NEAR Meta-Analysis

A summary of NEAR Tournament

Introduction

NEAR is a blockchain built to be simple, secure, and scalable []. NEAR Protocol is a software that aims to incentivize a network of computers to operate a platform for developers to create and launch decentralized applications. Central to NEAR Protocol’s design is the concept of sharding, a process that aims to split the network’s infrastructure into several segments in order for computers, also known as nodes, to only have to handle a fraction of the network’s transactions [].

The analysis of the NEAR protocol can be done through five main aspects as follows:

Local Government (Validators): view of the NEAR politics, taking a closer look at its validators
The Capital (Users): general metrics about users and how users start on the NEAR blockchain
Financial District (Ref Finance, DeFi, and Burrow): analysis of some of the most popular DeFi products built on Near, as well as some of the more general metrics.
Art District (NFTs found on NEAR): an investigation on the NFT scene of NEAR
Bridging into NEAR: an investigation on the Rainbow Bridge

This dashboard aims to summarize and review the most important parameters of the above-mentioned areas according to the winner dashboards of NEAR Tournament as follows:

[]

1. Local Government (Validators)

In this part the following parameters in NEAR blockchain has been investigated:

The daily and the total number of users who delegate and UNdelegate their assets to Near validators.
The daily and the total number of delegation and UNdelegation transactions to Near validators.
The daily and the total amount of Near delegated per validator, as well as the UNdelegated amounts and the net of delegation per validator.
The daily average amount of Near staked per user.

The highest number of the stakers and number of staking transactions are related to Aurora.poolv1.near.
It must be notified that meta-pool.near is the validator with the most amount of NEAR staked.
major peaks in the last chart (line chart) imply the presence of whales.
A few massive transactions on some days (line chart) also imply the presence of whales.
However, on most of the other days, the average is much lower which shows regular users rather than whales. This result is compatible with the decentralization concept.

[Ref] []

The most undelegation-related actions are related to the following validators:
1. astro-stakers.poolv1.near , 2. nearcrowd.poolv1.near and 3. blackdaemon.poolv1.near are the validators that have seen
major peaks in the last chart (line chart) imply the presence of whales (this result has been discussed more in the previous part)

[]

Total NEAR has been staked by the following liquid pools:
1. Meta, 2. LiNEAR, and 3. Stader.
NEAR Staked with Meta Pool=22.68M
NEAR Staked with LiNEAR=5.85M
Total NEAR Staked with Stader=2.71M

[]

\

2. The Capital (Users):

In this part the following parameters in NEAR blockchain have been investigated:

the first transactions of NEAR users
Number of Transactions on Near (in a chosen period),
Active Users on Near (in a chosen period),
Transaction Fees (in a chosen period) as well as some of the top contracts that generated the most fees,
The number of Smart Contracts deployed on Near

Received: the first transaction where the user's address is the transaction receiver. This means a user received something, or another address acted upon their address.
[]

Sent: the first transaction where the user's address is the transaction sender. This means a user initiated or sent out a transaction. []

A significant increase in the number of transactions on August 20th can be observed (a variation over +400%)
A direct correlation between the gas spent and the transactions executed can be concluded.
The top contracts that generated the most fees are Aurora and NearCrowd and by about 2.4M and 400k).

[]

It can be observed that the number of active users remained unchanged in the past few weeks.
On the other hand, certain users are active in the ecosystem. []

It can be seen that a lot of smart contracts have been deployed on Near.
Most of these transactions have been successful (only a small portion of them is failed creation attempts.)
Aurora and NearCrowd are The most interacted with contract with about 61M and 50M interactions, respectively. []

3. Financial District:

In this section, have focused on the two most popular DeFi products: Ref Finance and Burrow.

Ref Finance users are mainly swapping assets while they are in the City.
It is highly notable that ‘add liquidity’ transactions are more than ‘remove liquidity’, which shows that that a larger proportion of users is staying with Ref Finance.
It can be seen that over 1.25M swap transactions in on August 21st 2022.

[]

Burrow is DeFi protocol which is an interest rate market protocol allows users to supply and borrow interest-bearing assets. Users can deposit stNEAR and earn ~ 11% interest per year, and then borrow against it.
As far as depositing, withdrawing, or borrowing is important, stablecoins (USDC and USDT) are very popular on Burrow.
It is highly important that when it comes to depositing and borrowing, users also show interest in using the native NEAR token.

[]

What tokens are the most popular on NEAR?

NEAR, USDT and USDC have seen the most buy/sell volume, the most swaps as well as the overall volume.
However, the final pie chart shows that these are not necessarily the most traded tokens, for example REF token with almost 30k of unique traders.
Some other tokens such as Octopus Network token, or the Jumbo token with quite a big number of traders overall can be seen.

[]

4. Art District (NFTs found on NEAR):

The most popular NFT marketplaces in Near are:

Paras
Mintbase
UniqArt
Apollo42
Few and Far
Seatlab

Each one of them offers a very similar product, with different service fees or minting tools. Some of these marketplaces haven’t launched yet - such as Few and Fear or Seatlab.

It can be seen that the most popular NFT marketplaces on Near is Paras.

5. Bridging into NEAR: an investigation on the Rainbow Bridge

The ETH to NEAR Rainbow Bridge opens the gates for assets to flow freely between NEAR and Ethereum blockchains while enabling users to bridge any ERC-20 token they wish [].

It can be observed that the Aurorian token are the most popular amongst users who bridge to Near.
USDC , USDT and DAI are the tokens bridged the most as far as the number of transactions or the USD volume is concerned.
A lot of users bridged through Ethereum to Near on

25 Oct 2021 and Apr 9-26th (key inflow dates) []

The bridging out of Near

It can be concluded from these figures that bridging between Near and Aurora is way more than to/from Ethereum,
On the other hand, once users are bridged into NEAR, they don’t leave the network. They are still active on the network just by switching to Near and Aurora and vice versa.

[]

Once again it must be pointed out that this dashboard is a summary of the NEAR tournament winners as follows

Our focus in this dashboard was mainly on “”.

Data from FlipsideCrypto

flipside