Algorand x Fifa Partnership

    Q64. On May 2nd, Algorand announced a technical partnership with Fifa causing the price to move 25%. Over the rest of the week, how did this impact Algorand blockchain activity?

    Introduction

    On Monday, May 2nd FIFA announced an agreement with Algorand in which it will become the official blockchain platform of FIFA and provide a wallet solution, presumably for the World Cup in Qatar 2022 as a Regional Supporter and the Wome's World Cup Australia and New Zealand as Official Sponsor.

    Additionally, Algorand will support FIFA in developing its digital assets strategy (what ever that means) and FIFA will provide advertising, media exposure and promotional opportunities.

    This is not the first partnership with a leading sports institution from Algorand after partnering with World Chess to be the first official blockchain partner of the FIDE Grand Prix Series, which gave a lot of exposure during the FIDE World Championship Dubai 2021.

    Will we see the next football World Champions lifting the cup with the Algorand logo on the back?

    Methodology

    Up to 9 CTEs were combined for this analysis, using the algorand.payment_transactions tables for transactions of ALGO and wallet numbers, the algorand.account and algorand.blockfor new addresses, again thealgorand.payment_transactionsfor active addresses (defined as any address which sent a transaction) thealgorand.swapsfor swap statistics and the newalgorand.prices_swap` table for ALGO price.

    Results

    New wallets

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    Price action on the week of the announcement, rising from 0.6 USD to 0.75 USD (25% increase) ... and back after the recent blood bath.

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    Figure 1. shows the number of new addresses created during the FIFA week. There is a very significant surge from May 4th until May 9th. A total of 1.37M new wallets were created in the week.

    ALGO amount transferred and number of transactions

    Figures 3. and 4. show the ALGO transferred and transactions, both for total and sent from new wallets.

    In terms of total transferred ALGO, there are some days with increased volume like May 6th with almost 240M ALGO and days like May 5th with 75M, just like May 2nd. Quite erratic behaviour. Transactions do see a behaviour which looks correlated to the price action, surging from around 200k to over 500k with similar timing.

    Transferred ALGO from new wallets remains relatively low except from one day of around 5 times the volume (May 7th with 20M transferred) while transactions for this group see an increase from 3k on May 2nd to between 5k and 6k which moves into the following week.

    Figures 5. and 6. show the ALGO transferred and transactions, both for total and sent to new wallets.

    In terms of total transferred ALGO, there are some days with increased volume like May 6th with almost 240M ALGO and days like May 5th with 75M, just like May 2nd. Quite erratic behaviour. Transactions do see a behaviour which looks correlated to the price action, surging from around 200k to over 500k with similar timing.

    Transferred ALGO to new wallets remains relatively low except from one day of around 5 times the volume (May 3rd with 23M transferred). Transactions to new wallets see a massive 30x increase between the number at the beginning of the week, below 10k transactions, and the number mid-week, just over 300k. It returns to levels of 13k on May 10th.

    Figures 7. and 8. show the ALGO transferred and transactions, both for total and sent from centralized exchanges (cex).

    ALGO transferred from CEXes accounts follow an erratic behaviour, with total ALGO transferred between 12M on Monday and 50M on Friday. The following week started with over 62M ALGO transferred from CEX wallets.

    Conclusions

    • There is a clear uptick in new wallets created on May 4th, two days after the announcement, lasting until May 9th. The whole week saw almost 1.4M new addresses created.

    • The daily amount of ALGOS transferred increased with no clear pattern, showing the week's max on May 6th with 240M ALGO. May 8th saw 200M ALGO transferred while May 7th had similar levels than the day of the annoucement, just below 80M ALGO. Transfers to new wallets saw an increase on May 3rd and transfers from new wallets saw an increase on May 7th, to 23M and 20M ALGO respectively.

    • There is a clear increase in transactions for the week doubling from the numbers on May 2nd for total transactions and transactions from new wallets. But the biggest increase is for the transactions sent to new wallets - from 10k-15k levels on May 2nd and 3rd till over 300k on May 8th.

    • Transactions from centralized exchange also saw an increase - in number of transactions but especially in ALGO transferred. Up to 60M ALGO were sent from CEX to on-chain wallets, the day with the biggest price drop.

    • On the swaps side, a significant increase in number of swaps and volume to ALGO can be seen the following day of the announcement, both metrics roughly doubling.

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    The biggest takeaway is that newly created addresses saw a significant increase on transactions sent to them while this increase can not be traced back clearly to sent from cex alone. This leads me to think that the most active new wallets were created by entities already active in Algorand. We'll need to see if the FIFA deal helps bring more adoption.

    Figures 9. and 10. show the number of swaps and amount swapped to ALGO. Both metrics see an increase the day after the annoucement.