Terra New User Inflow

This is my solution for the “New User Inflow” challenge. I’ve answered it in two sections, where the first is focused on measuring new users for Terra as a whole, and doing the same for both Mirror and Anchor. The second section is focused on the adoption of whales for the new Mirror and Anchor protocols. I hope you learn as much as I did with this fun exercise! Do note that the supporting charts are below the paragraphs.

Live Dashboard

1. Measuring Active Users

• For our purposes, we’ll define a user as an address with a non-zero balance (whether staked or not)
• This means that the “join date” of a user is the first date where the address had a non-zero balance
• Naturally, we can use the table for thisdaily_balances
• To measure the “New Users” per date, we will count the distinct wallets that “joined” for each date
• For clarity, a user is considered to be a “new user” for “2020–01–01” if the join date for the wallet is “2020–01–01”
• We derive the join date for each wallet address by getting the earliest date with a positive balance (whether staked or not)
• For users on Anchor and Mirror, we define a user as one who has made any transaction on the respective platforms
• You’ll notice that new users for Anchor were noticeably high during the first few days, which indicates that much of the existing Terra community was jumping into the stable 20% yield value proposition
• As for Mirror, you’ll see that the trend of new users was more stable, with occasional spikes, but with an overall stable range of new users coming in
• In terms of how new to Terra users are when they join Anchor, and Mirror, the numbers show that it’s somewhat moderate. Overall the average “age” of Terra users joining the two new protocols is between 10–20 days. This may indicate that it takes 1–3 weeks of onboarding to terra before users feel comfortable trying out DApps.
• However, you’ll also notice that this average age has been going up in the past few weeks! Perhaps the recent market downturn / sideways movement is increasing the urgency for older terrans to start moving liquidity to fixed income, and alternative assets.

2. Tracking Whale Behaviour

• I used to take the "small wallet" label seriously (based on this reference query), but then you'll see that while the average balance for addresses within this category is 426 USD, it has a standard deviation of 105K USD
• Also, the larget "small wallet" balance is 111 Million USD, which means it's likely there's no deterministic cut off
• Since we want to study individuals, we'll create our own deterministic criteria on what constitutes a "whale"
• As a starting point, I'll use 35 Million UST as a reference, which is the current daily transaction volume in UST (2021-06-27)
• From here, I'll consider a user (address) as a whale if they hold enough balance to move at least 10% of daily UST volume
• Because of this, I'll define whales as users with a balance worth >= 3.5 Million USD for a specific point in time
• From the table results, you'll see that we have 68 whales under the category "small wallet"
• This translates to 0.0025% of all of "small wallet" users on terra - not so small after all!
• All in all, there were 106 whales in the past day accross all categories
• If you look at the new "whale users" per day for Mirror vs Anchor, you'll notice they're quite different in distribution
• For Mirror, whales have been joining at a fairly steady pace, ranging from 0-6 new whales per day
• For Anchor, whales seem to have "jumped in" at the first opportunity, where 61 whales (~60%) went into Anchor at literally the first launch day on March 17
• This shows how compelling the stable 20% interest value proposition was for whales; and actually, the same was true for regular users as well

New Terra User Inflow (Daily) Last Upda