Introduction

Our objective in this article will be to determine the 10 most popular assets users swap their algorand for. To find the top 10 assets, we evaluate the assets on two main metrics.

1. The volume of swaps

2. The average amount of algos swapped for

Assumptions

Before we dive into the analysis. Let us first state the important assumptions we make for the analysis.

1. All the assets are evaluated only for this year. That is, we analyse the swaps that have occured this year (2022) only.

2. Only swaps where the algo swapped is greater than 0 are counted.

Analysis

Now that we have stated our objective and the assumptions we have made. we can start with our analysis.

Volume of top 10 assets

We define Volume as the total amount of algos that were used for swapping. We shall then identify what the top 10 assets were

USDC and Yieldly are the most popular assets to swap into. It's quite surprising to see that just the two together make up to more than 50% of the swap volume ( when we consider the top 10 assets). Continuing, we can see that Defly token comes a distant third.

Average amount of algo swapped

Now we look at what the average amount of algo was used for exchanging the algo.

Zone, USDC and Defly have the highest average value of algo exchanged per swap. This implies that such coins though swapped less, move a lot of algos. It could also mean that more whales could be swapping into these assets.

Time series analysis

Our third step involves creating a time series chart to look at the number of swaps (from ALGOs) to each of these 10 ASAs over time by day since the beginning of 2022 and making a note of any trends on the increasing or decreasing popularity of any of the ASAs.

Well, If one would look at the graph more closely, one can find a lot of interesting patterns and stories hidden in the graph. Let's unpack each trend we see and possibly explain why it occurs.

Noted trends

1. There was huge reduction in the number of swaps in the month of January 2022. Especially from 7th Jan to 21st Jan. But why would that be ? Well it's because of the tinyman hack. Tinyman being the most predominant DEX on algorand was hacked on jan 6. This lead to the chaos seen for the next two weeks.

2. USDC, among the most popular coin has stabilised in terms of number of swaps after the initial spike after the resumption of Tinyman DEX. This appears to be the same with STBL

3. Opulous appears to have had a huge spile in the second week of March 2022. This is because of the announcement made by the team that they would start DeFi staking on algorand chain.

4. Defly token which had a very high average algo per swap, appears to be on a downward trend. The number of swaps reduced from the range of 1500-2000 to just below 300 a day.

5. Akita inu, a meme coin based on a dog breed was swapped a lot in the first week of march 2022.

Now that our analysis is over, we can view a nice video visualisation of the changing landscape in algorand chain.