Problem

There’s been some unusual activity with Gnosis as pointed out by our community. Time to figure out exactly what’s going on.

\n

Take a deep dive into recent activity on Gnosis, especially recent rapid rises in the number of active users, transactions, and more. Make any hypothesis you can about what is driving this activity. Is there a new dapp that launched? Is there some incentive program going on? Or is the spike in users/txns due to some sybil attack?

1️⃣ Definition

What is Gnosis Blockchain?

Gnosis is an open-source, decentralized prediction market built on the Ethereum blockchain. Users are able to create markets where they can speculate on any event or arbitrary outcome. By using the Ethereum Protocol, Gnosis is able to guarantee a secure and transparent ecosystem. [1]

What is Arbitrary Message Bridge (AMB)?

The main use case of the Arbitrary Message Bridge (AMB) between the Rinkeby Testnet and the xDai chain is to relay tokens emitted by Reddit (e.g. Moons and Bricks) to a chain with real value (xDai) through the AMB extensions. [2]

2️⃣ Method

• In this analysis, we are going to look at different aspects of the Gnosis chain to find out any unusual activity in recent days

• Timeframe: last 60 days, on a daily basis

• Defining New User as the first time a wallet appeared on the sender or receiver of a transaction

• Calculating the daily transactions count and fees, users count, xDAI transfer amount and senders count, blocks count and average TXs per block on a daily basis, number of events and called contracts, new and total Gnosis users

• Calculating the failed & succeeded transaction and looking at them separately

• Plotting the result and discussing it

More info on method including used contracts and tables can be found on Appendix!

\

3️⃣ Gnosis Overview

3.1 Blocks Overview

• We can see a little downtrend in the daily number of blocks, but the numbers are regular totaly
• After the fall in total generated fees in late August, we can see a little spike in late September
• There is a downtrend for the unique number of miners that went from ~16 to ~12
• We can see a big jump in the daily average transaction per block from October 4 to 8, the only considerable change in recent days in this part

3.2 Events Overview

• For the number of events, we had a downtrend in August, and after that a big jump on October 4, when we came to 401K events from 206K events on the previous day
• The number of called contracts had some normal ups and downs, as you can see
• On October 4, 4345 unique contracts were called through 401K events

3.4 xDAI Transfer Overview

• As you can see, there are high amounts of xDAI transfers in mid-September and October 14th
• There are a very high number of xDAI transfer transactions on October 4 & 5
• On October 4th, 1375 senders sent ~3M xDAI to ~36K receivers through ~49K transactions
• On October 5th, 56K senders sent ~1.3M xDAI to 1893 receivers through ~69K transactions

3.3 Transactions Overview

• As you can see, there are very high volumes from October 4 to 8 in the number of transactions, varying from ~185K to ~364K
• There is a high number of transaction senders on October 5, with around 57K users
• We can also see a high amount of transactions on September 19 & 20 and a high number of transaction senders on September 27 & 28

3.5 New Users Growth

• Looking at the growth of new users, we can see a very high spike on October 4th, when ~38K new users came to Gnosis, making a 1.4% growth in the total number of users, from ~2.58M to ~2.62M
• Since the starting day, 2.64M unique wallets created in Gnosis

3.6 Transactions Status

• There are a very high number of failed transactions from October 4 to 8
• ~19.5% on October 4th, and ~70% to ~85% from October 5 to 8 are the percentage of failed transactions among all transactions
• If we ignore the failed transactions, only the October 4 and 5 had an unusual high number of transactions in recent days

3.7 Failed Transactions

• Looking at the failed transactions alone, we can see a very high number of failed transactions from October 4 to 8, which most of which belong to AMB Rinkeby Bridge
• AMB Rinkeby Bridge had ~284K failed transactions on October 7th, the highest among all
• There was also a high number of failed transactions on September 19 and 20
• More than 70% of all failed transactions (~904K TXs) in the last 60 days belong to AMB Rinkeby Bridge, which almost happened only on five days on October 4 to 8

3.8 Succeeded Transactions

• Looking at the succeeded transactions, there are a high number of transactions on October 4th and 5th in recent days
• ~72K AMB Rinkeby Bridge transactions for bridging xMOON into Gnosis happened on October 4th, ~44% of the total transaction on that day
• There were ~36K OminiBridge Reward transactions for sending 0.01 $xDAI into user’s wallets on October 4th, ~21% of the total transaction on that day
• On October 5th, ~54K transactions in which users transferred their $xDAI rewards into 0x37efe9b… wallet, ~50% of the total transaction on that day

4️⃣ Conclusion

In this analysis, we went through a deep dive into the Gnosis chain to find out any specific trend and activity in recent days, and here are our findings:

• There was a big jump in the daily average transaction per block from October 4 to 8, from around 4 TXs to around 20 TXs

• On October 4, 4345 unique Contracts were called through 401K Events, A high volume in recent days

• There are very high volumes from October 4 to 8 in the number of transactions, varying from ~185K to ~364K, and a high number of transaction senders on October 5, with around 57K users

• On October 4, 1375 senders sent ~3M xDAI to ~36K receivers through ~49K transactions

• On October 5, 56K senders sent ~1.3M xDAI to 1893 receivers through ~69K transactions

• Looking at the growth of new users, on October 4, ~38K new users came to Gnosis, making a 1.4% growth in the total number of users, from ~2.58M to ~2.62M

• There are a very high number of failed transactions from October 4 to 8, varying from ~19.5% to ~85%, and ignoring the failed transactions, only October 4 and 5 had an unusually high number of transactions in recent days

• There is a very high number of failed transactions from October 4 to 8, which most of which belong to AMB Rinkeby Bridge

• There are a very high number of succeeded transactions from October 4 to 5, which :

  • ~72K AMB Rinkeby Bridge transactions for bridging xMOON into Gnosis happened on October 4
  • ~36K OminiBridge Reward transactions for sending 0.01 $xDAI into user’s wallets on October 4
  • ~54K transactions in which users transferred their $xDAI rewards into 0x37efe9b… wallet on October 5

Appendix

• The main table that was used for this analysis was gnosis.core.fact_transactions that includes all Gnosis transactions

• The s was gnosis.core.fact_blocks, gnosis.core.fact_event_logs and gnosis.core.ez_xdai_transfers where tables used for this analysis

• AMB Rinkeby Bridge contract address: 0xc38d4991c951fe8bce1a12beef2046ef36b0fa4a

• OmniBridge Reward address: 0x562a9171c251777766285e877c80e7f4cc02d165

• The address that reward transferred to: 0x37efe9b31830653039edc3b212a6e1b882cd46b4