Introduction

A popular way to invest in an asset over the long term is to dollar cost average. This means that investors buy an asset at specific time intervals, regardless of price, which has a smoothing effect on the average entry price and attempts to avoid short-term volatility. To answer this question one has to look at the "seasonality" of the asset, borrowing a better known term from commodity trading.

In this case, we will conduct a seasonal analysis on Sushiswap activity to see if the average of paid fees are lower during festive seasons or not. To do that, we will choose two festive seasons in 2021 to put this claim to the test.

Methods

First of all, to carry out the first part of the analysis, I have taken into account the transactions included in Ethereum DEX swaps table referring to Sushiswap platform. From that, I extracted the amount in USD, the distinct from_address abd the distinct tx_id to calculate the average fees as well as the median.

In my case, I have selected the Easter Festive Season and the Thanksgiving day to compare with the whole year average fees in order to see if the statement of "during festive season the fees are low" is correct or not.

Results

This first chart shows the distribution of the average fees among these selected days. This is a good option to see in which seasons are users paying more fees. In my case, almost 50% of the average fees are in Thanksgiving day, 28.5% in Christmas Eve and the 27% for the other annual days.

It represents that higher average fees are paid during the festive seasons rather than in non-festive days.

To finish the analysis, I have plotted as well the average and median fees paid during these periods of time. Again, both, median and average fees were higher during festive seasons instead of other annual days.

It is a good starting point to make a good review about that. However, it has some limitations. For example, the paid fees are computed in USD, then, it could be different from one point of the year to another due to changes in Ethereum gas price. When the Ethereum gas price goes up, more fees should be paid in USD and then, the average fees goes up. It could be the reason why the difference between Thanksgivind Day against other days are so high. But, it could be possible as well that users tend to interact more during festive days because of they have more time when they are not working.

Conclusions

To sum up, we have seen how the statement about users paid lower fees during festive season is false. In this dashboard, we have compared the average annual fees against Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving day fees and the results are on the other way around. The average fees were higher during festive days. As mentioned above, it could be possible because of users tends to operate more times when they have more time and are OOO. However, an important factor limitation is that we have calcualted the fees in USD and it is correlated with the Ethereum network gas fees and may alter the results. The idea is to calculate the fees in ETH to see the true value of this.