• With CEXes being the easiest way to get your hands on cryptocurrency these days its no suprise to see the biggest single category here

DEX Swaps

Decentralized exchanges are automated markets that allow you to exchange tokens on a blockchain. They usually use liquidity pools to provide swap capabilities. This is the most basic way for someone to obtain tokens in DeFi.

• Some users get their first SUSHI on ethereum through a bridge but its uncommon
• As they must have owned SUSHI on a other chain it makes sense that must bridge users owned SUSHI on eth before too

(This number only includes source addresses that have bridge in their name, there likely are unknown bridge addresses or ones that don't have it in their name)

xSUSHI Staking Rewards

SUSHI tokens can be staked in a staking contract. Doing so will provide you with xSUSHI tokens. xSUSHI will slowly gain value over SUSHI as a fraction of trading fees on Sushiswap go into the SUSHI / xSUSHI staking ratio. Unstaking xSUSHI will result in your SUSHI back plus staking rewards accumulated during the staked time.

(Includes all addresses in the pool sublabel-type of the dex label-type)

• With ~44k addresses getting their first SUSHI tokens through swaps this is second largest single category.
• For many users this is a good alternative to CEXes

Token Bridges

There are many different blockchains in crypto. Many of which do support ERC-20, which is the standarized token format used for the SUSHI token. Briges are dapps that allow you to lock up tokens on one chain to receive a copy of it on another. Using a bridge you can obtain your first SUSHI tokens on one chain, yet bridge users must have already owned the asset on another so they are not actually first time SUSHI receivers.

• Its rare for addresses to get their first SUSHI tokens from the xSUSHI contract (from unstaking xSUSHI)
• This makes total sense as in order for this to happen they got to buy xSUSHI and unstake as they would need SUSHI from a different source to stake themselves

• Just 19 addresses got SUSHI tokens from the mint
• With no publicly accessible mechanism for minting existing this number should be low and constant

CEX Withdrawals

Most people make their first steps in crypto by signing up for a centralized exchange (CEX) and doing some trading within it. All that happens within a centralized exchange not reflected on-chain but is only recorded in the CEX. The only exception is when users want to withdraw crypto from a CEX. This will result in a transaction going from a CEX wallet to the users wallet.

Sushiswap

With around ~90k holders in June 2022 SUSHI is certainly a well spread token.

Methodology

Before we go any further lets make sure we are all on the same page:

• The data we will be looking at is only relevant for SUSHI on Ethereum!
• All address labels come from the ethereum.core.dim_labels table which is inheritly incomplete or can contain wrongly labelled addresses!

Hint

Polygon & Optimism data is not used as their respective labels tables are missing a lot of data (https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/velocity/queries/fcded85c-b20f-4d60-8f6f-82703d8d50b9)

Now lets get started

First we will take a look at the general distribution of labels:

Findings

• ~46% of addresses got their first SUSHI tokens form a unlabelled address
  • e.g. trasnfers between users
• 30% of addresses got it through a DEX
  • Not only swaps but also other services provided by DEXes
• 20% of addresses got it through a CEX
• <2% got their first tokens through dapps, index tokens or other defi products

Now lets break that down further into the sub label types

Findings

Just going to mention one that do not have its own section below:

• Index Tokens
  • The token label & token_contract in the dapp label are both mainly referring to so called "index tokens"
  • Those allow you to get exposure to multiple cryptos with a single token
  • Example CC10 Token
  • Buying and burning a index token that contains SUSHI allows you to get your first SUSHI tokens
  • Its rather uncommon in the graph above

Initial SUSHI Mint

After the SUSHI contract was deployed some addresses got sushi that was newly minted for them. There is no mechanism that mints SUSHI for normal users, all addresses that received SUSHI this way are belonging to Sushiswap or are closely related.

Concluding

• While there are a lot of different methods people used to get their first tokens most users that got their SUSHI from a labelled address got it from either

  • Withdrawing from a centralized exchange
  • Swapping to in on a decentralized exchange

• There are more addresses that got their first SUSHI from an address that belongs from a decentralized exchange address than from a centralized one

  • As the token is part of the ecosystem of a DEX this is to be expected
  • Its suprising that CEXes still make up for a large part of the SUSHI holders first SUSHI tokens

Sushiswap is a decentralized exchange that is deployed on a variety of EVM-Chains. It has been created as a fork of the most popular DEX, uniswap, but since then implemented many different features. One of which is the SUSHI token which has a few different use cases within SUSHI.

Before looking at where the SUSHI holders got their SUSHI from we should look at how many there even are: