What is Solana?

Solana is a blockchain platform designed to host decentralized, scalable applications. Founded in 2017, Solana is an open-source project currently run by Solana Foundation based in Geneva, while the blockchain was built by San Francisco-based Solana Labs.1 Solana is much faster in terms of the number of transactions it can process and has significantly lower transaction fees compared to rival blockchains like Ethereum.

What is Raydium?

Raydium is an automated market maker that runs on the Solana blockchain and allows for fast transactions, shared liquidity, and ultra-low fees. The protocol leverages the order flow of Serum to allow users to access the best prices for assets. It also utilizes the intrinsic features of Solana to move liquidity from its pools to other parts of the network.

Furthermore, users who supply money to the pools earn the fees from trades that occur on the network. The pools on the network will reward LPs for their contribution to the pools. Novel projects can leverage Raydium’s features to benefit from its liquidity.

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Question:

Choose a defi protocol from the following list and create a dashboard with the new Flipside layout that can refresh once a day highlighting at least 4 metrics of your choosing that helps show the "health" of the protocol and what is happening on it. Note any noticeable trends or current events for the protocol. Highlight how liquidity is flowing in and out of the protocol and which pools are popular.

Methodology:

In this dashboard I am going to be looking at Raydium and observing it’s health over time through a handful of different metrics, I will see how many users are swapping on the platform, how many swaps there are, the percent of successful swaps, and most popular coins to swap to/for I will then be analyzing these metrics and discussing any patterns that arise from my observations.

Metrics:

1. Daily Total Swaps Vs. Unique Swappers
2. Daily Total Failed Swaps Vs. Succesful Swaps
3. Daily Percent of Failed Swaps Vs. Succesful Swaps
4. Top 10 Tokens Swapped From by Token
5. Daily Swaps By Top 10 Tokens to Swap From
6. Top 10 Tokens Swapped To by Token
7. Daily Swaps By Top 10 Tokens to Swap To

Analysis:

The most popular tokens to swap from are USDC, SOL, and RAY on Raydium, the largest by a significant margin is USDC with over 5.7M swaps from it, followed by SOl which has 3.12M swaps from it. After those two though the amount of swaps from each coins drops significantly. If we look at the graph over time we can see a similar trend that we noted from the graphs earlier with an overall downward trend taking place, although the same coins tend to remain equally popular over time showing that the health in terms of which coins are popular has remained somewhat similar. If we look at the next graph we can see a much different landscape of coins that are popular to swap to. The three largest of these are SOL, USDC, and USDT. These coins are swapped for in much higher volume than the previous coins we look at are swapped from. Overall the daily swaps of these coins are all over the place with a somewhat upward trend into May of 2022 which began to trend back downwards and appears to still be doing that into the current day, although as stated earlier it appears the coins that have been popular have remained popular over time.

Conclusion:

1. The daily number of swaps and unique swappers have been trending downwards over time.
2. The percentage of failed swaps has been trending downwards recently likely as a result of decreased overall transactions
3. the most popular coins to swap from on Raydium are SOL, USDC, and RAY and the most popular coins to swap to are SOL, USDC, and USDT.

Analysis:

The daily total swaps and unique users on Raydium daily have been on a downward trend, around December of 2021 the daily swaps on Raydium where anywhere from 150k-180k while now by the current day they sit around 30k-50k swaps daily, a similar trend is reflected for unique users. It seems that as time goes on this trend is going to continue as it has for the entirety of Raydium’s lifespan. If we move onto the next two metric we can see first on the left the total daily succesful and failed swaps, as you can see the number of failed swaps has been going down as the number of overall swap has been going down, If we look at the graph on the right we can really see this as the percentage of failed swap is currently around 5%, down from many other points in the year where it was anywhere from 10-20% on average. This is likely a result of the fact that less swaps are taking place, which causes things to run more smoothly and the percentage of swaps failing to decrease.