On the 12th of December, White Whale has performed its token launch via a new method called BOOTSWAP. BOOTSWAP is essentially a Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool, where all the funds raised from the launch go directly to to fund the liquidity pool on TerraSwap for the $WHALE/UST pair, and the corresponding LP tokens are deposited in the White Whale treasury, as a bootstrapping for their Protocol Owned Liquidity approach.
Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools (LBP) may sound new. And indeed, they are. Especially on the Terra blockchain, where they have only recently been implemented and open-sourced by the Astroport Team. In a nutshell, the price of the token starts high and, as time goes on, it constantly drops. However, if users starts to buy in, then the price may stabilize or even increase in price.
This mechanism prevents bots from purchasing tokens at a cheap price, when the pool is bootstrapped, causing the price to spike and allowing them to make profit by dumping the tokens on the retail users.
If you want more info on the LBP and BOOTSWAP, I suggest you to read the official post.
So, how did it go?
I have been monitoring the situation as time went on, and I kept posting updates on my Twitter page.
Now that the BOOTSWAP is over, I want to display some interesting visualizations and analyse some of the key metrics that may be relevant when assessing how well the launch went.
Number of participants
The number of unique addresses which participated is: 7215
When was their first interaction?
In order to measure how much time users have waited before purchasing the token for the first time, we plotted the number of users which made their first transaction on a hourly basis. For reference, we also calculated the average price for the same hour, in order to allow to identify trends. You can toggle the two metrics in the chart.
We can see four different spikes of new users participating in the BOOTSWAP:
- The first is at the very beginning. Almost 300 users have bid right at the start, at an average price of $0.96
- The second wave happened after 9 hours. This was triggered by the price dropping below $0.20 and the buying pressure raised the average price to $0.32. This was the first FOMO wave and its effect can be seen in the average bid price
- The next spike happened 14 hours before the end. This was most likely triggered by the price dropping to $0.15. The FOMO raised the average price to $0.18
- The last wave happened at the very end. These are probably users who were probably very patient and waited the end hoping that the price would drop even lower, given the LBP mechanics. However, this did not happen as the average price was $0.20
It interesting to notice how the different waves of new users are tightly coupled with price dropping below certain levels, and how these levels have changed over the course of the event.
In order to measure the participation in the event over time, we can look at the number of hourly transactions.
This resembles very much the trend we have seen in the chart showing the first interactions of new users, with the same 4 major spikes. However, we can see a couple of more spikes, such as around 8:00 of the 14/12. This is a spike matches with the time when the price fell below $0.14 and — given it is not present in the new users chart- it means that these transactions have been mostly performed by users who had already bought tokens.
How much UST was spent and at what prices?
The total net $UST spent by users was 22mln.
We plotted the amount of $UST spent and gained at the different prices. The two options can be toggled to better focus on only one of them.
- The price which saw the highest amount of $UST spent and gained was $0.19, with a total of $3.87m bought and $1.44m sold of tokens.
- $0.18 was the second most popular price and $0.20 was the third. A clear cluster has formed around these prices. $0.19 was indeed the final price.
- If we look outside the cluster, $0.14 appears to be a popular price with $1.7m of bought tokens
- The net $UST for $0.18 and $0.19 is the highest, with $2.4m of delta between bought and sold tokens.
It is important to notice how the price discovery -allowed by the LBP- has led to a high concentration of bids around the eventually final price. This is good, since it means that there are relatively small bags of tokens ready to sell at higher prices to break even.
At how many different prices have users bought?
In order to answer this question, we counted the different prices at which each user has performed transactions. We plotted the number of users grouped by the number of different prices. The percentage is also available to be toggled.
- 56% of all users have only bought at one price
- 18% has bought at 2 prices while 9% has bought at 3
- 4% (300) has bought at more than 6 different prices
- 1 user has bought at 22 different prices
Interesting to notice how a small percentage of users have really taken the DCA strategy seriously and bought at several different prices.
Amount of UST per bid
Let’s at the statistical summary of the amount of UST per single bid and how they are distributed.
+-------+-----------------+
| count | 19417.000000 |
+-------+-----------------+
| mean | 1147.302430 |
| std | 6398.955341 |
| min | 0.000280 |
| 25% | 50.000000 |
| 50% | 115.000000 |
| 75% | 500.000000 |
| max | 462531.790845 |
+-------+-----------------+- The average amount of UST per bid has been $1147 UST
- However, we can see that the maximum amount per bid is over $462k
- 50% of all bids had an amount of $115 or less
- 75% had an amount of $500 or less
- This means that we have some few outliers, hence few transactions with high amount of UST, which raise the average value
Let’s remove outliers and plot the distribution of the other bids
We can see that the number of bids with less than $50 is the range with most transactions. The number than is stable between $50–$100. We see spikes around round numbers: $100, $200, $300 and so on including $500.
At what price was the largest bid made?
It turned out the largest bid was made at price of $0.19 by address: terra109epuz6qhhaujy4s3ya0zxwdrj6s3pu7q9dzf9.
+---------------+----------------------------------------------+
| sender | terra109epuz6qhhaujy4s3ya0zxwdrj6s3pu7q9dzf9 |
+---------------+----------------------------------------------+
| Time | 2021-12-14 15:36:21.411 |
| bid price | 0.19 |
| Amount of UST | 462531.790845 |
+---------------+----------------------------------------------+This is the only bid placed by this addressed, and it was placed roughly 11 hours before the end of the event
Biggest profits and losses
Some users have both bought and sold $WHALE tokens during the event. Some have consequently made some profits, while others may have realised some losses. Let’s look at the top 20 profits and losses.
- The top most profitable address has realised a profit of $15k
- The worst performing address lost nearly $30k — meaning that he spent net $30k during the event. However, this loss may not have been realised yet as most of its tokens have not been sold yet.
If you are curious like me, you would like to see more closely how these addresses behaved during the event. Let me show you.
Let’s start with the one with the highest losses:
The address has bought a large bag of $WHALE tokens at $0.17, which is a good price, but also bought in at $0.25 and $0.41, which is where most losses were accumulated. It also sold tokens at $0.17, $0.24 and $0.25.
Let’s now look at the address which has profited the most during the event:
This address has only performed one speculative purchase of more than $300k at $0.18 and sold right at $0.19 — making a profit of $15k.
It was that easy.
Conclusion
The BOOTSWAP event has seen the participation of over 7k users. We could observe several waves of new users buying in, mostly correlated with price drops below certain levels. Most of the users has bought at only one price, while more than 300 has bought in at over 7 different prices.
The cluster of most spent UST is centred around the final price of $0.19, which shows how effective this type of launch has been in allowing users to buy at a fair price.
Some users have even realized significant profits during the event.
I personally hope to see more of these launches in the future. It looks like a fair way of launching the tokens and it would be interesting to compare users behaviour with the one in the BOOTSWAP.
