Introduction

This Bounty will examine which protocols are driving the most growth for Terra. My main source of information for this dashboard will be DefiLama.

Firstly, let's look at the overall picture:

What we can see here, by looking at the monthly change, is that the most growth has been encountered by Risk Harbor, Aperture Finance, and Spectrum Protocol. In the next part, I will do some research on those three sectors that have attracted the most users in the past month, and see what made users attracted to them! I will also investigate some other sectors, some of which will be focused on staking, others on NFTs - the goal of this dashboard is to examine the reasons for growth of several different protocols.

Risk Harbor - sector: INSURANCE

Risk Harbor is a risk management marketplace for decentralized finance (DeFi) that utilizes a completely automated, transparent, and impartial invariant detection mechanism to secure liquidity providers and stakers against smart contract risks, hacks, and attacks.

Aperture Finance - sector: INVESTING

Aperture Finance is a cross-chain investment ecosystem with a community-driven marketplace for strategies. It allows users to invest into different stocks, such as Apple, Amazon or Facebook within a DeFi environment. What drove people into this protocol is the ability to have all their DeFi needs taken care of in one single place, and it's an amazing thing to be able to invest into all kinds of stocks wile also being in a non-centralised place!

Spectrum Protocol - sector: YIELD OPTIMISER

Spectrum Protocol, one of my personal favourites, allows users to put their assets into a variety of liquidity pools - but what is the most exciting part here, is that any rewards generated by the LP are sold and auto-compounded and auto-stake within the pool! The ability to leave your assets and have them grow due to the auto-compounding and auto-staking has driven a lot of users into Spectrum! A few examples of the Liquidity Pools are shown below:

Anchor Protocol - sector: STAKING

Another of my personal favourites, and probably the reason why I have heard about Terra in the first place, long long time ago! Anchor allows users to stake their UST for an amazing APY % - that used to be around 20% but has now started to drop since the beginning of May due to the decrease in the yield reserve. Even though this is the case, the amount of users that believe in Anchor is HUGE. We can see that the total TVL, according to DefiLama is... almost 17 BILLION $! I think the number speaks for itself and there is not much to say about Anchor, other that it definitely contributed to the growth of Terra to a very large extent.

MARS Protocol - sector: LEND/BORROW

MARS has initially attracted a lot of users, due to the ability to lock your UST and forget about it for a maximum of 18 months, and as a result of this, get an airdrop of MARS tokens. Those MARS tokens can then be used to govern the protocol, using the xMARS governance token. One could point out that in the past month there has not been a lot of attraction here, but what we have to remember is that MARS is still within its prime days! I'm sure the developers will improve the 'fields of Mars' section and add more variety to it, which in the future will attract even more growth to the community.

I have completed a lot of in-depth analysis in the past specifically about MARS here on Flipside, which can be found here: The Red Planet. One of the most insightful graphs from that dashboard is the following, which lets us see how quickly MARS has grown based on the cumulative daily user count.

KNOWHERE.ART - sector: NFTs

The next sector that needs to be considered is the sector of NFTs. Knowhere has been one of the biggest NFT marketplaces on Terra that has attracted users by allowing them to mint and sell beautiful art pieces using LUNA.

We can see that Knowhere has had a big number of transactions in the past day (836 transactions) that totalled over 5 thousand LUNA. Maybe this is not a lot in comparison to the amount deposited to Anchor on a daily basis... but what matters here is that Knwoehre is a very interesting platform and without it, users wouldn't be able to buy art using their LUNA, and equally, artists wouldn't be able to get attention and attraction from the Terra world!

Below are two charts to help in visualising how much UST has been deposited on and borrowed from Anchor. As we can see, users deposit and borrow UST on a daily basis, the growth of Anchor in the past month has not been as massive as in the beginning, but we can still see a ~ 8.6% increase in the TVL in the past month.

Conclusion

There are many exciting protocols within different sectors on Terra. Some of them attract users by proving with something new and different from other places, such as Risk Harbour with its innovative offer of insurance. Other protocols, such as Anchor, allow users to stake their stablecoin for a great APY in return, or such as Spectrum, where users can auto-compound and auto-stake their rewards obtained from a variety of liquidity pools. What this dashboard shows is that Terra continues to grow with exponential growth. New protocols are born and attract new users to the ecosystem, whether it is for NFT, for a large APY, or for being able to invest in stocks. Either way, this dashboard has shown what the potential of Terra is based on the sectors where the growth has been the greatest in the past month.