Introduction

Ever heard of Sushibar? It's great if you have, if not then it's completely fine. But it's advisable to have a basic understanding of sushiswap and its working.

So let's start with understanding what SushiBar is and how xSushi is intertwined with it.

SushiBar and xSUSHI

SushiBar is a sushiswap pool where you can stake your sushiswap tokens and get a reward for staking. When you stake your sushi token, you get xSushi token in return. You could think of xSushi as representation of your share in the sushi pool. This share can be traded with others and you might even add xSushi into another liquidity pool to get some extra rewards.

Okay, now you might ask who gives me a reward and where do they generate money from? So everytime a swap takes place in any of the hundreds of pools across sushiswap, a 0.3 % is collected as transaction fees out of which a 0.05% is added to the sushibar. So at a particular time of the day, a contract sells all the accumulated liquidity pool tokens from the sushibar in return for Sushi tokens. These sushi tokens are then divided into users based on their sushi token (or in other words xSushi). The initial Sushi token staked can be used by the contract to increase the pool volume if required.

Alright fair enough, I WANT MY SUSHI, what should i do? If you would like to get your sushi back, you could return your xSUSHI to the contract which would then burn those xSUSHI and credit your initial sushi along with rewards to your wallet address. However, do keep in mind that the gas fees are high and also that there is a staking period.

If you would like to read more about the protocol, head over to the official web page https://docs.sushi.com/products/yield-farming/the-sushibar

Objective

Draw charts showing sushi tokens transferred to the Sushibar. Do it at different frequencies and describe the trends if any.

Methodology

In order to reach our end result of visualizing the tokens transferred to sushibar, we need to preprocess the data from the table. In this analysis we not only look at the trend of tokens transferred to the sushibar, we shall also look at the return of sushi. that is how they are burned.

Mint A process where a smart contract generates new tokens. Certain actions can be set to trigger the process. One such process is when the sushibar contract receives sushi, it mints xSushi. Hence to find such records, we find transactions where the contract address is sushibar(0x8798249c2e607446efb7ad49ec89dd1865ff4272) and the sender or from_address is genesis (0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000).

Burn A process where a smart contract removes tokens from supply. Certain actions can be set to trigger the process. One such process is when the sushibar contract receives xsushi, it burns them. Hence to find such records, we find transactions where the contract address is sushibar(0x8798249c2e607446efb7ad49ec89dd1865ff4272) and the sender or to_address is genesis (0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000).

NOTE : hereon, mint would mean transferring sushi to sushibar and burn would mean redeeming sushi from sushibar

Time periods Our objective is to find the trend of minting (tokens transferred to sushibar) over different time periods. Here we need to be sensibly select the right time periods. So we pick the following time periods.

1. Monthly trend -> the service started in September 2020, that is 18 months ago. As it is not a multiple of 12, we consider only the last 12 months for the analysis.
2. Weekly trend -> We shall look at the trend over each weekday
3. Hourly trend -> We check if there is some particular time where the transactions are low or very high.

We ignore the second, minute trend as they are too fine to yield any results. And we also ignore the year component as it has been only 1 and a half year, so we ignore it because of the lack of data.

Analysis

Alright now that we know all the basic per-requisites and we also have outlined what our objectives and methodology is, we shall now look at the graphs.

Graphs, Here we come.

1. Mint and Burn trend

We start with the total mints and burns since the start of the contract.

It appears that the Mint and burn of xSUSHI are highly correlated and have almost the same trend. Both have a peak in the month of November 2020. While the peak burnt amount is 30M xSUSHI coins, the peak of minting xSUSHI is close to 37 Million, both in the month of November 2020.

Both appear to taper off after than, especially in the recent months where the mint and burns are in the range of 150-300 thousand tokens. One reason could be the initial buzz around DEX that propelled people to invest more into xSUSHI and SUSHI in general.

2. xSUSHI Mint and Burn over month

We now look at the xSUSHI Mint and Burn over month for the last 1 year

We can observe that the months of May-June-July 2021 have been particularly very active for sushibar. This can be easily attributed to the defi summer 2021. A rush towards towards decentralized finance could have caused the huge increase in the minting and burning.

3. xSushi Mint and burn over weekdays

We shall now look at how xSushi were Minted and burned over weekdays. Hopefully we might some days of the week where users tend to mint or burn a lot.

First we need to understand what the x-axis denotes. 0 -> Sunday

1 -> Monday

2 -> Tuesday

3 -> Wednesday

4 -> Thursday

5 -> Friday

6 -> Saturday

On inspecting the graph, we can see that the minting and burning is significantly higher on the weekdays rather than on weekends. Does this indicate, people who use sushibar are more full-time investors rather than part-time investors who do it as a hobby on weekends ?

4. xSUSHI mint and burn over hour

We shall now look at how xSUSHI was minted and burned over hour of the day. Hopefully we might find a trend indicating that certain hours are more preferred for the activity.

The x-axis is in terms of a 24 hour format of the UTC time. that would mean that 1 PM UTC would be represented as 13.

From the graph, we can see that the amount of xSUSHI burnt and minted is less during the 5 AM and 1 PM UTC. Is this because this coincides with the night time of USA ? Though there seems to be some correlation with the time, it cannot be said with certainty that the relation between the two is causality.

Summary:

Lets summaries all our findings till now.

1. The amount of xSUSHI minted and burned has reduced drastically compared to the initial months.
2. The De-Fi months increased the amount of xSHUSHI minted and burned
3. xSUSHI are minted more during the weekdays than on weekends
4. xSUSHI are minted more during the 0-3 UTC and very less during 5-13 UTC