The Rainbow Bridge

In this investigation, we’ll focus on the activity metrics of the Near Bridge.

Dashboard Parameters

1. date_trunc - hourly,daily,weekly,monthly
2. Daily refresh

Agenda

1. Core Metrics
2. Summary & Discussion

Summary & Discussion

From what we can see, and keeping in mind that activity metrics are only a proxy of the underlying value moving through the bridge, we can see that a lot of the first movers (ETH→NEAR) may have returned (NEAR→ETH), but what is also clear is that there’s still a lot of demand for the bridge. When looking at the average transactions per active and unique user we can see that for ETH→NEAR in the past 90 days each unique user executes approximately 2 transactions on average and for NEAR→ETH about 2, which still indicates interest in using the bridge and that users are approximately bridging more than ones at a time on either side. This could be because NEAR has still really low fees, at least compared to Ethereum, users prefer to make swaps or other DeFi actions on a cheaper network and then bridge back their assets on a more established one.

We can see that there was a mass movement around the 22nd of December from ETH→NEAR and another massive movement around May 12th (post-collapse of Terra). I wonder if the former date is also related to some announcement or external event.

Bonus

Stablecoin transfers ETH→NEAR

What we can see is that USDC, USDT and DAi are the preferred stablecoins that people are bridging over to NEAR. What we can also see is that there was a large movement of USDC around the 12th of May 2022.