Overview

• In this open analysis we are looking at the Flash loans for MakerDAO on Ethereum.
• Specifically we look at FlashLoan Volumes, Frequency and number of borrowers.
• We also look at the top 10 and average Flashloan users and then see what kind of activities they are doing in the past n_days,i.e 60 days by default.

What is a Flash Loan?

Flash loans are a feature designed for developers, due to the technical knowledge required to execute one. Flash Loans allow you to borrow any available amount of assets without putting up any collateral, as long as the liquidity is returned to the protocol within one block transaction. To do a Flash Loan, you will need to build a contract that requests a Flash Loan. The contract will then need to execute the instructed steps and pay back the loan + interest and fees all within the same transaction.[1]

Flashloan Volume and Frequency $DAI

• We have seen an overall increase in the Flashloan volume for DAI in Aug 2022 with the monthly volume touching 17B $USD.
• The frequency however has decreased with only 852 loans in Aug 2022.

Flashloan Frequency Overall

• Overall Flashloan frequency has actually decreased by 50% since Jan 2022.
• DAI is the most popular token by number of loans, followed by WETH and USDC.

Flashloan Users Average and Top 10

• We look at the Top 10 Flashloan users and 20 average users and look at various metrics like balances and their activities.
• Flashloan Users
  • The typical flashloan user only takes about 1 flashloan.
  • The Top 10 flashloan users hav ~3000 Flashloans.
  • Most of the users only take out 1 Flashloan, followed by 1-10 Loans, and then 10-50 loans.
• Balances
  • Balances are all over the place for flashloan users.
  • However, the overall balance has seen an increase in the recent days.
• Swaps
  • Very few of these users actually do other activities like swaps.
  • We see the most number of swaps in a day is 6 swaps.
• Votes, Delegations, Deposits
  • None of these typical or the Top 10 users vote, delegate or deposit in the MakerDAO platform, which is quite surprising.

Conclusion

• Flashloans on MakerDAO are strong and have seen increased volumes for $DAI in the recent times.
• However, the decrease in the number of loans and the wallets borrowing has gone down which is concerning.
• Apart from that the typical wallets balance of users is seeing an overall increase which is a good sign.

Flashloan Number of Borrowers

• Even though the frequency of loans has decreased, the number of borrowed have seen a spike in Jun 2022 and then it has again decreased in Jul and August.
• DAI has had the most number of borrowers in a month, it has been dominating other tokens.
• In total DAI has had by far the most number of borrowers, followed by WETH and USDC.