Introduction

Gnosis Chain is an Ethereum-based sidechain with the stated goal of drastically lowering transaction fees and speeding up confirmation times, and its native coin is XDAI. It's a one-to-one representation of the DAI token on Ethereum, whose value is fixed at one US dollar per token.

The term "Layer 2" is used to refer to a group of Ethereum scaling solutions. Layer 2 blockchains are independent blockchains that build upon Ethereum while still benefiting from the network's security features.

Sybil attack: For the purpose of exerting undue influence on a network, an attacker may resort to a Sybil attack, in which they create a large number of fictitious user accounts under the guise of innocent-looking people.

Method

To pinpoint when the out-of-the-ordinary activity on Gnosis occurred, we'll first examine the dashboard's data on the number of transactions, active users, and new registrants over the course of the past 2 month.

The next step is for us to examine some data in an attempt to determine the cause of that out of the ordinary behavior. I need to know where these odd purchases were sent. where did the mysterious addresses go, and what are they used for.

The primary table that will be used for this bounty is gnosis.core.fact transactions.

Analysis

The following charts shows the count of unique active and new users over past 2 month and daily count and growth of transactions over time.

✍🏻 Conclusion

• Since this address (0x37...46b4) is not in Gnosisscan, labels table, or on-web data, the destination of anomalous activity on Gnosis is unclear. Users who caused this odd action are unknown.
• Gnosis's social media hasn't announced this mysterious action. Thus, this activity is not related to a DApp, DeFi program, platform launch, or protocol (Staking, Farming, etc.). Another reason for this conclusion is that all transactions were completed in a few hours, whereas a normal event would take longer.
• This Gnosis activity is unrelated to an event that drew regular users. For example, this cannot be a new DApp or DeFi program because none of the 54136 users who caused this unusual activity were regular users since they have not interacted with any other protocol or destination on Gnosis and their first and last transaction was the unusual activity.
• Thus, the unknown addresses (mainly 0x37...46b4 that caused the highest spike on 5 October) are wallet addresses, not contracts. Bots or Sybil attacks are likely.

About:

• Author: HaM☰d

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• Discord: 0xHaM☰d#8391

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• Twitter: @arjmandi_hamed

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• Email: h_arjmandi2012@yahoo.com

What's Going On With Gnosis?

There’s been some unusual activity with Gnosis as pointed out by our community. Time to figure out exactly what’s going on.

Take a deep dive into recent activity on Gnosis, especially recent rapid rises in the number of active users, transactions, and more. Make any hypothesis you can about what is driving this activity. Is there a new dapp that launched? Is there some incentive program going on? Or is the spike in users/txns due to some sybil attack?

Note any trends or outliers you see.

Hey there 👋!

Firstly, I appreciate you sticking with it until the conclusion.

I'm Hamed, a civil engineering Ph.D.

student interested in data analysis.

I've made many similar dashboards and visualizations since I started at Flipside in January.

Please take a look at my various contact details and let me know what you think.

:telescope: Findings:

According to the data presented above, there was a significant increase in the number of transactions and, most notably, active and new users of the Gnosis protocol on October 5, 2022. As of October 5th, there are 57.312k active users and 55k new registered users on the Gnosis protocol, up from a peak of 13.53k active users and 10.8k new registered users on September 28th, respectively.

So, We have observed not only there was extraordinary interaction of users (57.312k) with Gnosis protocol, but also 55k of these users were freshly registered on Gnosis at the same time of unusual activity. This suggests that the paid fee for each unique transactions were probably far lower than the average fee paid per user or transaction

The third graph shows that on October 5th, neither the daily nor the cumulative charge created by this abnormal activity was very high, whereas the greatest paid fees were distributed on September 28th, the day before the daily peak.

The 27th and 28th of September saw some odd behavior as well, but the 5th of October saw something much stranger, and it created a far bigger rise.

:telescope: Findings:

The chart in the right shows the daily transactions count of SDAI & other tokens transfer over past 60 days.

As can be seen in Oct 5th the highest volume of XDAI transferred in more than 65.35K transactions. and in the previous day (Oct 4th) the highest count of other tokens transactions took placed at over 53.67K.

:telescope: Findings:

As of above chart can be observed, an unusual daily unique sender count was happened in Oct 5th with 56.15K transferrer, that was too huge number.

Also, according of right chart, the transfer transactions type is the most of transactions count over past 2 month.

:telescope: Findings:

The preceding data suggests that the unusual activity on Gnosis was caused by the high volume of communication between users with the 0x37…46b4 address.

Additionally, we can see that all 54.136k people who have interacted with this address are new.

This address is unknown and I couldn’t find identity of that on gnosis.core.dim labels database. Accordingly, we cannot confidently determine who owns this address.

:rocket: Transfer Transactions

Following charts shows the token transfer transactions over past 2 month.

:telescope: Findings:

The following PIE chart shows the share of transfer transactions type and total count of transfer transactions, as of this can be seen that the percentage of DAI transfer transactions is the highest , at 61.1%, that followed by ETH transfer by 20.1% of transactions. 100% of transactions performed by Hop Protocol and bridged.

The next chart shows the top addresses, who that have had more than 1K transfer transactions on Sep 4 & 5th, as of this chart can be seen that 0x56…d165 transferred the most volume of XDAI with 35.7K, and 0xcb…1904 transferred the highest volume of other tokens.