TL; DR
As we covered in the last intro piece, MakerDAO has gained the largest user group so far. Being the 2 largest (not only out of the 4 we presented — but overall), Maker and Compound have the largest shared user community between them. Here we took a closer look into their common users and with the help of the network graph — we can see the user overlap between all 4 of the platforms we introduced last time.
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The DeFi Universe
With featuring color marked, we can see 4 largest cluster as the exclusive users for each protocol, meaning these addresses interacted with the only one DeFi protocol they are surrounding around. The graph reveals that MakerDAO dominates with blue nodes as the largest community, while Compound follows as the second.
Besides, there are nodes (users) showing on multiple platforms, which are marked as yellow, orange and red ones. For users who appeared in 2 platforms, we marked them as yellow in the graph — Compound and MakerDAO shared the largest common users of more than 1,000 users ( who is both a Maker CDP opener and also a Supplier/Borrower on Compound). This indicates a close relationship between these 2 protocols and potential usage or token flow direction: For example, tokens borrowed or supplied from Compound are possibly being liquidated into MakerDAO market and DEX.
Also it makes sense to see Compound and Maker are the most connected two as they serve similar functionalities as lending platforms, while Augur, as a prediction market, shares less common users with the rest. With more DeFi products included, this network graph can also serve as a clustering visualization tool, to group similar protocols into different categories of usage.
For orange nodes — the users who showed up in 3 protocols — we notice a center cluster of ~240 nodes. This implies that there’s also a certain amount of tokens that are liquidated into/from Uniswap platform. We will dive into these users’ behaviors with more details and data now.
Overview Stats
In this network graph, we included the following groups of users on the different platforms:
For Compound the 15,637 supply and borrow interactions — made by 3,604 distinct addresses can be broken down as follows:
- 12,642 supply actions — made by 3,601 distinct addresses
- 2,995 loans — made by 551 distinct addresses
Notice the number of addresses involved in these is not equal to the sum of the distinct addresses for each — the 548 address difference is made up by users who did both types of interactions at one point
Summary: 39,100 events in total — made by 11,194 distinct users. They had just 10 users in common between them.
Platform Overlaps
To be thorough, let’s cover all of the possible platform overlaps. We already know what the user bases for each of them are, and also that which they share between all 4 of them. What remains is to cover all the possible combinations of 2 and 3 platforms — of which there are 10.
Maker & Compound
11,466 users in total — 10,164 distinct => overlap of 1,302 users. This number, put into perspective — represents 36% of Compound’s users base. More than a third of the addresses who interacted with Compound (by either supplying or borrowing) have also opened CDPs on Maker.
Maker & Uniswap
8,946 users in total — 8,525 distinct => overlap of 421 users. Out of the 1,084 distinct users that interacted with Uniswap by providing liquidity — those they share with Maker represent 38% of the total.
Maker & Augur
8,501 users in total — 8,403 distinct => overlap of 98 users. Therefore, only 15% of those who opened Augur prediction markets also opened CDPs on Maker.
Compound & Uniswap
4,688 users in total — 4,286 distinct => overlap of 402 users — 11% of Compound’s user base & 37% of Uniswap’s.
Compound & Augur
4,243 user in total — 4,177 distinct => overlap of 66 users — less than 2% of Compound users opened prediction markets, and around 10% of Augur’s users interacted with Compound.
Uniswap & Augur
1,723 users in total — 1,694 distinct => overlap of 29 users. Smallest overlap since,
Maker & Compound & Uniswap
(421 + 1302 + 402) overlap of 2 sets — (12,547 users in total — 10,687 distinct)=> overlap of 265 users
Maker & Compound & Augur
(66 + 98 + 1302) overlap of 2 sets — (12,105 users in total — 10,679 distinct) => overlap of 40 users
Maker & Uniswap & Augur
(29 + 421 + 98) overlap of 2 sets — (9,585 users in total — 9,051 distinct) => overlap of 14 users
Compound & Uniswap & Augur
(402 + 66 + 29 ) overlap of 2 sets — (5,327 users in total — 4,847 distinct) => overlap of 17 users
To better explain the shared user bases, a timeline of the interactions may be interesting to study. We could answer the question — who onboarded these users into DeFi? How did they start, and why did they stay? What is the usual ‘path’ through protocols for those that used all 4? Is there one? Of course, since it’s both the oldest and the largest — both user and activity wise — we’d expect Maker to be the first choice for most of these shared users.
Luckily there are only 10 addresses. By looking at the date for the oldest interaction and the platform with which it was made — we found the following: 8 of them had their first interaction with DeFi in 2018, between February and November, while the other 2 were introduced in January 2019. Surprisingly, 5 of them started with Augur, 4 with Maker and 1 with Compound. None of these addresses that the 4 protocols shared in common had their first interaction with Uniswap — which can tell us that at least between the ‘hardcore’ DeFi users — Uniswap was a later stop in the journey.
Platform exclusivity
Since we’ve covered all possible overlaps between these platforms — it would make equally as much sense to look into how many users these platforms managed to keep exclusively to themselves
Maker
There is a total of 6,347 distinct users that only used the Maker platform. This number is pretty high, considering the amount of overlap, but since Maker is the largest by far this was expected to a degree. We can say that these are Maker’s loyal users — 80% of the total.
They also opened 86% of all the CDPs ever (14,926 out of 17,352). These users include the ones we talked about in the last article — the largest CDP openers, including that one user with 4,893 CDPs opened.
Compound
For Compound, there are 2,143 distinct users that were exclusive to it — which comes up to about 60% of their total user base.
Uniswap
515 liquidity providers (47.5%) on Uniswap didn’t interact with another protocol.
Augur
507 Augur market creators are unique to Augur — around 80% of their total user base is therefore loyal to them.
We can see that Augur and Maker have the largest share of ‘loyal’ users out of these 4 platforms. This can be explained by the fact that they are the largest and smallest of them — while also attributable to Augur having such a specialized use case. Prediction markets have so little in common with the other protocols that we can therefore assume that Augur’s users — to some extent — may not show interest in using other platforms.
Disclaimer: Alethio has no preference or prejudice towards any of the projects mentioned above. The range of protocols discussed is limited and we will keep working on adding more in the list to achieve a more holistic view. Alethio has a strong commitment to staying neutral by providing facts and best judgments based on objective and/or verified information. This article should never be used as a guide for any malicious practice or trading suggestion.
