc that they use Snowflake for their Blockchain data warehouse. I think it is really nice if there is an article that explains the performance comparison between Dune Engine V2 (Databrick) vs FlipsideCrypto (Snowflake). Please let me know if you have something interesting, please comment below.