Research the DeFi market by the total number of users

特邀专栏作者

2020-05-04 10:19 (UTC+8)

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A common rule in DeFi projects is that any project v2 release or product change will cause a large jump in the growth rate of new users.

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A common rule in DeFi projects is that any project v2 release or product change will cause a large jump in the growth rate of new users.

Editor's Note: This article comes fromCrypto Valley Live (ID: cryptovalley)Editor's Note: This article comes from

Crypto Valley Live (ID: cryptovalley)

, Author: Richard Chen, translation: Ziming, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

Currently, the most popular indicator adopted by DeFi is the total value locked in DeFi (TVL). As a newly launched indicator that guides market liquidity, it does perform well for various projects. After all, automatic market makers like Uniswap and digital currency market platforms like Compound will not play their due role without sufficient liquidity.

But TVL alone is an incomplete measure. First, TVL denominated in USD is somewhat misleading and tends to be driven by fluctuations in the price of ETH. In addition, for projects like ETH as collateral assets, or stable coins like DAI, when the price of ETH falls, the TVL denominated in ETH will actually increase (because the price ratio of DAI/ETH becomes larger), vice versa.

More importantly, it is well known that the usage of DeFi is very uneven, or that a very small number of users account for the vast majority of usage. A single MakerDAOCDP holder #3088 has 127,274 ETH as collateral, which is 17 times that of the second largest CDP holder. The deposited assets of the three users on InstaDApp account for about 80% of all users. There are many other similar examples in DeFi (the above are just two extremes)."Since then, the TVL indicator will be artificially exaggerated, because the DeFi ecosystem only relies on this small number of users to provide most of the liquidity and mortgage assets for different projects, which also reduces the degree of decentralization of DeFi."Therefore, as a supplement to the TVL indicator, we should also pay attention to the total number of users as a supplement to the TVL indicator, so as to provide a more comprehensive perspective for the adoption of DeFi."mainstream adoption model", but"The criteria are not based on whether there are"Billions of dollars in value locked in smart contracts

, but

How many ordinary moms and dads are using this product

. The reason why Coinbase can become a company worth 8 billion dollars and can become the mainstream of the market is precisely because of its more than 30 million users.

Below, the author has compiled some recent data on the total number of users of top DeFi projects (measured by unique addresses). But addresses are not a perfect indicator of the total number of users, because many people (including me) use multiple addresses. Having said that, you can convert the above numbers by how many duplicate "users" (or addresses) there are.

Because the numbers for these charts are cumulative, they are never decremented. You can use the first derivative of the graph to calculate daily new users, and you can use the second derivative of the graph to calculate the growth rate of daily new users. The image data can also reveal other information if explored further.

May 23, 2019: Compound launches Compound v2.

July 24, 2019: The interest rate for lending DAI reaches a level of nearly 15%.

September 1, 2019: ENS short name auction launched on OpenSea.

July 26, 2019: CoinbaseEarn launched the Generate Dai with Maker lesson, which led Coinbase users to create a large number of small CDP accounts from the Coinbase Wallet.

November 18, 2019: MakerDAO launches Multi-Collateral DAI.

Creating a CDP account is not the same thing as actually using DAI as a medium of exchange, so the usage of DAI has actually increased.

April 17, 2019: dYdX launches v2 solomargin trading.

April 20, 2020: dYdX withdraws from the BTC perpetual contract market.

December 6, 2018: Havven changed its name to Synthetix and launched a synthetic token backed by digital currency.

March 13, 2019: Synthetix changed the digital currency policy to increase the supply of SNX and use the additional allocated SNX as staking rewards.

November 6, 2018: The US House of Representatives midterm election market traded over $3.3 million.

core points

February 14, 2020: The bZx attack occurs, causing NexusMutual to pay over $30,000 in claims and recover $1.3 million in new smart contracts to get out of the woods.