What is NEAR?

NEAR Protocol is a smart contract-enabled proof-of-stake public blockchain that aims to act as a community-managed cloud computing platform. It is a decentralized application platform (dApp) and competitor to Ethereum that focuses on the ease of use for users and developers. The native NEAR tokens are used to pay for transaction fees and storage on the Near crypto platform. Sharding reduces the computational load by dividing or partitioning the network into shards. With this tactic, each node is not required to execute all code on the network, only the code that is relevant to its shard, so shards can perform computations in parallel with each other, thus scaling the capacity and number of network nodes. NEAR Protocol aims to advance the crowded race to provide the infrastructure for Web 3.0 and has sought to distinguish itself through its unique developer-friendly and user-friendly features.

Methodology

To obtain which contracts are users spending the most gas on to use in NEAR, we use the flipside_prod_db.mdao_near.transactions table. Then, we sum all the gas used by day and divide it by 10^12 to convert the raw gas units to decimal format.

According to the Near Documentation, each NEAR account can only hold one smart contract. However, you can create "subaccounts" with a "master account" for apps with multiple contracts. Account naming follows the internet domains model. So for example, the account user-A-account can create subaccounts contract1.user-A-account and contract2.user-A-account. Thus, the transaction receiver is the account name, and as those can only have one contract, we use this field to recognize the contract. Finally, we average the gas used per contract to select those with the highest values.

Gas Usage During the Last Month

The chart above shows the gas usage during the last month for all contracts. It can be observed that the gas spent by users oscillated most days between 2 and 4M, but from July 16th to July 21st, there was a spike that reached over 12M. To see why this happened, let’s chart the contracts where most of the gas was used on during those dates.

Top 10 Contracts that Required the Most Gas Usage (All Time)

These are the top 10 contracts that have required the most gas usage on average (from higher to lower, respectively):

1. client.bsc-bridge.near: Bridge between NEAR and the Binance Smart Chain.
2. deadmau5.mintbase1.near: Deadmau5, the DJ and Producer teamed up with rockband Portugal. the Man, Mintbase and NEAR to release their new single as an NFT.
3. nft.nearapps.near: NEAR applications.
4. pangolindex-token.near: Pangolin’s decentralized exchange deployed on the NEAR Network.
5. miaminwhs.neareducation.linkdropv1.near: The LinkDrop contract allows any user to create a link that someone else can use to claim tokens even without an account. The NEAR Education team is launching a unique and exciting initiative to onboard 1000 teachers from all backgrounds and disciplines.
6. nft-premium-land.l2e.near: Land to Empire is a play-to-earn mobile ready strategy game on NEAR Protocol.
7. terraspace_mint_test_8.xuguangxia.near: 777 Generative Landmark NFTs. Explore NEAR Protocol’s NFT Market Featuring Multi-Collection Staking.
8. claiming.jumbo_exchange.near: Jumbo is designed to be the most user-friendly exchange that sets out to eliminate the common struggles people experience when navigating Decentralized Exchanges.
9. nft.danteairdrop.near: Dante is a token pegged to Tomb with future NFT utility.
10. blockchain-academy-event.learnwith.linkdropv1.near: In essence, a NEAR drop lets you send a link to whoever you want with a certain amount of $NEAR attached to it.

Top 10 Contracts that Required the Most Gas Usage (Last Week)

If we repeat the process but filtering only by the last week, we see that out of the 10 contracts obtained, only the contract in the 8th position (linkdropv1.near) correlates with the contracts that users spent the most gas on to use historically. Moreover, the average gas used has also been lower during this past week. That might reflect a shift in tendency, be it because other contracts have gained more popularity (even when they require a lot of gas), or because the all time top 10 contracts might have been optimized to require less gas. During the last week, the contract that required the most gas usage was learnernft.learnclub.near, an NFT collection, which is a collab between LNC community and one of the best award winning graphic designers in Europe.

Top 10 Contracts that Required the Most Gas Usage (Last Month)

The chart on the left shows the contracts that users spent more gas on during the last month, which as we also saw on the chart above, it only has one contract in common (linkdropv1.near) with the top 10 all time contracts by most gas usage. However, if we compare them to last week’s top 10 contracts, five of them match:

1. learnernft.learnclub.near: An NFT collection, which is a collab between LNC community and one of the best award winning graphic designers in Europe.
2. zomland.near: ZomLand is an interactive P2E NFT card game. You take on the leader's role of the army of zombies and monsters to battle with other users all over the world.
3. sputnik-dao.near: SputnikDAO is a hub of DAOs empowering communities of the NEAR ecosystem. 
4. token.serpius.near: Serpius token.
5. linkdropv1.near: A NEAR drop lets you send a link to whoever you want with a certain amount of $NEAR attached to it.

Gas Spikes (July 16th to July 21st)

After analyzing which contracts used more gas between July 16th and July 21st, we conclude that the Aurora contract was the reason behind these spikes in gas, as almost 90% of the top 10 contracts that used the most amount of gas on those dates belonged to this contract. Aurora is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) built on the NEAR Protocol Blockchain, that aims to be an Ethereum-compatible scaling solution. This enables developers to operate their apps on an Ethereum-Compatible, high-throughput, scalable, and future safe platform at a lower transaction costs for their users.

We confirm the aforementioned statement by querying the average gas used on the Aurora contract during the last month, where we observe the same gas spikes between July 16th and July 21st.

Conclusions

In this dashboard we analyzed which contracts users spent the most gas on to use (during the last week, last month and all time). The most important takeaways are the following:

• The top 10 contracts that users spent more gas on to use (all time), oscillated in gas between 226 and 102.
• Comparing those values to those obtained during the last week, there is a big difference as the latter oscillate between104 to 52. Moreover, after correlating the contracts, only 1 of them matches.
• The same scenario happens when comparing the all time contracts to those from the last month, but these last ones have 5 contracts in common with those from last week.
• There were gas spikes from July 16th to July 21st, caused by the Aurora contract.