1. Introduction

Axelar is a network, securely connecting all blockchain ecosystems, applications, assets and users to deliver Web3 interoperability, and enabling composability between blockchains. Instead of pairwise cross-chain bridges, they can rely on a network architecture that provides a uniform code base and governance structure.

They recently (on the 27th of September) launched their native token “AXL” on Osmosis, which will be the case study for this dashboard!

Proposal on governance. The Axelar team did a governance proposal fully explained here asking for a  740,741 OSMO loan to bootstrap liquidity

On the 20th of September, a governance proposal (nº 332) was submitted on the Osmosis blockchain, in which the Axelar team asked for Loan Swap of OSMO to Axelar for bootstrapping liquidity for the following pool to be created, also voted on the following proposal ID 333.

\n This kind of proposals have already been tested on Osmosis to bootstrap other pools successfully such as the STARS pool. As explained in the proposal, launching with depth is extremely important to prevent substantial price impact from early trade volume. When a pool with a highly anticipated token launches, people tend to ape in as soon as the pool goes live. If there isn't significant liquidity in the pool to handle that kind of trade volume, this causes short and potentially long-term asset mispricing issues.

In the short term, the price of the asset will skyrocket simply because the supply isn't there to meet the early demand. Usually this is followed by a crash as those early buyers take profits, meaning people that were late to the party usually get rekt. The price may thereafter stay inflated over what might otherwise be considered a reasonable value for current market conditions for some time thereafter.

The figure on the bottom left shows the amount of votes in % for the proposal, without being weighted using the governance votes table, and the one on the bottom right shows the different validators and their weight, ordered by voting choice.

3. Pool activity

We can see that the top 10 OSMO depositors has a clear outlier, which corresponds to the Axelar Foundation (wallet osmo1z6mf937x9ug4ck7lt45f2wyrt9lnway68lpta9). If we exclude it from the result, we get a list with the real top 10 depositors, with the maximum amount of OSMO deposited being 35k OSMO. The same is true for AXL depositors, as shown in the following figures.

2. The proposal

The top 10 swaps come from three different traders. Again, the top trader is AXL Foundation osmo1z6mf937x9ug4ck7lt45f2wyrt9lnway68lpta9 as we can see in the list on the right hand side.

If we remove it and aggregate by top 10 traders, we get the following charts below, where we see two top traders swapping OSMO to AXL (“osmo1n..8uz0” has swapped a total of 100k AXL out for 52k OSMO) and trader “osmo1…3tny” has swapped a total of 13k OSMO out for 13K AXL in.

The bottom par of this top 10 have swapped less than 5% that of the top traders.

Out of the total amount of users adding liquidity and/or swapping in the new pool, how many of them are swapping for the first time?

It’s interesting to see that out of a total of 660 traders so far interacting with the new AXL-OSMO pool, a 7% of them (either adding liquidity or swapping using the new pool) are new users who had not done any swap previously with any other pools. The next part of the dashboard will be dedicated to see differences between “old” and “new” users. We can see that:

• New users represent a 0.12% of all swaps from AXL to OSMO
• New users represent a 2.23% of all swaps from OSMO to AXL
• New users are swapping on average way less AXL to OSMO than old users, compared to swapping from OSMO to AXL, where they seem to be swapping a higher amount.
• The preferred pools by users which are not new and have interacted with AXL-OSMO pool are displayed, comparing them right below with overall preferred pools. We see that there are a lot of matching pools, but I find it interesting that those old users top 10 list of pools include two EEUR pools (ATOM-EEUR and EEUR-OSMO)
• Finally, we can display the hourly distribution of swaps in all Osmosis since the pool was initiated, and we can see peaks in which almost 13% of all swaps were from the new AXL-OSMO pool.

4. Conclusions

We’ve gone through all the timeline; from the proposal on the commonwealth, to the voting and approval of governance proposals, to the user distribution and preferences, and we’ve seen that:

• The Axelar team was very diligent in their work when proposing the approval of a bootstrapping liquidity which was proven successful for previous projects. Thus, we see that almost all validators voted YES in the approval.
• We've identified the Axelar Foundation wallet osmo1z6mf937x9ug4ck7lt45f2wyrt9lnway68lpta9, which we have to exclude from some analysis if we don't want a very important outlier in our data, both for depositing and swapping.
• Once identified the top traders in the new pool, we see that around 7% of the users which have interacted with it (either depositing or swapping) are new users.
• From this new users, we've seen that:

  • Despite being a 7% of the total users, they're misrepresented when it comes to number of swaps.

  • They prefer swapping OSMO to AXL in higher amounts than from AXL to OSMO, compared to "old" users.

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• From the users that have interacted so far with the new pool and are not new, if we compare them to overall users, they prefer two EEUR based pools (ATOM-EEUR and EEUR-OSMO) which are not on the top 10 overall pools.
• At peak activity, the number of swap transactions from the new pool accounted for nearly 14% of overall swap transactions on Osmosis.