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There is Velodrome and there is Uniswap. Both decentralized exchanges, both with their own users behaviour.
Lets do a little comparison
Task
- Make a dashboard that compares Velodrome to any other Optimism DEX.
- Total number of swaps by day over the last month.
- Total number of wallets swapping by day.
- What are the most popular asset pairs to swap from and too.
- Top 10 assets swapping from.
- Top 10 assets to swap to.
Method
The data for this analysis was retrieved from Flipside’s Database
-
optimism.core.fact_event_logsto find unique users to both dexs- Also to find uniswap activity events.
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optimism.velodrome.ez_swapsto find Velodrome activity related events\
Swaps by day over the last month
Last month was an unusually progressive month for the crypto space, while most markets are decreasing activity, dexes in Optimism seemed to be increasing they activity. But overall, this activity went mostly for Uniswap
Until it wasn’t. In July 25, Velodrome surpassed Uniswap in daily swaps executed on the platform. Maintaining and even gaining superiority over Uniswap on the last days of July. Talk about what those in the gaming space would refer as a nice comeback
Uniswap Liquidity Pool
On Uniswap the most used liquidity pool would be ETH/USDC pool. Not too surprising considering that Uniswap is native to Ethereum L1 and USDC is the most used stablecoin on Ethereum.
The second most used pool would be ETH/OP. Quite reasonably too, considering that this is the Optimistic side of this exchange.
And in third would be OP/USDC. Again, not unexpected.
And in fourth place ETH/DAI. With the second appearance of an stablecoins on these lands.
Velodrome Liquidity Pools
On Velodrome, being native to Optimism, should not come as a surprise the fact that the most used pool is OP/USDC. Being the native token of the layer coupled with one of the biggest stablecoin in all the crypto sphere.
The second most used would be WETH/USDC, being the only one in the top places that is not native to Optimism.
Because in third comes VELO/USDC, taking space for the native dex token.
Followed by VELO/OP, both native to Optimism.
Unique users over the last month
While swapping volumes were increasing towards the end of the last month for Velodrome, is a different picture when considering unique users.
The amount of high number of swapping executed on Velodrome does not correlate with the percentage of unique users increasing its use.
While it did spike, the increase in swapping activity was just too much to account for that much users.
Uniswap overall has the bigger grip on the Dexs space on Optimism.
Final remarks
- Uniswap, being present across blockchains has the most users going through its gates.
- Its safe to assume that in the last wave of new users to Velodrome there were some power swappers (probably bots) that spiked the whole network activity.
- Liquidity pools on Uniswap tend to be more ERC-20 focused
- Liquidity pools on Velodrome tend to be more Optimistic focused tokens. As expected, obviously.
- The preferred asset to swap to was USDC, in both cases.
- Giving that is a solid stablecoin, makes sense to use it to get out of any position in a relatively safe manner.
- But in the second place, for Uniswap would be DAI while in Velodrome was OP.
- And the preferred asset to swap from is strictly correlated to the native platform for each DEX.
- OP for VELO
- ETH for Uniswap.
- And while in Uniswap the second most swapped from was OP, in Velodrome was its own token, VELO.
- The tokens being swapped from present the biggest difference in behaviour from these two Dexs.