Introduction

Velodrome is an AMM designed as the trading and liquidity marketplace of the Optimism network, designed with the sole mission of being the liquidity base layer of Optimism, allowing users to trade digital assets securely, with very low fees and low slippage.

Velodrome shares certain features with AMMs such as Uniswap adapted from Solidly. However, it has some adaptations in order to be more competitive and at the same time attractive. The main advantages are 0.02% commission, near-zero slippage on uncorrelated or highly correlated digital assets, trade routing across stable and volatile asset pairs and 30-minute time-weighted average price (TWAP).

As with Curve, those who block their tokens can vote to direct issuance to desired pools and receive a share of the proceeds from the protocol fee. However, there are also differences. In Curve CRV bettors could bet CRVs and direct future CRV issuances to non-productive pools that did not produce fees, Solidly was initially made to focus on incentivising trading fees rather than passive liquidity. Thus, voters in Velodrome would receive 100% of the fees only from the pools that voted, and this behaviour incentivises the pools that produce the most fees.

Methodology

In this dashbord we are gonna study the activity on the Velodrome Finance since its launch on Optimism. The idea is to track not only the daily new locks created on the platform, but also analyze a list of other important metrics to get a good view of the Velodrome Finance activity. Then, the main metrics analyzed are:

• The most common durations on the Velodrome Locks
• The top wallets that have locked the most during the past month
• The most popular pools that wallets are voting their locked tokens

Results

Looking at the daily locks over time, it can be seen how the number increased over the past month. The main increase took place during July. While in June, the number of daily locks oscillates from 70 to 200, in July the daily numbers increased to more than 300 in several days.

On the other hand, the daily volume locked also increased since the mid of June. Despite the first day when the volume was so high, for the rest of the days of June the volume ranged from 300k to 2.8M of VELO. But in July, the volume started to increase reaching more than 8M of VELO during the last registered days.

To be able to know the lock duration, I have compute the difference between the supposing unlocking date and the date when the tokens were locked. Then, I have put the locks in buckets to be able to have an overview of the current Velodrome locks.

The buckets have been the following:

• Less than a week
• Between a week and a month
• Between 1 and 3 months
• Between 3 months and 6 month
• Between half a year and a year
• More than a year

Looking at the results, it is clear that the major of the locks have been putted in a long term (more than a year), representing almost 57% of the total locks. There are also 3 important buckets with over 10% of teh total locks each: locks between 1 and 4 weeks, locks between 6 and 12 months and locks less than a week.

Regarding the top 10 users locking on Velodrome during the last 4 weeks, I have computed considering both the volume of VELO locked and the number of locks.

In the image above, it can be seen the top 10 providers by volume locked.The volume locked of these top 10 users ranged from 1.4M to 5.8M. The top user locked more than 23% of the total VELO locked by these top 10 users.

On the other hand, the top 10 providers by the number of locks are different. In this case, there is a highlighted user that created 1257 new locks, however it is not the top user in terms of volume, its the third one. The other two top 3 users generated 121 and 43 locks. The rest generated 25 or less locks.

Finally, regarding the most popular pools on Velodrome, I have divided the study in two parts as well. Considering the number of users locking on each pool and considering the number of locks done on each pool.

In the first image it can be seen a donut showing the distribution of users among the top 10 most popular pools. In this case, there are 4 important pools in terms of active users. The VELO/USDC pool reaching more than 740 users, OP/USDC with 477 users, VELO/OP with 402 and USDC/sUSD with 368 unique users. The rest of the pools have less than 250 users.

On the other hand, looking at the number of locks, the top pool remains the VELO/USDC with more than 7.6k locks showing a great difference against the other pools. In this case, the second one is the WETH/USDC pool, followed by VELO/WETH and OP/USDC. All of them with over 1k locks. The rest of the pools received less than 1k locks.

For the end of the analysis, I have compared the percentage of different type of pools usage: volatile vs stable pools. It is curious that more than 83% of the locks are done in a Volatile pools while only 16% on the Stable pools.

Conclusions and key insights

This dashboard presents a deep study about the Velodrome Finance recently launched on Optimism. Several metrics such as daily locks, daily volume fo VELO locked and top users locking as well as the most popular pools are displayed through the analysis.

The key insights extracted from the research have been the following:

• The number of locks and volume locked increased over the past month.
• The major of the locks have been putted in a long term (more than a year), representing almost 57% of the total locks.
• The volume locked by the top 10 users ranged from 1.4M to 5.8M of VELO tokens. The top user locked more than 23% of the total VELO locked by these top 10 users.
• In terms of top users by number of locks, there is a highlighted user that created 1257 new locks, however it is not the top user in terms of volume.
• There are 4 important pools in terms of active users. The VELO/USDC pool reaching more than 740 users, OP/USDC with 477 users, VELO/OP with 402 and USDC/sUSD with 368 unique users. The rest of the pools have less than 250 users.
• More than 83% of the locks are done in a Volatile pools while only 16% on the Stable pools.