Tokens’ Daily Number of Transactions

Daily Transactions

NEAR Burrow Introduction

Burrow is a decentralized, non-custodial, pool-based interest rate market protocol built on NEAR that allows users to supply assets and earn passive interest, and borrow against them to utilize liquidity. Users are also able to deposit a token as collateral and then borrow another one to create a leveraged position. In general, it is similar to other pool-based protocols such as Aave and Compound. The smart contracts of Burrow are written In Rust and run natively on the NEAR blockchain. The burrow protocol has a native token named BRRR that allows holders to benefit from boosted APY by staking it. Stakeholders will receive xBRRR tokens in exchange which enables extra rewards of more than two to four times the rewards they would have earned without it. They are also able to partake in DAO governance through token-weighted voting.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the comparison of two lending protocols, namely Burrow and BENQI, on the blockchains of NEAR and Avalanche, respectively, has demonstrated that the activity scale on BENQI has been much higher compared to Burrow. It is worth mentioning that these two protocols are the largest lending/liquid-staking protocols on each network, thus their activity is representing the DeFi ecosystem on these blockchains. The total market cap of Avalanche is around two times higher than NEAR, however, the BENQI protocol has had a turnover of more than $1B, while Burrow’s has only been around $30M. In terms of liquidity, a negative netflow on BENQI is a much healthier sign compared to the positive netflow on Burrow. Because fundamentally, higher outflows mean that users are in debt of the platform and have to pay back the borrowed asset, which ultimately generates income through the interest rates. Both platforms have had a fair share of daily active users, however, they have also been in a downward trend over the past 3 months. The liquid staking sector on BENQI has also had much more inflows, indicating more users tend to become stakeholders on Avalanche. Overall, this analysis has demonstrated that the difference between the DeFi sector of NEAR and Avalanche is much larger compared to the difference between their total market cap, and Avalanche has had the upper hand between these two L1s.

NEAR Burrow

Avalanche BENQI

Actions’ and Tokens' Total Share of Transactions

Tokens’ Netflow

Tokens' Total Transactions

Platforms’ Overview

Methodology (Burrow)

The full methodology was explained on The Financial District dashboard by the same author as this analysis. In summary, the required data for this analysis were collected by combining the data on the fact_transactions and fact_actions_events_function_call tables of the core schema of the near database. The contract address related to different operations on the platform and their subsequent method name on the tables were determined by directly interacting with the protocol. The symbol and USD price of tokens available for depositing and borrowing on the protocol were selected using the fact_prices table.

Each action, namely deposit, borrow, repay, and withdraw, registers a different type of transaction with a different set of method names and arguments. For each action, three indicators of the number of transactions, number of users, and transaction volume were calculated. For the calculation of the volume, the decimals of the tokens had to be hardcoded for each action, due to the decimals of some of the tokens being different in different actions.

For a more overall evaluation, the inflow and outflow, and consequently, the netflow of the protocol were measured by considering the deposits and repays as inflows, and borrows and withdraws as outflows.

> Liquidity = Inflow - Outflow = Supply - Borrow + Repays - Redeems > > Burrow contract address: contract.main.burrow.near

The charts on the left column belong to the Burrow protocol.

Avalanche BENQI Introduction

BENQI is a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol providing liquid staking and liquidity market on the Avalanche blockchain. Users can lend their digital assets and provide liquidity to the protocol to earn passive incomes by utilizing the BENQI Liquidity Market (BLM). They also can borrow in an over-collateralized manner. Users can also stake their AVAX tokens in BENQI Liquid Staking (BLS) protocol and gain the ability to utilize BENQI’s liquid-staked AVAX tokens and use them in DeFi applications. BENQI aims to provide a highly scalable and decentralized platform with a focus on approachability, ease of use, and low fees. According to DefiLlama, BENQI is the largest Avalanche-only protocol with more than $450M total value locked (TVL) on the network. In this analysis and by utilizing the information in the official documentation of BENQI, the liquidity market and liquid staking of the protocol have been evaluated and broken down quantitatively.

Staking

Tokens’ Daily Transactions Volume

Tokens’ Daily Number of Users

Methodology (BENQI)

The full methodology was explained on the What's Going On With BENQI dashboard by the same author as this analysis. In summary, The required data for this analysis were collected from the fact_event_logs and fact_token_transfers tables of the core schema of the avalanche database. In this dashboard, the liquidity market, liquid staking, and governance of the BENQI protocol have been investigated using their corresponding token addresses. To analyze the liquidity market on BENQI, the transactions on the fact_event_logs table were filtered using the addresses of qiTokens. There are four types of actions, including deposits, borrows, repays, and withdraws, that result in the inflow and outflow of capital into liquidity pools. These four actions register a transaction with Mint, Borrow, RepayBorrow, and Redeem event_name on the blockchain, respectively. After filtering the subsequent transactions, their transferred amount was obtained by using the event_inputs column. The proper decimal for each token was selected by matching the transaction data with SnowTrace Avalanche C-Chain Explorer. Ultimately, the net liquidity of each token was calculated.

> Liquidity = Inflow - Outflow = Supply - Borrow + Repays - Redeems > > Comptroller: 0x486af39519b4dc9a7fccd318217352830e8ad9b4 > > qiAVAX: 0x5c0401e81bc07ca70fad469b451682c0d747ef1c > > qisAVAX: 0xf362fea9659cf036792c9cb02f8ff8198e21b4cb > > qiBTC.b: 0x89a415b3d20098e6a6c8f7a59001c67bd3129821 > > qiBTC: 0xe194c4c5ac32a3c9ffdb358d9bfd523a0b6d1568 > > qiETH: 0x334ad834cd4481bb02d09615e7c11a00579a7909 > > qiLink: 0x4e9f683a27a6bdad3fc2764003759277e93696e6 > > qiUSDTn: 0xd8fcda6ec4bdc547c0827b8804e89acd817d56ef > > qiUSDT: 0xc9e5999b8e75c3feb117f6f73e664b9f3c8ca65c > > qiUSDCn: 0xb715808a78f6041e46d61cb123c9b4a27056ae9c > > qiUSDC: 0xbeb5d47a3f720ec0a390d04b4d41ed7d9688bc7f > > qiDAI: 0x835866d37afb8cb8f8334dccdaf66cf01832ff5d > > sAVAX: 0x2b2c81e08f1af8835a78bb2a90ae924ace0ea4be

The charts on the right column belong to the BENQI protocol.

Insights

• Overall, Burrow has registered a positive netflow of more than $7M, while BENQI has had a negative netflow of slightly below $37M;
• It is worth mentioning that although the scale of netflow on both platforms are close to each other, the nearly $1.6B turnover on BENQI has been much higher compared to $30M on Burrow;
• The share of transactions of Burrow has been close to each other on each equivalent action. On the other hand, while the number of deposits and depositors have had a share of more than 50% on BENQI, the volume of withdraws has been higher than deposits;
• From the tokens perspective, stablecoins, especially USDC and USDT, have had a share of more than 50% of the total volume on BENQI, while AVAX and sAVAX dominated the number of transactions and users. On Burrow, a similar pattern has been observed where stablecoins had a considerable share of total transactions, except with the fact that wNEAR has been the dominant token in the past three months;
• During the past 3 months, USDT, USDC, and STNEAR have registered a positive netflow on Burrow with more than $2M in liquidity each. Other tokens' liquidity has been below $1M, either positive or negative. On BENQI, only sAVAX has had a positive netflow with nearly $13M in liquidity. On the other hand, tokens such as USDC, USDT, BTC, and AVAX have registered considerable negative liquidity in this period;
• wNEAR has had the highest burrowing volume on Burrow, while USDT and USDC have been the dominant borrowed tokens on BENQI;
• USDC and USDT, and USN have had the highest amount of withdraws on BENQI and Burrow, respectively;
• On a daily basis, whenever there was an increase in the number of transactions and users, the volume increased subsequently. However, this was not the case on BENQI and while there have been periods with high user activity, the volume did not reflect that;
• Both of the platforms have registered significant activity for various tokens with all of the actions. However, borrowing and repaying have been the most active part of Burrow, volume vise. Interestingly, there has not been a steady activity within deposits and withdraws, except for some unexpected surges on some days here and there;
• Overall, the data showed that Burrow has been in a relatively steady situation, while the transactions volume on BENQI has had a downward trend over the past 3 months;
• Both of these platforms also offer the staking of their native tokens, namely BRRR for Burrow and sAVAX for BENQI. Expectedly, the scale of staking on BENQI has been much higher than on Burrow, however, it has also fluctuated more daily;
• The staking on both of these platforms has not had a clear trend, only with sudden increases in the volumes;
• While the number of stakeholders has decreased during the past three months on Burrow, it has had a more steady downward trend. BENQI on the other hand saw massive fluctuation in its staking activity in the measured period.