18 [SUSHI] Stalking Whales

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    $6 Billion in TVL!

    As Sushi's core value prop is a decentralized exchange, a successful exchange needs deep liquidity. On a decentralized exchange, the LPs get a cut of the trading fees. Therefore, the incentives are such that this attracts whales who have deep pockets to offer liquidity to facilitate mega trades.

    According to DefiLLama, Sushiswap currently has around $6 Billion Total Value Locked across 10+ chains. This means that Sushiswap has so far been successful in attracting some whales.

    In this analysis, let's find out who these whales are.

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    Our Whales

    > NOTE: This was one of the most consuming bounties as the amount and amount_usd columns in udm_events table cannot be relied upon. Some of the values are already dividing by 10^18 while others are not making it very unreliable to track the largest LPs.

    > After much trial and error and consultation with Debank.com on the addresses, I believe we're looking at true Sushi whales.

    Our largest whale is providing almost $100 Million of liquidity on Sushiswap. All of our top 10 whales are providing significant liquidity with the #10 whale also providing almost $30 Million in assets.

    Number of Transactions

    Looking at the weekly transactions of our whales, we see some interesting patterns:

    1. Our whales are not doing a lot of add or remove transactions per week. The most transactions in a week across all the whales is less than 30 i.e. on average 3 transactions per whale.
    2. Fewer transactions is understandable as with these large amounts, markets can shift dynamically.
    3. Our whales love the WETH-USDT, WBTC-WETH and lately SUSHI-WETH pools for adding and removing liquidity.

    Gas fees the size of a nice BMW

    Even though the whales are not doing a lot of transactions where they are adding or removing liquidity, I tracked down how much gas fees they are paying across Ethereum in a week.

    The number are astounding as a 'low week' in 2021 consists of paying 10K USD in gas fees and at the peak of gas wars — 90K USD! That is more than many people's current investments.

    Issues with Flipside data

    I spent a lot of time working on this bounty but couldn't solve the questions for figuring out LP profits and time stayed in the pools. I kept getting weird errors like the below and couple with unreliable amount values, it pretty much made it impossible for me to solve the rest of the bounty. Here's how far I got with the time-stayed query if anyone wants to pick up from here.

    https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/velocity/queries/809d21b0-5ba4-4940-97ee-abbb07e92b0d

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