Q86. Create a way of identifying bots within THORChain (could be something like a certain number of swaps / day made). What % of the swaps and swap volume are made by bots? Are there certain strategies you can see them employing (most of them are likely arbitrage bots)? Are there many bots or mainly just a few that conduct a high % of bot activity?
Methodology
In this analysis, I try to define what a bot looks like and compare them to average users. The time-frame for this analysis is the last 30 days.
For figuring out a bot, there's no on-chain metadata. So, I had to come up with my own interpretation of what a bot behavior looks like. I used the total number of transactions in the last 30 days as a metric to determine who are the bots.
I used the 1000 transactions in the last 30 days as the threshold. I believe that anyone doing more than 30 transactions a day for 30 days straight is likely to be a bot.
Observations
With the definitions out of the way, let's look at the numbers.
Based on our methodology, we found there to be only 42 bots compared to ~13K users which is around 0.3% of the total users!
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The average number of transactions per day for bots is around 218 while the normal users do about 0.15 transactions per day.
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Overall, the users have done around ~19% of the transactions (64K) while the bots have done ~81% of the transactions (~275K).
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Bot Patterns
With the synth launch on Thorchain, the arbitrage between different asset prices has become a reality without a long confirmation time (Bitcoin) or high-gas fees (Ethereum). These swaps represent a dominant use-case for bots as we can see from the below chart. The bots have about 98.5% of the swapped volume (around $508M)!
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The number of swaps also skew heavily in favor of bots with around ~97% of the swaps by bots.
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Conclusion
The bots dominate the swapped volume and number of transactions for Thorchain synths.
Based on my criteria of 1000 transactions per month, I found that there were around 42 bots.
These bots dominated ~98% of the swapped volume and number of swaps!