New Unique Users
Approach
To calculate the number of unique users per day, I took the following approach. I started looking at the daily_balances
table and the number of unique addresses per day. Then I calculated the difference between address on that day to the number of addresses on the previous day. Theoretically, the difference in the number of addresses should be the number of unique users added that day. Therefore,
Number of unique users added on a day
= Number of addresses today
- Number of addresses yesterday
Let's see how this strategy fared.
Analysis
- For most of the days, we see a constant trickle of new users 1000-3000 new users.
- There are a few peaks where a lot of users are added and a lot of users are removed.
- The biggest peak is September 28, 2020 where about 550K users are added. It's unclear what made the number of users jump up that high but I have a couple of hypothesis.
Hypothesis for September 28 jump
- Terra USD (UST) was launched around September 2020 and listed on Bittrex Global. Refer to the following announcements by Do Kwon and Bittrex Global.
- https://medium.com/terra-money/announcing-terrausd-ust-the-interchain-stablecoin-53eab0f8f0ac
- https://medium.com/bittrexglobal/new-coin-listing-terramoney-ust-dd9c5f91a25e
The next set of announcements can be found in the Terra Community Update for September 2020 - https://medium.com/terra-money/september-2020-community-update-1db23a5808e9
- In September 2020, CHAI integrated with CJ O Shopping, Korea’s most established home shopping service, bringing the total number of integrated merchants to over 40.
- Terra money announced additional partnerships with ZenGo, MantraDAO and Hex Trust.
However, even with so many new launches, such a large 1 day peak makes little sense. This could likely be a data issue as well for the following reasons:
- We see 0 users added on many days in the first half of October which is unlikely.
- There are negative peaks which means were removed from the terra ecosystem. I'm not sure if that's possible.
- Looking at the Terra Station dashboard and new accounts added every day, there's no peak beyond 25K and certainly no negative peaks.
Hypothesis for 0 new users from October 3-October 14
Between October 3 and 14, there were many days where no users were added. My hypothesis is that October 3rd was when the Columbus-4 upgrade was executed and it took many days for flipside to update the daily_balances table on the new mainnet. Therefore, the data from October 2nd was carried over every day until the blockchain data could be extracted.
We also see a big jump in the new users on October 14th, which is all the new users added in the meantime.
Deep Dive into User Segments
Terra addresses plotted above can be broken down into various categories:
- Regular users who buy and swap tokens
- Special users who are part of the Terra operations such as Validators, Central Exchanges, DApps, Defi contracts,
User accounts
Let's take a look at the growth into Terra addresses using the daily_balances
table. We see a big jump of 500K accounts on September 28, 2020 again on this chart. Otherwise, we see a steady growth up to today with a few dips. By latest count, we're up to nearly 2.8 million accounts.
Non-User Addresses
The daily_balances
contains not only regular users' addresses but also those of validators, dapps, defi contracts etc. Let's look into how these have grown on the Terra network. Looking at the ecosystem this way, some of the Terra launches in the last year become apparent.
Analysis
- Terraswap launched on November 11, 2020 can be observed on the graph as the
dex
value goes from 0 to 8 on that day. - Similarily, Mirror Protocol launch can be observed on December 3, 2020 as the
defi
value goes from 0 to 22. - On September 27, 2020 the
cex
value which represents Central Exchanges such as Bittrex Global, Binance etc. jumps from 491 to 680 which most likely corresponds with the UST launch. The big jump of about 550K accounts in previous charts becomes clearer. It could possibly be because of the increase in central exchanges Terra assets were listed on. This increase of about ~200 exchanges could certainly contribute to the jump in 550K users on September 28th, 2020. - On March 17, 2020 the value of
defi
nearly doubles again pointing to the launch of Anchor Protocol.
Diving even deeper
I took the above segments and dove deeper into each of these
- chadmin - Nothing very interesting here
- dex - This is mostly made up of Terraswap pairs
- dapp - This was mostly different Chai contracts
- Operator - These are the different validators on the Terra network
- DeFi - This was the most interesting one. It shows the growth in Mirror, Anchor and Cw20Token contracts.