To celebrate the arrival of the FIFA World Cup, Flipside is holding a tournament to determine the top bounty hunters in the world across several blockchains, projects, and more. This dashboard compares which chains are most active and liquid in their transfers of USDC. The chains analyzed are: Ethereum, Optimism, Solana, Algorand, Flow, Osmosis, Polygon, Axelar and Near. The first part provides an overall comparison of all the chains together, while the second one dives deeper into each chain. This allows for the reader to have a general idea of each chain compared to each other, while still having an insight on the specific tendencies of each chain separately. The metrics covered are divided in the following sections:

• USDC Amount Transferred
• Number of USDC Transfers
• Number of Wallets Transferring USDC
• Average USDC Amount per Transfer
• Average USDC Transferred per Wallet
• Distribution of USDC Transferred by Wallet
• Distribution of USDC Transferred by Transaction
• Daily Destinations by Number of USDC Transfers
• Top 10 Destinations by Number of USDC Transfers

All metrics shown have a timespan corresponding to the last 30 days, but the number of days from the current date can be changed using the Days_From_Current_Date parameter above.

Ethereum

• The amount of USDC transferred daily on Ethereum used to slightly oscillate around 10B USDC/Day.

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• However, this metric raised to 16.33B USDC due to the FTX-Alameda news, which created panic in the crypto space and lots of funds were swapped for stable coins like USDC and sent to cold wallets.

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• This situation can also be seen on the rise of the number of USDC transfers during the second week of November.

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• The number of wallets follows a very close trend compared to the number of USDC transfers.

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• Moreover, November 9th had the highest peak of USDC transfers and wallets transferring USDC. However, it was not until the next day that the highest USDC volume was transferred. This means that the biggest whales were waiting for the market’s response to the crash.

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• Nevertheless, both the average USDC amount per wallet and the average USDC amount per transfer did not fluctuate much besides on concrete days like November 5th and 6th.

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• The second and third most common destinations by number of USDC transfers are the decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap and the WETH contract. The second one makes sense as most NFTs on Ethereum are bought using ETH, so this tokens is commonly swapped for USDC.

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• Most wallets on Ethereum have transferred less than 500 USDC.

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• However, most USDC transfers range between 500 and 5k USDC.

Optimism

• The total amount of USDC transferred during the last 30 days on Optimism is 13.4B USDC.

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• The number of USDC transfers and wallets transferring USDC also increased during the first two weeks, but the tendency looks much smoother.

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• On the other hand, the daily average USDC amount transferred per wallet has been very volatile over the last 30 days. This is because Optimism being a chain with less whales than Ethereum, when they have periods of higher activity it is noticed more compared to the days with regular activity.

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• A similar situation happens for the average USDC amount per transfer, but the chart is not as volatile because these whales don’t make up the majority of USDC transactions on Optimism.

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• Hop protocol is the most common destination for USDC transfers on Optimism. This is not a one time thing, but a recurrent destination for most users.

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• Most wallets on Optimism have transferred less than 500 USDC.

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• Moreover, most USDC transfers range between 0 and 100 USDC. As explained above, this is because there are less whales on Optimism being a Layer 2 compared to a Layer 1 like Ethereum.

Polygon

• The total amount of USDC transferred during the last 30 days on Polygon is 15.06B USDC. This value is very similar to the volume on Ethereum’s L2: Optimism.

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• Polygon is massively adapted by the crypto community, and that can be seen on the impact that the FTX crash had on the blockchain’s volume.

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• The second week of November had a spike of USDC volume, as most users wanted to mitigate the impact that this crash could have on their funds.

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• Despite the number of USDC transfers and wallets transferring USDC also increasing during that period, the daily tendency looks much smoother on both.

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• The average USDC sent per transfer/day represents a 13% of the average amount of USDC transferred per wallet/day. That confirms adaption and non sporadic usage of the network.

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• The most common destinations by number of USDC transfers are hop protocol, the decentralized exchange (DEX): Uniswap and the WETH contract.

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• Most wallets on Flow have transferred less than 500 USDC.

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• Moreover, most USDC transfers range between 0 and 100 USDC.

• Ethereum’s share in the total USDC Amount transferred is a 66.4%, which is equivalent to 505B USDC transferred. On the daily chart, Ethereum had a similar share throughout the last 30 days. On the other hand, Solana had a large volume of USDC being transferred until November 11th. This sudden decrease in USDC transfers on Solana happened because of the negative impact that the FTX-Alameda news had on the chain during the first two weeks of November. The volume of USDC transfers of the other 7 chains corresponds to a 3.8% share.

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• The chain with the highest number of USDC transfers is Solana, with a 58.7% share. Polygon and Optimism follow in second and third position, while Ethereum is 4th with only a 6.75% share. This is because both L2 chains and Solana are known for their low transaction fees. Thus, despite a higher volume of USDC transferred on Ethereum, this is done within less transactions than the other three aformentioned chains. It is worth noticing than the number of USDC transfers on Solana did not decrease proportionally to the volume. This means that despite a similar activity being kept throughout this difficult time, the biggest investors are being cautious and stopped doing USDC movements until the situation turns to be less volatile.

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• Algorand is the top chain by number of wallets transferring USDC with a share of 48.4%. However, there might be an error on the Algorand database as most of these users happened to transfer on October 23rd and 24th, and the values just seem hard to believe. Ethereum is second with a 20.2%, Polygon is third with a 13.2% and Solana is fourth with a 13.2%. This means that the large number of transactions on Solana are being done by a small number of users (compared to the other chains).

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• The average USDC transferred per wallet shows that Ethereum’s and Solana’s users are those that transfer the largest USDC amounts on average. This is because these two chains are widely used to purchase and collect NFTs, which might cost a lot and users need to transfer the funds to do so (usually on USDC or another stable coin to not lose value while waiting for the NFT to be on sale).

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• Ethereum clearly dominates above all the other chains on average USDC amount per transfer with an 88% share. Again, these is heavily influenced by large NFT whales moving lots of funds on stable coins to purchase NFTs.

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• The most common user’s profile on nearly all chains transfers a sum that ranges between 0 and 100 USDC.

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• The 0 to 100 USDC category is also the most common one for the average amount of USDC transferred per transaction.

Introduction

Analysis

Algorand

• The total amount of USDC transferred during the last 30 days on Algorand is 0.912B USDC. This represents a USDC transfer volume 14 times lower than Optimism’s.

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• The average USDC transferred per day has been 29.4M USDC during the past 30 days.

• As mentioned in the first section of this dashboard, there seems to be an issue with the Algorand database for October 24th and 25th, where there is an immense number of transactions and wallets transacting USDC.

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• Despite this, two peaks are shown on these charts for November 8th and 9th due to the FTX-Alameda situation.

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• The average USDC amount transferred per transaction is 1276 USDC/day.

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• On the other hand, the average USDC amount transferred per wallet is 10.42k USDC/day. Thus, on average users make between 9-10 USDC transfers/day.

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• The most common destination for users transferring USDC on Algorand is the biggest centralized exchange (CEX): Binance. The second most common destination is Tinyman (one of the most used DEXs on Algorand).

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• If the misleading users and transactions of November 23rd and 24th are discarded, the majority of wallets on Algorand have transferred less than 500 USDC during the last 30 days.

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• Moreover, most USDC transfers range between 0 and 100 USDC.

Axelar

• The total amount of USDC transferred during the last 30 days on Axelar is 0.912B USDC. This chain is the second lowest one by USDC transferred.

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• The average USDC transferred per day is 2.72M USDC.

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• Being a smaller blockchain, the impact that the FTX-Alameda crash had on the number of USDC transfers was not that noticeable. The highest peak on November on the number of USDC transfers only reached a slightly higher peak than on October 28th.

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• Only 4520 wallets transferred USDC during the past 30 days, with an average of 262 distinct wallets/day. This represents a 5.8% of the total wallets.

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• However, the average USDC amount transferred per transaction is 4820 USDC/day, which is almost 3.5 times the amount on Algorand.

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• The average USDC amount transferred per wallet is 9.18k USDC/day.

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• The most common reason for USDC transfers on Axelar is to purchase the AXL token.

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• Most wallets on Axelar have transferred less than 500 USDC.

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• Nevertheless, most USDC transfers range between 500 and 5k USDC. This is because many wallets transferred small amounts of USDC for a specific reason they needed to, but those wallets that usually transfer USDC tend to have larger USDC holdings.

Flow

• Flow is the chain with the lowest amount of USDC transferred amongst the 9 chains with 575k USDC over the past 30 days.

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• The average amount of USDC transferred per day is 19.8k USDC. Thus, this number is highly influenced by a sudden USDC volume peak on November 15th.

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• With only 97 USDC transfers made during the last 30 days, only 3.34 transfers are made per day.

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• However, the number of USDC transfers per wallet are slightly above 1, as the average number of wallets that transfer USDC per day are 2.79. November 8th reached a peak of 8 wallets, while other days like November 5th had no transfers at all.

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• The sudden rise on the volume chart on November 15th was due to a single user transacting in one transaction 442k USDC. That represents a 77% of all the USDC volume transferred on Flow over the past 30 days.

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• There are 4 most common destination for USDC transfers on Flow: swaps for Fiat tokens, swaps for the chain’s native token: FLOW, teleport custody to Ethereum and flow fees.

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• Most wallets on Flow have transferred less than 500 USDC.

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• Moreover, most USDC transfers range between 0 and 100 USDC.

Near

Osmosis

Solana

• The total amount of USDC transferred during the last 30 days on Near is 44.1M USDC.

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• Being a smaller blockchain, the impact that the FTX-Alameda crash had on the number of USDC transfers was not that noticeable. Only November 10th had a really outstanding USDC volume peak.

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• The average amount of USDC transferred per day is 1.423M USDC.

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• The number of USDC transfers and wallets transferring USDC increased during the first two weeks of November, but the tendency looks much smoother.

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• The number of USDC transfers per day represent a 3.22% of the total transfers over the past 30 days, while the number of wallets transferring USDC/day represent a 5.3% of the total nnumber of wallets over the past 30 days.

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• Both the average USDC per wallet and the average USDC per transfer were affected by the FTX situation but only on November 10th.

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• The most common destination for USDC transfers on Near is the Near factory bridge.

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• Most wallets on Flow have transferred less than 500 USDC.

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• Moreover, most USDC transfers range between 0 and 100 USDC.

• The total amount of USDC transferred during the last 30 days on Osmosis is 96.4M USDC.

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• Being a smaller blockchain, the impact that the FTX-Alameda crash was hardly noticeable on the volume of USDC transfers.

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• The daily chart shows that the volume was actually almost 3 times in a peak to peak comparison from October-November.

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• However, it did had an impact on the number of USDC transfers and the number of wallets transferring.

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• Thus, we can affirm that the FTX situation had more impact on the average retail user than to the average whale.

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• The average USDC per transfer is three times smaller than the average USDC transfer by user.

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• The most swapped tokens for USDC on Osmosis are USDC tokens from other chains, WETH and AXL.

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• Most wallets on Osmosis have transferred less than 500 USDC. This is because many wallets transferred small amounts of USDC for a specific reason they needed to, but those wallets that usually transfer USDC tend to have larger USDC holdings.

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• Moreover, most USDC transfers range between 100 and 500 USDC.

• The total amount of USDC transferred during the last 30 days on Solana is 236B USDC.

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• It is actually the second largest blockchain by USDC amount transferred (the first one is Ethereum). The difference from these two chains with all the other chains in volume is just massive.

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• The volume on Solana after November 12th went down massively. This might be because of its high correlation with the FTX exchange that went bankrupt.

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• Solana is the blockchain amongst the 9 analyzed that has the largest number of USDC transfers, as it is a very adopted network with very low gas fees that has been around for a long time now.

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• The number of transfers only increased slightly during the second week of November, but nothing very impactful.

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• On the other hand, the number of users transacting during those panic days went up noticeably, as most retail investors moved their funds to stablecoins to mitigate further token crashes.

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• The average amount of USDC per transfer on a daily basis oscillates around 11k USD.

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• However, most users use this chain recurrently for transferring their USDC, and this is reflected on the average USDC transferred per wallet per day (272k USD).

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• The top 3 destinations for USDC transfers are three CEXs: Biannce, FTX and Coinbase. However, the daily chart shows that the number of USDC transactions on FTX just disappeared after November 12th, as it went bankrupt.

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• Most wallets on Flow have transferred less than 500 USDC.

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• Moreover, most USDC transfers range between 0 and 100 USDC.

Ethereum is an open source decentralized software platform based on the Blockchain, which uses its own cryptocurrency, Ether. It allows Smart Contracts and distributed applications to be built and run without downtime, fraud, control, or third-party interference.

Ethereum abandoned Proof-of-Work (PoW) in mid-September 2022 and fully embraced Proof-of-Stake (PoS). With this system, there are no miners, but transaction validators who would "buy" their rights with a certain amount of ETH in their wallets. Thus, those who have more coins, the greater the chances they will have of being chosen by the system to validate transactions without any other expense of energy or equipment.

Optimism is a Layer 2 blockchain that speeds up Ethereum transactions and reduces their costs by settling them on another blockchain using advanced data compression techniques.

The special sauce of Optimism's scaling methodology is in its name: it uses a technique called Optimistic Rollups, whereby multiple transactions are "bundled" into a single transaction, settled on another blockchain, with receipts fed back to the main blockchain of ethereum.

Optimistic Rollups are a type of rollup that "optimistically" assumes that all transactions in the rollup are valid. This saves time, as individual transactions do not have to be presented with direct proof of their validity. Rollup validators have one week to review the entire rollup if they believe it contains fraudulent data.

This blockchain addresses the common issues of scalability and consensus mechanism of first and second generation blockchains. The main feature of Algorand is its Pure Proof of Stake (PPoS) consensus protocol which randomly selects validators weighted by their staked ALGO token (native currency of this blockchain).

Any user with minimal computing power, who owns $ALGO and is online will automatically be eligible to be elected to participate in the Algorand block consensus.

Multiple blockchain ecosystems are emerging that provide unique and distinct features attractive to users and application developers. However, communication across the ecosystems is very sparse and fragmented. To enable applications to communicate across blockchain ecosystems frictionlessly, Axelar was proposed. Axelar stack provides a decentralized network, protocols, tools, and APIs that allow simple cross-chain communication. Axelar protocol suite consists of cross-border routing and transfer protocols. A decentralized open network of validators powers the network; anyone can join, use it, and participate. Byzantine consensus, cryptography, and incentive mechanisms are designed to achieve high safety and liveness requirements unique for cross-chain requests.

Conventional Blockchain application development used to be done on Ethereum, but technological progress and the increase in users has brought with it scalability issues. Flow was born as a new generation blockchain to solve these problems.

It has a unique architecture that allows it to scale without fragmentation in a secure, fast and simple way. In other words, its speed and performance are superior, and it also maintains a friendly environment for developers.

Flow operates with the PoS algorithm. Its network protocol is designed to scale thanks to a multifunctional architecture in which each node fulfills its own function. And with the novelty that, instead of implementing a horizontal flow, the Flow platform uses the so-called vertical flow. Its advantage is that it separates the objective (deterministic) processes from the subjective (non-deterministic) processes.

NEAR Protocol is a public blockchain that facilitates the development of Decentralized Applications (DApps). Like other blockchains, such as Solana, Algorand, or Horizon, NEAR's goal is to compete with the Ethereum blockchain by offering greater scalability. The main advantage of this platform is its ease of use. The NEAR protocol offers a set of sample applications that make it easier to develop a DApp than on other blockchains.

One of the main features of Near is that it uses a sharding technique, known as Nightsade, to avoid slowing down the chain and achieve greater scalability. The objective of this fragmentation is to divide the Blockchain database into smaller sets to make them more manageable. Another advantage of NEAR is that thanks to the fragmentation, it does not need as much computational power. Even the nodes can work in the cloud.

Osmosis is a decentralized exchange (DEX) based on a next-generation Automated Market Maker (AMM).

Osmosis introduces a new Adaptive Automated Market Maker (AMM) model that operates within the Cosmos ecosystem. Appealing to both crypto traders and developers, the Osmosis crypto ecosystem offers a variety of use cases for its native Osmosis token and interoperable modular tools for developers.

Showcasing the potential for the next paradigm shift towards decentralized finance (DeFi), Cosmos AMM offers full customization with protocol parameters. Furthermore, the OSMO token allows liquidity providers to govern the individual pools in which they participate. In addition, Osmosis AMM offers frictionless and low-cost cross-chain transactions.

In simpler words, Osmosis is a decentralized exchange, in which we can exchange currencies from the networks to which it connects.

Solana is a PoS Layer 1 blockchain that offers many of the same operations as Ethereum, including decentralized finance applications (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Its native token is SOL.

Compared to Ethereum, Solana can claim that its software is easier to produce and use, plus everything is highly scalable, cheaper and faster compared to Ethereum.

Also, it works using something called Proof of History (PoH), as opposed to PoS. It uses a series of timestamps so everyone knows what's going on. That lack of time between computers translates into increased speed. Solana is built on a unique combination of PoH and PoS consensus mechanisms.

Polygon (MATIC) is a layer 2 solution with sharding support that seeks to facilitate mass adoption of blockchain projects through sidechains that offer 65,000 TPS and block confirmation times of two seconds. Polygon's technology moves Ethereum DApps to a system of connected blockchains (as in Polkadot) that retain the security and ecosystem advantages of the Ethereum network.

In addition to scalability, Polygon aims to enhance the developer experience with a permissionless design, full technological sovereignty, and modular security solutions. Regular users also benefit from low-cost and instant transactions, as well as full compatibility with Ethereum tools like Metamask.

Chain Comparison

• Ethereum’s share in the total USDC Amount transferred is a 66.4%, which is equivalent to 505B USDC transferred. On the daily chart, Ethereum had a similar share throughout the last 30 days. On the other hand, Solana had a large volume of USDC being transferred until November 11th. This sudden decrease in USDC transfers on Solana happened because of the negative impact that the FTX-Alameda news had on the chain during the first two weeks of November. The volume of USDC transfers of the other 7 chains corresponds to a 3.8% share.

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• The chain with the highest number of USDC transfers is Solana, with a 58.7% share. Polygon and Optimism follow in second and third position, while Ethereum is 4th with only a 6.75% share. This is because both L2 chains and Solana are known for their low transaction fees. Thus, despite a higher volume of USDC transferred on Ethereum, this is done within less transactions than the other three aformentioned chains. It is worth noticing than the number of USDC transfers on Solana did not decrease proportionally to the volume. This means that despite a similar activity being kept throughout this difficult time, the biggest investors are being cautious and stopped doing USDC movements until the situation turns to be less volatile.

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• Algorand is the top chain by number of wallets transferring USDC with a share of 48.4%. However, there might be an error on the Algorand database as most of these users happened to transfer on October 23rd and 24th, and the values just seem hard to believe. Ethereum is second with a 20.2%, Polygon is third with a 13.2% and Solana is fourth with a 13.2%. This means that the large number of transactions on Solana are being done by a small number of users (compared to the other chains).

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• The average USDC transferred per wallet shows that Ethereum’s and Solana’s users are those that transfer the largest USDC amounts on average. This is because these two chains are widely used to purchase and collect NFTs, which might cost a lot and users need to transfer the funds to do so (usually on USDC or another stable coin to not lose value while waiting for the NFT to be on sale).

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• Ethereum clearly dominates above all the other chains on average USDC amount per transfer with an 88% share. Again, these is heavily influenced by large NFT whales moving lots of funds on stable coins to purchase NFTs.

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• The most common user’s profile on nearly all chains transfers a sum that ranges between 0 and 100 USDC.

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• The 0 to 100 USDC category is also the most common one for the average amount of USDC transferred per transaction.

Conclusions

FTX Situation (explained for context)

FTX is a cryptocurrency exchange, the purpose of which is to offer their clients a space to exchange digital currencies for other digital currencies or for traditional money and vice versa.

FTX has its own token called FTT, which trading agents or operators use for operations such as payment of transaction fees. Last year, Changpeng Zhao (the CEO of Binance) sold his stake in FTX back to Sam Bankman-Fried (the ex-CEO of FTX), who made a partial payment with FTT tokens.

On November 2nd, the cryptocurrency news site CoinDesk reported that a document had reportedly been leaked showing that Alameda Research, a hedge fund operated by Sam Bankman-Fried, had a rather unusual large number of FTT tokens. In theory, FTX and Alameda are separate companies, but the story implied they had close financial ties.

Binance announced on November 6th its intention to sell its FTT tokens “due to recent revelations.” In response, the price of FTT plummeted and traders rushed to abandon FTX, fearing it would become yet another crypto company in disgrace.

FTX had difficulty processing withdrawal requests, which totaled around $6 billion in three days. Later, it came to have liquidity problems, since it did not have enough money to cover the requests received.

On November 8th, Binance indicated that it had reached an agreement to buy FTX to bail it out. However, Zhao added in that announcement, “Binance has the option to withdraw from the agreement at any time.” In a simultaneous announcement, Bankman-Fried said the agreement would protect clients and allow FTX to finish processing requested withdrawals. He tried to calm the jitters around the rumors of a conflict between FTX and Binance and even said: “We are in the best hands”.

On November 9th, Binance announced that it had decided not to purchase FTX, “after completing the due process audit of the company.” In addition, he cited regulatory investigations and reports on mismanagement of funds. Before announcing its bankruptcy, FTX had communicated that it had reached an agreement with the blockchain platform Tron to exchange some FTX tokens to other cryptocurrency wallets.

The cryptocurrency industry has long struggled to convince regulators, investors, and ordinary customers that it is trustworthy. The fall of FTX, which seemed more stable than other companies, in addition to the withdrawal of Binance from the purchase, have shocked the market.

The price of FTTs is down about 80 percent since November 8th. The price of BTC and ETH, (the top tokens by market capitalization) has fluctuated wildly since November 8th; at one point, it suffered a drop of more than 20 percent.

Overview