Try Quests to earn cryptoWhat's Going On With Gnosis?
There’s been some unusual activity with Gnosis as pointed out by our community. Time to figure out exactly what’s going on.
What is Gnosis?
create, trade, and hold.
Gnosis Protocol is a fully permissionless DEX, which has been in research and development over the course of the last two years. Gnosis Protocol enables ring trades to maximize liquidity. Ring trades are order settlements which share liquidity across all orders, rather than a single token pair, and uniquely suited for trading prediction market tokens and the long tail of all tokenized assets.
Actually Gnosis Protocol is a trading protocol for ERC-20 tokens. The protocol is technically compatible with any ERC-20 token, but only tokens listed on the protocol can be traded. Token listing is permissionless and can be done by anyone. However, a spam protection fee of 10 OWL is required to list new tokens.
In the world of technology, as much as there are good intentions to provide better services, there are also bad intentions to disrupt these services. In between, there are people who commit unpleasant acts in order to gain power, gain profits, or destroy a system. One of these unpleasant acts that fall under the category of cyber attacks is Sybil attack.
A Sybil attack is a type of attack on a computer network service in which an attacker subverts the service's reputation system by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence.
But what does this explanation have to do with the topic of this dashboard? In recent days, we have seen unusual activities in the Gnosis protocol. In this dashboard, according to the available data, we check whether these unusual activities are the result of the growth of Gnosis or whether it is a sabotage?
To understand this issue, the transactions, transferred tokens, fee payment of new users and active users, events and controlling entity have been investigated. But before starting work, it is better to have a short introduction of Gnosis.
By examining transaction fees, we see that the fluctuations of payment fees are very high in the 90-day period. But since October 5, we have seen a sudden fall in the chart. So that on October 7, only 27 USD was paid for transaction fees.
Now we will check the number of active users and the number of new users. As it is clear, in the graph of the number of new users daily and the accumulation on the 5th of October, there is a tremendous jump in the number of new users, so that from 107 new users on the 4th of October to 54.715K. on the 5th day, and on the day On the 6th, the number of new users has returned to normal. Due to the large number of new users on the 5th day, the number of active users has also grown abnormally. This is a sign of a disorder or an unusual process.
Finally, it is time to check the Controlling Entity and Events. Events specify what each transaction is done for. As we can see, in the last 90, 60, and 30 days, respectively, 67.6%, 74.1, and 72.6% of all transactions are related to transfer transactions. More than 50% of all transactions are related to DAI L2. In general, approximately 456M, 385M and 264M XDAI tokens have been transferred in the last 90, 60 and 30 days respectively. But according to the daily charts on October 5, we see a huge jump in the number of transfer transactions and the number of senders. This is while the amount of XDAI transferred on this day has decreased compared to other days, or at least it has not changed much. This case is another reason for network instability and incorrect operation.
conclusion
With the conducted investigations and data analysis, and considering the sudden and unreasonable change in the number of transactions and the number of users, as well as not changing the efficiency, we come to the conclusion that these changes were not due to the growth of the Gnosis ecosystem. Likely, this increase in the number of users and transactions was the result of an attack, and most likely this attack was a Sybil attack.
Fortunately, on the flipside there is a separate table for Gnosis data. Although these tables seem incomplete, this amount of information can meet our needs. The data available for review in this dashboard is obtained from gnosis.core.fact_transactions, gnosis.core.fact_event_logs and gnosis.core.ez_xdai_transfers tables. Also, most of the data have been reviewed in 3 time periods of last 90, 60, and 30 days, in order to have a better understanding of the change process.
In general, in the last 90 days, approximately 7.34M transactions have been made. In the last 60 days, approximately 5.5 million transactions and in the last 30 days approximately 3.37 million transactions have been made. We are witnessing a change at the very beginning of the work. It can be said that nearly half of the transactions of the last 90 days happened in these 30 days. By checking the graph of the number of daily transactions, we can see that there was a small jump on September 19 and 20, and several big jumps from October 4 to October 8. The main point in the jumps of this chart is the huge number of unsuccessful transactions (blue color). As we can see, from October 5 to October 8, most of the transactions were unsuccessful. In the diagrams of successful or unsuccessful transactions, it is also clearly seen that 35.1% of all transactions in the last 30 days were unsuccessful, which is a large number. This point can give us the idea that there is a malfunction in the system.
