Crypto Stablecoin Report 03: Where are the users of DAI?
Original link: https://bihu.com/article/1059510543
Original publish time: June 2, 2020
Original author: Lie Ma, researcher of MYKEY Lab
We released MYKEY Crypto Stablecoin Report to share our interpretation of the development status of stablecoins and analysis of their development trends to help the participants in the crypto market stay updated on the development status of stablecoin. The MYKEY Crypto Stablecoin Report will be published every week, looking forward to maintaining communication with the industry and exploring the development prospects of stablecoin together.
Quick Preview
- The total market capitalization of stablecoins grew by about $143 million last week, with a weekly growth rate of 1.33%.
- Tether additionally issued 100 million TRC20 USDT on Tron on May 23.
- The total number of active addresses of stablecoins hit a record high on May 25.
- Centrifuge launched Tinklake on Ethereum, supporting the use of traditional assets as collateral to lend stablecoins on the platform.
- The data shows that DAI has a more intensive distribution of holders than that of USDT, and is used more in decentralized applications.
- Western DAI holders use DAI more for DeFi applications than Eastern DAI holders, but overall DAI is used more in the Eastern.
1. Overview of Stablecoin Data
First, let’s review the changes in the basic information of the various stablecoins in the past week.
Market Circulation
Source: MYKEY, Coinmetrics
Overall last week (from May 22 to May 28, 2020, the same below), the total market capitalization of stablecoins grew by about $143 million last week, with a weekly growth rate of 1.33%.
Source: MYKEY, Coinmetrics
The main contributor is USDT. Tether additionally issued 100 million TRC20 USDT on Tron on May 23. This is followed by BUSD and USDC, which increased by approximately $18.51 million and $13.54 million, PAX, HUSD, and DAI followed, increasing by approximately $7.82 million, $4.86 million, and $1.86 million. GUSD grew less, just about $480,000, and the supply of TUSD has shrunk by about $4.26 million. It has hardly increased in the past week.
The Number of Holding Addresses
Source: MYKEY, DeBank
The number of stablecoin holding addresses on Ethereum continued to rise and increased by 89,748 last week.
Source: MYKEY, DeBank
The increase in the number of holding addresses mainly came from USDT, which increased by 84,128, followed by DAI and USDC, which increased by 3,155 and 2,789, and the number of PAX holding addresses decreased by 678 instead.
The Number of Active Addresses
Source: MYKEY, Coinmetrics
Last week, the total number of active addresses of stablecoins kept growing, and hit a record high on May 25.
The Number of 24-hour Transactions on the Public Blockchains
Source: MYKEY, Coinmetrics
Last week, the number of daily transactions of major stablecoins also maintained a growth trend and is currently at its highest level in three months.
The Number of 24-hour Volume of Transactions on the Public Blockchains
Source: MYKEY, Coinmetrics
Last week, the daily volume of transactions of major stablecoins remained stable, and the proportion of the daily volume of transactions of each stablecoin did not change much.
2. The Premium of DAI Disappeared and Growth Space Expanded
Since the market plunged on March 12, 2020, there has been a certain premium for DAI, the decentralized stablecoin, the premium did not nearly disappear until the report was written.
The March 12th shock exposed some flaws in the DAI stabilization mechanism. The downward market will let people have the safe-haven demand for DAI, but at the same time, the supply side of DAI also needs to buy Dai to repay debts to prevent liquidation due to the downward price of the collateral. Rising demand and declining supply will cause a positive premium of DAI to unanchor.
When DAI has a negative premium, Maker can reduce the circulation and shrink the supply by increasing the loan interest rate and deposit interest rate at the same time to push DAI back to the anchor price. But under normal circumstances, when DAI is at a positive premium, the maximum adjustment method of Maker is to reduce both the loan interest rate and the deposit interest rate to zero. If it does not work, a long-term positive premium may appear.
Perhaps the long-term positive premium of DAI has pushed Maker to accelerate its adoption of other assets, or perhaps the pressure from centralized stablecoins such as USDT, USDC, BUSD, and decentralized stablecoins such as Acala, Kava, and Celo has made Maker’s approach more radical.
Maker has listed USDC and WBTC as collateral assets in its MCD contract, increasing the supply of DAI and pushing DAI back to the anchor price in recent months.
On May 26th, Centrifuge released Tinklake on Ethereum. People can use traditional assets as collateral to borrow on the platform, stablecoin holders can lend their stablecoins on the platform and earn corresponding interest. As of the time of writing, the platform has released 255,000 DAI loans and the collateral is Freight Forwarding Invoices.
The partners of Centrifuge and Maker may be able to provide tokenized traditional assets as collateral for Maker in the future. In addition to the ETH, BAT, USDC, and WBTC that have been added. In the future, we will see more assets become collateral in the MCD, improving the growth space of DAI.
With a market capitalization of over $100 million, DAI is the largest decentralized stablecoin in terms of market capitalization. While its mechanism still suffers from the aforementioned flaws (which the author thought might be improved by renewing the contract and adding support for negative interest rates), it has generally proved the effectiveness of this stablecoin mechanism. At present, other decentralized stablecoins use similar CDP architecture, and we will analyze and compare them in the subsequent study.
3. Data to Portray User Portraits of DAI — Where Are the Users of DAI?
The above chart shows the proportion of DAI and USDT held by the top 100 addresses. It can be seen that the distribution of DAI is more concentrated than that of USDT. The DAI held by the top 10 addresses accounted for 75.50% of the total DAI circulation, while the USDT held by the top 10 addresses accounted for 44.59% of the USDT circulation on Ethereum.
The Usage Scenarios of DAI and USDT are very Different:
Source: MYKEY, Etherscan
According to Etherscan’s notation of addresses, 17.47% of DAI is currently stored in addresses of DeFi applications (DEX, lending, etc.), while only 2.45% of DAI is stored in addresses of centralized exchanges. On the contrary, 12.45% of the ERC20 USDT is stored in the address of the centralized exchange, while only 0.16% is stored in the address of the DeFi application.
Source: MYKEY, Etherscan
We selected major DeFi smart contract addresses and addresses of centralized exchanges and lending platforms from addresses holding more than 100,000 DAI, and counted the changes in their DAI balances over time. It can be seen that in these applications, the overall balance of the DAI is showing an increasing trend. However, if it is divided into centralized applications and decentralized applications, we actually see at the balance of DAI in the addresses of centralized applications such as Bitfinex, OKEx, and Nexo has not increased significantly in 3 months. The growth of the balance of DAI in each application mainly comes from decentralized applications such as dYdX, OasisDEX, Curve, and Aave.
Source: MYKEY, Etherscan
We hope to explore the portraits of DAI holders using the DeFi application, and we have drawn the above heat map of usage time based on the DAI transactions involved in the smart contracts of dYdX, OasisDEX, Curve, Aave, and Kyber in the past three months. (The time in the chart is Beijing time).
The chart above shows that DAI holders have used the above-mentioned DeFi applications more from 21:00 to 9:00 the next day (UTC+8) (9:00 to 21:00 Washington time, USA) in the past three months. This provides us with important information that DAI holders who use these DeFi applications are more in the Western Hemisphere and most likely American users.
According to our data, DAI holders have used DeFi applications approximately 45% of their total transactions in the past three months, and the heat map above only represents some DAI holders’ usage behavior. Below we have drawn a heat map of DAI usage time including all DAI transactions in the past month.
Source: MYKEY, Etherscan
We can see that this heat map has changed significantly compared to the heat map of the time DAI was used in the DeFi application. Except for May 10th, the usage of DAI was mainly concentrated at 9:00 to 1:00 the next day(UTC+8), and the usage of DAI is relatively inactive between 1:00 and 9:00(UTC+8) in the past month. This heat map shows that the users of DAI are more concentrated in the Eastern Hemisphere (close to the active time of Chinese users).
In summary, we can conclude that DAI holders in the Western Hemisphere use DAI more for DeFi applications than DAI holders in the Eastern Hemisphere, but overall DAI used more in the Eastern Hemisphere. We can use the following chart to briefly show the usage of DAI.
Source: MYKEY
This is what we’re sharing in this MYKEY Crypto Stablecoin Report, welcome to stay tuned for follow-up weekly reports. We will provide more interpretations of the development status of stablecoins and analysis of their development trends to help you stay updated on the development status of stablecoin in the follow-up report.
PS: MYKEY Lab has the final right to interpret the content of the article, please indicate the source for the quotation. Welcome to follow our official account — MYKEY Lab: MYKEY Smart Wallet.
Past review
About Us
KEY GROUP: https://keygroup.me/
MYKEY Web: https://mykey.org/
BIHU: https://bihu.com/people/1133973
Telegram: https://t.me/mykey_lab
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mykey_lab
Medium: https://medium.com/mykey-lab
Github: https://github.com/mykeylab
Youtube: MYKEY Laboratory
