Introduction

An essential indicator of a healthy ecosystem is the presence of a dedicated user base that drives innovation across the protocol as a whole. The research aims to shed light on the activities of NEAR wallets and unearth intriguing data points that can spark further inquiries. In what ways may humans engage with the physical structures of ecosystems? What level of safety concern do they have? Is there a trend toward using the ecosystem? The typical time a new customer spends on your site is: These are only a few of the many intriguing issues that will be explored in this study; so, strap in and let's get to work!

NEAR citizens can participate in a whole host of activities on NEAR -

• Staking their NEAR to help secure the city, while gaining staking rewards
• They could trade on the financial districts via decentralisation exchanges (swaps) or provide liquidity
• They could mint or buy NFTs from marketplaces such as Paras
• They could deposit their assets to borrow or loan them out in money markets (Burrow Cash)

Meta Pool

Users stake $NEAR for $stNEAR, which increases in value relative to $NEAR after each epoch.

Stake NEAR, receive stNEAR for AMMs and Lending protocols like Ref.Finance and Burrow Cash. Meta Pool with MetaYield lets users fund new initiatives.

Meta Pool's algorithms assign NEAR to 87 validators and monitor user performance and uptime[1].

LiNEAR

Users stake $NEAR for $LiNEAR, which increases in value relative to $NEAR after each epoch.

Utility: Switch between DeFi protocols on NEAR and Aurora or $NEAR. DeFi yields add to staking rewards

Decentralize network security by delegating stake to multiple validators[2].

Stader

$NEAR is staked for $NearX.

Yield farming backed by SD tokens for NEAR-NearX LP, future NFT and gaming utility proposed

Decentralization: NearX tokens for liquidity staking. Stader helps network decentralization through validator monitoring and rebalancing[3].

Method

In this analysis, we will look at key new user activities on NEAR and explore what do NEAR users commonly participate in and track the tends of them.

To do these I used the following tables:

• ethereum.core.fact_event_logs
• near.core.fact_transactions
• near.core.fact_receipts
• near.core.fact_actions_events_function_call

I will dive into newcomers from other chains and liquid staking on the NEAR blockchain currently. Specifically, I will explore:

• how many users came from other chains via rainbow bridge and how those interacted with NEAR ecosystem
• how much NEAR has been staked through liquid staking platforms
• how many users have utilised liquid staking & the type of users on liquid staking

The Past_days parameter above allows you to select the number of days prior to the current date to use in computations, and the Frequency field lets you customize the time interval of over-time charts to be daily, weekly, or monthly.

> (You need a Flipside account to make adjustments)

The queries have brought from the TZM#8337, Pinehearst#1947 & mhm#1465 dashboards and modified, Thanks to them.

Analysis

:hourglass_flowing_sand: Overall View

As of two charts bellow:

• Staking NEAR, Mint NFT and Swap on Dex was the most popular interactions explored in terms of unique user count, with 2.7% of all citizens doing so.
• Trading on the financial district (Decentralized exchanges) was the third most popular activity, with 11.3k users (0.66%). Only a small proportion (~1.23%) of citizen ever provided liquidity on DEXs.
• Around 1 in every 100 citizens will mint an NFT, while only 0.16 in 100 will buy on from a Market
• Money markets (Burrow) and minting of USN were the least popular activity, with <0.022% of users ever interacting with these protocols

✍🏻 Conclusion

This dashboard have made to track the newcomers behaving on NEAR protocol to find the loyalty of them on ecosystem, because of when an ecosystem is on a good heath mode, its users and specially new users tends to be more and more active on that. Overall, based on current dashboard results, the health of NEAR protocol has improved and can be hopeful by when market conditions going to be more healthy, the NEAR protocol follow the market and be better than now.

In comparison to Q3, the number of new and active wallets are have smoothly increased.

Near delegation is still higher than undelegation that is a positive signal for ecosystem.

References of Queries:

About:

• Author: HaM☰d

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• Discord: 0xHaM☰d#8391

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• Twitter: @arjmandi_hamed

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• Email: h_arjmandi2012@yahoo.com

Bounty’s Purpose

Each quarter, the NEAR Foundation publishes data to help the NEAR community understand the health of the ecosystem as part of their NEAR Foundation Transparency Report.

We want your help in making the NEAR ecosystem even more transparent. How can you improve on the existing Transparency Report?

Explain which metrics should be taken into consideration and why. Then, analyze those metrics over the last several weeks and draw your own conclusions on the health of the NEAR ecosystem

Hey there 👋!

Firstly, I appreciate you sticking with it until the conclusion.

I'm Hamed, a civil engineering Ph.D.

student interested in data analysis.

I've made many similar dashboards and visualizations since I started at Flipside in January.

Please take a look at my various contact details and let me know what you think.

:mag_right: Findings:

In contract, in terms of total transactions count Swap on Dex, Mint NFT and Stake NEAR were the top popular actions.

:mag_right: Findings:

The chart right represent the emigrants from Ethereum and Aurora chains to NEAR via rainbow bridge as the major bridging platform on NEAR protocol.

As can be seen the the most immigration transactions count executed in Dec 7th and Nov 9th from Ethereum and Aurora, respectively.

Over the past 90 days, more than $79.6M & $43M inflowed to NEAR protocol from Ethereum and Aurora, respectively.

:mag_right: Findings:

The chart right represent the emigrants from NEAR to Ethereum and Aurora chains via rainbow bridge as the major bridging platform on NEAR protocol.

As can be seen the the most immigration transactions count executed in Nov 9th and after this date decreased to bellow 20 and 200 to Ethereum and Aurora, respectively.

The most volume exited from NEAR on Nov 9th, two days after FTX’s demise.

Over the past 90 days, more than $122.15M & $39.18M exited from NEAR protocol to Ethereum and Aurora, respectively.

🚗 Traffic & Interactions

How are the users spending their time? Is there a notable difference between whales and non-whales?

• Interactions with DeFi products
• Interactions with the NFT scene
• Other transactions such as staking, transfers, bridging, etc…

As expected, whales transactions are mostly restricted to DeFi platforms, staking and moving funds from one wallet to another, whether that is on or off chain.

:hourglass_flowing_sand: Newcomers

Before diving into NEAR users' on-chain activities, we conduct a broad survey of them to learn about their demographics and interests. The quickest and most convenient method of funding a new wallet is to transfer NEAR from a cryptocurrency exchange (CEX) or an existing wallet. However, there is a lot of foot traffic on the Rainbow Bridge, the main route connecting the ecosystem to Ethereum (and Aurora). This is where we start looking into how to get aboard the NEAR spaceship.

For the purposes of this analysis, a "new wallet" is defined as any wallet created within the last 90 days (Q4, 2022). The dataset is limited to valid addresses only to ensure reliable information about the habits of freshly created wallets.

:mag_right: Findings:

As NEAR staked through liquid protocol will be reallocated by the protocol, the delegations from relaying or operation contractors from the liquid staking protocols are excluded in the native staking transactions to avoid double counting. This analysis explores the amount of NEAR staked, not accounting for unstaking transactions.

Let’s now move on to analyzing the behavior of the delegators on NEAR. In a DPoS, users can delegate their NEAR to share part of the revenue (aka staking rewards) and contribute to the decentralization of the network (or centralization for that matter). Over time, how has the volume and traffic changed?

On the right, we can see how many delegations and undelegations happened over time (on a daily basis). Interestingly enough, the chart almost looks mirrored.

:mag_right: Findings:

The right-hand chart shows that NEAR's wallet count increased smoothly over Q4, 2022.

All the wallets that were made using a referral link are shown in orange on the graph.

🔮 New Wallets General Data

To get an idea of how organic the adoption of the ecosystem is, let’s take a look at some general data about these newly created wallets and how they operate right after their creation. What’s the user retention looking like?

Observations

The distribution map on the left immediately dispels any uncertainty regarding the retention and growth in users seen by late 2021.

50 percent of the 22K newly created wallets have never made more than 2 transactions on-chain. If we exclude these IPs from the user growth calculation, we get a much lower number that doesn't look so great when examined in isolation.

We can verify this by inspecting the average and median transaction amounts for all of the freshly created wallets.

Right below, we have a visualization of the assumptions made so far. The NET growth of the user base on NEAR is free falling.

Because of the severe environment and bearish trend we are experiencing, many of the negative indications we are discussing can be found on many different platforms/protocols. This investigation shows that the detrimental impacts are magnified for NEAR affected by FTX and Alameda’s demise.

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:mag_right: Findings:

The data presented here bolster the overarching conclusion that many wallets just make a brief appearance but never make another purchase.

Fair enough, the right-hand activity curve is "healthier" than the figures presented so far. Age of all freshly generated wallets and number of unique days they were active are also included in the median and average counts and numbers.

Some extra data

Here’s a quick look at the wallets in question and the distribution of the time elapsed between the first tx executed and their creation date.

:droplet::cut_of_meat: Liquid Staking on NEAR

:mag_right: Findings:

As of charts above right and right, can be seen that

Newer wallets make up for the majority of the DeFi traffic

Same goes for the NFT dApps respect to common active users.

🥾 First Steps

Finally, how does a brand new wallet usually spend its first several days? The first 10 transactions of every wallet have been studied to provide a solution to this query.

• NFTs are a far more significant factor in the success of the user onboarding process.
• Some whales use DeFi devices, but for the most part whales just "stake and forget."

:mag_right: Findings:

• With a Nakamoto coefficient of 8 and a Gini coefficient of 0.52, some factors responsible for the decentralization of the network can be improved.
• The distribution of staked Ⓝ NEAR should be incentivized toward smaller validators.
• The inflow and outflow of delegations are quite healthy considering the broader market conditions.

Of the 3 platforms, Meat Pool received the most amount of NEAR delegated, at 1.55M. The daily volume of NEAR staked has been hovering bellow 100K most days over past 90 days.

The proportion of NEAR delegated through liquid staking platforms has been spiked on some days for Meta and Linear pools, reaching 1M and 500K dominance in some days(Nov 12 & 26, Dec 15 for Linear & Meta, respectively).

Daily new stakers shown in the chart above. as can be seen after reaching at over 200 in Nov 12, decreased to date.

Overall, more than 11.27K users have staked their token for first time over past 90 days.

🌉 The Bridge Interaction

:mag_right: Findings:

Overall, can be observed, over past 90 days, more than $42M & $4M exited from NEAR to Ethereum Aurora in net state, respectively.

So can be said that, NEAR protocol doesn’t health in terms of net flow from other chains.

Observations on the data presented around decentralization

> The Nakamoto coefficient is the number of validators (nodes) that would have to collude together to successfully slow down or block any respective blockchain from functioning properly

This is definitely something that should be addressed especially if the chain starts gaining significant traction. The Lorenz curve (on the left) and Gini coefficient, validate the idea of a needed improvement in this department. For reference, a value of 1 means that only one decision maker (validator) is needed to compromise the system. The closer we get to 0, the more decentralized and “equal” the distribution is.

> The Lorenz Curve shows the cumulative share of voting power in the validator set. In a case of perfect equality, the chart would show a straight 45-degree line connecting the x and y-axis.

In practice, when trying to actually conduct an attack on the blockchain, the power and capital needed to actually be able to take over the chain is higher than what these coefficients state since additional variables come into play.

:timer_clock: Where are NEAR citizens from?

• User timezone analysis, referencing framework from Pinehearst#1947’s dashboard . In short, he used transaction activity to estimate where the user is most likely from.

Note that the user count here is low as we are looking at users that have made transactions in >20 unique hours, which is necessary for this analysis.

NEAR citizen seems to come from Central Asia to Southeast Asia Region.

We see users clustering around the -2 UTC to +8 UTC region. This suggests that most of the users were from Mid-Atlantic (? which is odd) and South/Central Asia region.

Here, we add an additional filter to look at the active users defined in this analysis. Similar to the previous analysis, we see a similar distribution, but with spikes in user count in specific timezones:

• -2 UTC: Mid-Atlantic Region
• -3 UTC: Brasilia, Buenos Aires, Greenland, Salvador Region

This chart counts the number of new wallets created and performing on NEAR.

NEAR saw a total of 5.42M new citizens from September 2021

From Sep 2021, there were 5.42M wallets created that has initiated a transaction. Compared to 2021 Q4, the number of new wallets has been increasing over 2022 Q4. Currently, there is around 8-10k new wallet created daily.

For unknown reasons, there were huge spikes in new wallets in mid-March & Sep 2022. Note that wallets that are created that have not initiated any transactions will not be identified here.

Here, we filter out wallets with > 10k transaction counts to exclude bots/contracts.

Most of the citizens were actually just sojourners.

The chart above shows the cumulative new wallets by the number of days where they have been active. From the chart above, we see a sharp drop in new users between those who have been online for a day to those who are online for 5 or more days (3.65M → 608.8k).

When we look at users who are online for > 14 days, this drops to ~260k. This suggests that the majority of the citizens were more like sojourners, leaving after a day or two of visit.