Introduction

This dashboard will analyse the tranfer of UST through the Shuttle Bridge between Terra and Ethereum, as it is one of the first two interchain use cases for UST as announced shortly after its launch in September 2020, together with Solana. Since then, a plethora of blockchains and protocols have been added to Terra interoperability strategy and now counts with over 10 destinations through Terra Bridge including BSC, Harmony, Avalanche and Osmosis.

Methodology

Two CTEs to calculate outflows and inflows through the Terra <-> Ethereum Shuttle bridge were joined to disply results of daily UST outflows/inflows, cumulative UST outflows/inflows, daily number of UST transactions outflows/inflows and daily users UST outflows/inflows.

For each CTE, the terra.transfers table was queried with a similar structure:

• sum(event_amount) as daily_UST_OUT/IN
• sum(daily_UST_OUT/IN) over (order by date) as cumulative UST OUT/IN
• count(tx_id) as daily_txs_OUT/IN
• count(distinct event_from/to) as daily_users_OUT/IN
• where event_to/from_address_name = 'ethereum bridge'

Note the difference in parameters and constraints to obtain both directions of the bridge.

Results

Figure 1. shows the daily and cumulative (in log scale) outflows and inflows for UST since December 2020.

Until End of November 2021, the growth is more or less stable, with outflows leading inflows and amounting up to 50M UST per day. High activity periods in March, May and since August 2021 led the cumulative outflow/inflow amount to 3.6B/3B UST.

On December 2021 a frenzy movement was disenchained. In one month, cumulative outflows/inflows almost doubled to 6.6B/5.6B and daily amounts were as high as 234M UST for outflows and 539M for inflows.

Since then, two other spikes happened, concentrated around January 28th (524M/246M UST for outflows/inflows) and April 3rd (724M/672M UST outflows/inflows). April 4th saw the cumulative outflows surpassing 11B UST with inflows at 10.6B UST.

Figures 4. and 5 show the average transaction size in UST and the average transactions per user respectively. Together they show a very interesting trend over time: users are doing bigger transactions but less number of them as the bridge matures.

This is more clear in the Figure 5. where users completed up to 6 transactions daily in the beginning of 2021, while now it has stagnated around 1.2 transactions per user daily.

Figure 4. shows a very significant increase in average size for both directions on April 3rd of 2.6M/2.3M UST, which means some humonguous transactions were completed this day.

Figure 2. and 3. show the number of daily transactions and users for the bridge's outflows and inflows. These two are highly correlated as can be verified on Figures 7a and 7b (see next section).

There is one significant day, March 17th 2021, on which 934 outflows and 1876 inflows took place. Comparing this day in Figure 1. the volumes more or less tripled with almost 10 times more transactions, so I imagine this day some promotion or social media campaign incentivized the use of the bridge to new users. Similarly, the peak in transactions in October 5th didn't translate into a significant increase in volume, hinting at new users trying the bridge with small amounts.

The peak in volumes on late December doesn't correlate with an increase in the number of transactions, indicating some whale influence, as does the peak in April 4th.

Figures 7a. and 7b. show the correlation between number of daily transaction and unique daily users for the outflows and inflows respectively. It shows a highly correlated relationship, with some outliers hinting at some powers users / bots in similar extent for both graphs. The biggest difference is the left top point on Figure 7b. which relates to the big increase on March 17th 2021 with over 1800 inflow transactions.

Conclusions

This analysis can be wrapped up very well with both figure below, 8. and 9.

As the bridge matures and the cumulative transfered UST increases, users are sending less number of transactions. Days when the daily volume is high (based on the color), the average transaction size increases, which is caused by whales or big players using the bridge to transfer big amount rather than by an increase in users or transactions.

Both directions follow this trend, although the inflows have an even more stable line of average transactions per users.

I see this as a good sign, since one would prefer to use the bridge once to transfer bigger amounts. Now the growth will maybe more dependant on the capability to attract more users to transfer their UST between networks, seeking to use more DeFi interchain products to obtain a profit from their UST.