Question in detail:

We want your help in making the NEAR ecosystem even more transparent. How can you improve on the existing NEAR Transparency report?

Explain which metrics should be taken into consideration and why. Then, analyze those metrics over the last several weeks and draw your own conclusions on the health of the NEAR ecosystem.

Overview of analysis:

This dashboard divided into the following parts:

• Network performance
• Users of Near blockchain
• Contract deployment on Near

The detailed metrics of each part are discussed in the Methodology section.

Two different time frames have been selected for this investigation:

• Past month→ Daily basis
• Past week→ Hourly basis

About Near:

Near is a public, sharded, extensible blockchain network based on the proof-of-stake (POS) paradigm. Developers can use this platform to launch their own decentralized applications (similar to the Ethereum network). The token of this network is called NEAR, which is the functional token of this network. The main goal of the NEAR network is to create an infrastructure for creating a new Internet. In the new internet, it will be harder for big companies to access people's personal information. Countries cannot ban some programs and destroy their business in this system. A world of freedom where everyone can act freely.

This platform uses sharding technology to solve the problem of scalability. In this model, a transaction does not need to be checked by all network nodes. With sharding, a network is turned into several parallel networks that check transactions simultaneously, so that each transaction is checked in a shard. As a result, only nodes present in a shard will check and confirm this transaction, and other nodes present in other shards of the network will not check this transaction. This idea makes the capacity of the network increase significantly.

The NEAR protocol has provided the NightShade solution. Nightshade is the main technology of Nair blockchain. In the NightShade solution, sharding is applied to all blocks individually instead of the main chain. In this method and because all the blocks are divided between the nodes of the NIR network, the scalability of this network increases significantly. The mechanism of NightShade is that instead of sending transactions individually to each of the network nodes, they are divided among all nodes and run in parallel.

Currently, NEAR has improved its sharding capability in partnership with Octopus Network. Octopus allows developers to build their own blockchains. The chains created by Octopus are known as App Chains and are connected to the NEAR network through the Octopus Bridge, which is deployed as a smart contract.

Methodology:

The data provided by Flipside has been used to handle this analysis. To handle this investigation the following steps have been passed as below:

• Network performance:

  • Metrics→ Count of transactions, Total and average paid fee, Transaction per minute (TPM), Success rate of transactions on Near

• Users activity on Near

  • Metrics→ Active users (Wallets received asset and wallets made transaction)

    new users, Time difference between first two transactions

    Users activity by count of transactions on selected period

• The contacts deployment on Terra

  • How to find contracts→ distinct TX_RECEIVER

    FROM near.core.fact_actions_events_function_call a INNER JOIN near.core.fact_transactions b ON a.TX_HASH = b.TX_HASH INNER JOIN near.core.fact_receipts as c ON a.TX_HASH=c.TX_HASH

    WHERE ACTION_NAME = 'FunctionCall' AND METHOD_NAME <> 'new'

  • Metrics→

    • New contracts
    • Contracts usage over the selected time frame
    • Most popular contracts (general and over time)

• Conclusion: By aggregating the outcomes of the previous parts draw a conclusion about the health of Near blockchain.

Conclusion:

According to the consequences of the previous parts related to health of Near blockchain, the following conclusion could be drawn:

• The trend of launching new and intelligent contracts in the Near blockchain is increasing and the application of contracts has consistent trend over time.
• One of the important parts related to the health of network are users activity and according to the outcomes, the pattern of newcomers on Near has promising movement.
• Also, the analysis related to the activity of users by count of transactions made is a practical criterion to network health.
• In less than two years, the NEAR protocol has excelled in key technical benchmarks among other competitors, which bodes well for the platform as it continues to execute its roadmap. The vision of the NEAR protocol does not limit it to a specific ecosystem, but prepares it as an infrastructure for running all Web 3 applications.

Findings:

Finally, lets investigate on the contracts deployment on Near network:

• The application of contracts on Near blockchain have consistent movement and a little bit of increasing pattern over the past week.
• The investigation related to the new contracts on Near reveals that the highest count of new contracts has been added on January 12, 2023, 08:00 and January 15, 2023, 14:00.
• The most popular contracts on Near network over the past month belong to Token.sweat and Tge-lockup.sweat.
• Also, the most used contracts on Near network over time demonstrated that the previous statement has been verified.

Part 3: Contract deployment on Near

Part 2: Users activity on Near

Findings:

This section concentrated on the users activity on Near blockchain:

• As mentioned in the methodology section, the active wallets are considered as combination of wallets received asset and wallets made transactions.
• The highest count of active and new users on Near happened on January 12, 2023, 19:00. Also, the trend of newcomers to network increased over the past week compared to the outcomes of pas month.
• Most of the active users on Near made their second transaction in the same day of first transaction as can be seen.
• Additionally, the highest share of active users made under 3 transactions over the past month or past week.

Findings:

The first part focuses on the network performance:

• The highest count of transactions occurred on January 12 and the hourly analysis validate it.
• Daily and hourly analysis related to the paid fee reveal that the highest volume of fee paid on January 12, 2023, 19:00.
• The average median of paid fee demonstrated that coincided with the huge count of transactions, the average and median of paid fee decreased.
• The success rate of transactions presents that the worst performance occurred on January 14 with over 18% of failure.

Part 1: Network performance

Useful links:

• Near blockchain
• Transparency reports on Near
• Medium article about Near

Author:

Credited by MZG

Discord handle: m.zamani#0361

Twitter handle: @GargariZamani