Welcome to my Improved Near Transparency Report

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Here is my previous submission, before starting i’ll discuss my new approach and the reasoning behind that.

• I got an score of 10, and my feedback was that i needed to provide more explanation on the reasoning.
• Looking at the top 3 Winners #1, #2, #3 they added more things such as transactions per second (TPS), NFTs, Bridges, Smart Contracts for example.
  • Meanwhile i focused in user retention, validators, decentralization metrics and block performance.

Now that i reviewed the previous contest, i’ll explain my new approach

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I already discussed the previous transparency report in my previous work so let’s focus only on this, the quarterly (Q3) report of 2022:

• Here they reviewed the Core Metrics, Total/Circulating Supply of Near, Ecosystem Holdings, Near Foundation Treasury & Grants, and compare the Q3 performance with Q2.

But the main problem for me is that they include only charts of Q3 2022 without providing charts of Q2 for a better comparison.

My New and Improved Near Transparency Report will focus on 2022 as a whole and i’ll use all the data to compare the performance of Near in all the Quarters of 2022, i decided to include Q4 2021 to see the growth of Q1 2022 and to have a better view of the growth in Near after 1 Year from Q4 2021 to Q4 2022.

Near Protocol is a Public Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Blockchain

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• Aims to bring decentralization finance (DeFi) to the masses with low transfer fees and fast transactions.
• With their sharding technology (Nightshade) they achieve speed and scalability.
• Uses PoS consensus to secure and validate transactions on the blockchain.
• In Proof-of-Stake, users show support to specific network validators by delegating NEAR tokens to them. This process is known as staking. The main idea is that, if a validator has a large amount of tokens delegated is because the community trusts them, and these validators can validate block transactions and add more blocks to the Blockchain.
• Validators earn NEAR Token rewards for producing new blocks in the form of a static inflation rate of about 4.5% each year.
• Stakers get rewarded in the form of that token, too. The token’s all-time highest price was $20.44 in January 2022.

Sources: Coindesk, Near blog, The Defiant, Nightshade

My Near Foundation Transparency Report 2022: How was the performance of NEAR in all the Quarters of 2022?

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I decided to provide my reasoning behind all the metrics here, and then after the charts i can focus entirely in showcasing my results.

• Transactions in Near: This is one of the main metrics they showcase in all of their transparency Reports, so this is going to be my first metric to focus, Unlike the Near Foundation reports i’ll show the Quarterly Transaction activity with the following focus:
  • Success Rate: Knowing the amount of Failed/Successful Transactions is really important, we’ll see later that some quarters may have more total transactions but if a significant amount of these transactions are failed transactions can be considered as a better quarter?.
  • Transactions per Time Period: Because i’ll focus on Quarters is important to showcase the average transactions per second/minute/hour in a day, and also the average daily/weekly/monthly transactions these quarters have.
  • With these two focus i’ll compare each quarter to see in the end which were the better.
  • I decided to add some general metrics like the total transactions on Near and daily Failed/Successful transactions in 2022 to complement the analysis.
• User Activity in Near: This is also one of the main metrics they showcase in all of their transparency Reports, I’ll compare each quarter using:
  • Daily Active Users (DAU) vs Weekly Active Users (WAU) vs Monthly Active Users (MAU) vs Quarterly Active Users (QAU): In my previous report i used a similar chart but this time i added the QAU because we’ll compare the quarters, with this chart we can see how is the average Day/Week/Month by Active Users in the Quarters and the total active users they have each Quarter.
    • But to complement more that chart i’ll include my previous chart of DAU/WAU/MAU which show detailed information of each Month, so we can know if the Quarter was doing good each month or if it has a specific Month which raise the average.
  • New vs Existing Users: The previous chart showcase all the active users but, how many users are new? and how many are from past quarters? with this chart we’ll know that, also the New user percentage will show us exactly how much of the total active users on that month were new.
    • To complement i’ll add the Top 10 days with most New Users, so we can know which were the days and months that has most users in 2022.
  • Stickiness Ratio (MAU/QAU): In my previous report i used a similar chart, but this time i modified to show us exactly the percentage of users which were making at least 1 transaction in each of the 3 months of the Quarter.
• After both of these metrics i’ll show 2 extra metrics which correlates User and Transaction Performance:
  • Daily Transactions Per Second (TPS) vs Transactions Per User (TPU): We’ll see if the amount of transactions depends of the amount of total active users daily.
  • Quarter to Quarter (QoQ) Growth Rate of Transactions vs User: Are the amount of transactions and users growing at the same pace by quarter?
• Stake Activity in Near: In my previous Report i didn’t include general metrics about stake activity, mostly because i cover them in my State of Staking report, but this time i’ll show the quarterly performance of Stakes and Unstakes in Near.
  • I’ll show all the metrics of Stake in Near by Quarter with the daily/weekly/monthly average for a better comparison.
    • Stakes/Unstakes, Stakers/Unstakers, $NEAR Staked/Unstaked.
  • Stake Pools: Which were the stake pools with most $NEAR Staked Quarterly?.
• Smart Contracts in Near: Knowing the amount of Smarts contracts deployed is important to know the diversity of projects in Near.
  • Active vs New Contracts: Each quarter, how many smart contracts were deployed?
  • And we’ll see how the top 10 contracts by times deployed were doing each quarter.
• Rainbow Bridge in Near: Finally we’ll see the activity of the rainbow bridge, this is very important to know how Near was interacting during 2022 with Aurora their L2 blockchain and Ethereum blockchain.
  • We’ll compare each quarter by total bridge transactions, unique bridge users and total $USD Volume being bridge.

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💡Transactions in Near 💡

🔎In this daily chart from Q4 2021 until December 31 2022, we can see that🔍

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• Q4 2021 goes in an Uptrend having less transactions at the start and reaching more at the end, meanwhile Q4 2022 goes in a downtrend having more transactions at the start and having less at the end.
• Failed transactions on NEAR doesn’t correlate with the amount of total transactions. As an example:

  • January 16, 2022 the day with most sucessful transactions in this Chart with 1.6M only presents 121k of Failed Transactions.

  • August 20, 2022 the day with most failed transactions a total of 1.7M only has 246k successful transactions.

  • Both days present almost the same number of total transactions but the fail ratio is completely different.

  • It’s seems that there are period of times in which the amount of failed transactions tends to be higher, and Q4 2022 have by far more failed transactions than Q4 2021.

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💡Now Let’s Look at the Quarterly Near Performance by Transaction Activity.💡

🔎Near Quarterly Transaction Performance - Analysis🔍

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• Q4 2021: This was the Quarter with less transactions in all time periods.
  • But also the quarter with higher Success Rate per transaction having 93.7% of the total transactions being successful transactions.
• Q1 2022: This was the #2 Quarter in transaction activity on 2022 for the Near Protocol.
  • All transactions in all time periods are in second place.
  • But this was the Quarter with the best Growth for ==Near== in transactions, because if we compare with the previous Quarter from 2021, the transactions per Second/Minute/Hour/Day/Week/Month/Quarter almost double in comparison with Q4 2021 at the cost of losing less than 3% in Success Rate for transactions per Quarter with 90.8%.
• Q2 2022: The “best” Quarter for Near in transaction activity, Near Protocol== reached their spikes in transactions per time period:
  • In an Average day there are 7.9 Transactions per Second, 474.5 Transactions per Minute and 28,472.9 Transactions per Hour reaching a daily average of 683,351.6 Transactions.
  • 4,687,382 Weekly Transactions and 20,728,330 Monthly Transactions with a total of 62,200,000 Total Transactions in this Quarter Only.
  • But from that total there are 13,331,640 Failed Transactions and 48,853,350 Successful Transactions having the second worst Success rate for transactions with 78.5%.
  • So in reality there are only 2M more successful transactions and 9M more Failed transactions than Q1 2022.
• Q3 2022: The amount of transactions are higher than Q4 2021 but didn’t reach the same values like the previous quarters of 2022:
  • The Success rate for transactions is the lowest of all with 76.8% and the amount of failed transactions is at second place with 9,395,843.
  • Still the amount of Successful transactions 31M is higher than the total transactions in Q4 2021 27.8M.
• Q4 2022: The performance of this quarter is almost the same than the previous having almost the same transactions per time period.
  • But the Success rate for transactions increases a lot with 87%, making the amount of Successful transactions higher with 36,383,550 transactions.

Although Q2 2022 Seems the best quarter for Near in transactions, in reality Q1 2022 was the best with an explosive growth in transactions per time period and having more than 90% success rate for transactions, thanks to that Q2 2022 reached its spikes in transactions but didn’t have the same growth or success rate.

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💡Quarterly Near Performance by User Activity💡

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💡Now to Complement my Quarterly Analysis on User Activity Performance let me include the following charts.💡

🔎Near Quarterly User Activity Performance - Analysis🔍

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First let me explain that it was necessary to include Q3 2021 to known the real amount of new users in Q4 2021, and because of that i’ll skip the analysis of that Quarter, also because the first days of October 2021 were part of September 2021 last Week this month presents a WAU which should be ignored.

• Q4 2021: The amount of New users starting their adventure in Near is high during this quarter.
  • This quarter has the best New user percentage (Q3 2021 doesn’t count because all the users were new) with 94% of new users from the total active users.
  • From the 526,198 of New users in Q3 2021 only 56,307 (10.7%) were active on this quarter making at least 1 transaction on Near.
  • DAU/WAU/MAU of these months (October/November/December) presents an uptrend and we can see that these values are higher than January and February 2022, but because of March 2022 we can see that in general Q1 2022 DAU/WAU/MAU/QAU is slightly better than Q4 2021.
  • A 36,6% (409,523) of the Total Quarterly Active Users (1,118,543) were active during the quarter making at least 1 transaction per month (Stickiness Ratio MAU/QAU).
• Q1 2022: It’s seems that user activity on this quarter wasn’t the greatest ==until March arrives and the amount of Active users reached their first significant spike of 2022.
  • The amount of Weekly Active Users in March is greater than the Monthly active Users in January and February.
  • The days 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 of March 2022 are in the top 10 days with most New Users in ==Near, March 19 is the day with most New users of 2022 (225,557) and 95% new user percentage on that day.
  • Only 121,488 users from 2021 were active in the first quarter of 2022, with 89.9% of New user percentage and 36.7% of Stickiness Ratio (MAU/QAU).
• Q2 2022: This Quarter presents the lowest numbers in active and new users.
  • From 329,224k Active users in this quarter, 61% were new users and because of the lower number the Stickiness ratio reached their first spike with 44.5% of these users making at least 1 transaction in each month.
  • The DAU/WAU/MAU starts downtrending from April to June and only 128,087 users from the past Quarters were active.
• Q3 2022: The performance of this month is similar to Q1 2022 with ==September being the month with most active users in 2022.
  • The Amount of Weekly Users in September (406,698) is also greater than all the Weekly Users from other Months in 2022.
  • The days 12,13,14 and 15 of September 2022 are in the top 10 days with most New Users, September 13 is the second day with most New users of 2022 (151,374) and 83% new user percentage on that day.
  • This Quarter have the worst Stickiness Ratio with 35% of the total active users making at least 1 transaction in each month.
• Q4 2022: ==Near Protocols ends their Year with the best Quarter in User Activity.
  • The DAU/WAU/MAU/QAU of this Quarter is the best one, having almost 2M of Active Users making at least one transaction in this quarter.
    • 62,874 Active Users in the Average Day, 326,756 Active Users in the Average Week and 964,031 Active Users in the Average Month.
  • The amount of New users in this quarter is the biggest with 1.28M new Users and 696k Active users from the past Quarters which is also the biggest.
  • But there is a downtrending in the DAU/WAU/MAU of (October/November/December).
  • The Stickiness Ratio (MAU/QAU) reached their biggest spike with 48.7%, so almost 1M of these users were making at least 1 transaction each month.

Q4 2022 Is by Far the Best Quarter in User Activity performance on ==Near==, it was the only Quarter were all three months have a high amount of active users.

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💡Now Let’s Compare Transaction Performance and User Performance against each Other💡

🔎Transaction and User Performance comparison🔍

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• Most of the Year the TPS correlates with the TPU that means, that these transactions are made by certain amount of highly active users in Near which made a large amount of transactions daily, like August 20, 2022 the day with most failed transactions where the TPS is 23 and the TPU is 204 the spike for both.
  • But there are period of times when the amount of daily active users is high making TPS reaching a spike meanwhile TPU reaching a valley such as Mar 14, 2022 until Mar 26, 2022.
  • Since September 14, 2022 the amount of Active users in ==NEAR== is significant higher so after that date, these metrics doesn’t correlate again.
• Growth Rate for both users and transactions is higher in Q4 2021 with an increase of 112% in active users against Q3 2021 and 216% increase in transactions.
  • After that the Growth rate starts downtrending each quarter:
    • Q2 2022 was a really bad quarter for Active users as we seen before, in that month the growth rate is negative, but because of that the growth rate in Q3 2022 is really high with almost 300% more active users.
    • Q3 2022 was the bad quarter for transactions, although the amount of users here starts to be higher, the amount of transactions suffers big fall and because of that the growth is negative.

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💡Quarterly Near Performance by Stake Activity💡

🔎Quarterly Near Performance by Stake Activity - Analysis 🔍

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• Stakes/Unstakes Transactions and staker/unstakers Users were really higher in Q4 2021, but starts going in a downtrend until Q3 2022 were it hit their lowest values.

  • Stakes and Stakers seems to increase more than Unstakes and Unstakers in Q4 2022.
  • In 1 year the Stake and Unstake Activity seems to have decreased more than half of the total Activity reached in Q4 2021.

• Because the $NEAR Price decreases a lot in 2022, the amount of $NEAR being Staked and Unstaked is really high in Q4 2022.

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💡Quarterly Stake Pools in Near Performance by $NEAR Staked💡

🔎Quarterly Stake Pools in Near Performance by $NEAR Staked - Analysis🔍

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• As the Quarters goes on, the staked $NEAR starts to being evenly distributed:

  • At first we can see that staked.poolv1.near is the leader in Staked $NEAR having 42-43M of $NEAR in Q4 2021 and only 1 more pool having more than 20M of $NEAR Staked.

  • In Q2 2022 the amount of pools having more than 20M $NEAR staked is 6 with staked.poolv1.near having still 42M of staked $NEAR.

  • But in Q3 2022 staked.poolv1.near lost all their $NEAR and dissappear from the top stake pools, and only 3 pools still have more than 20M of $NEAR Staked.

  • Finally in Q4 2022 there are still only 3 pools with more than 20M $NEAR staked but we can see that there are a lot of different pools with differents sizes, and there isn’t a single pool which has more $NEAR than the rest like it was the case before.

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💡Quarterly Smart Contracts in Near Performance 💡

🔎Quarterly Smart Contracts in Near Performance - Analysis🔍

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• The amount of New Contracts were in an uptrending until reaching Q1 2022 with a total of 3528 Contracts, after that the amount of New Contracts goes in a downtrend.
• Q2 2022 were the month with most unique contracts deployed.
• Aurora and app.nearcrowd.near were the favorite contracts in most of the quarters, although in the last quarter Sweat token contract became the most deployed.

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💡Quarterly Rainbow Bridge Performance 💡

🔎Quarterly Rainbow Bridge Performance - Analysis 🔍

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• Rainbow Bridge Activity seems to be in a downtrend from Q4 2021 Onwards, Unique Bridgers and Bridge Transactions Activity decreased all the 2022, specially for Bridges between Aurora and Near.
  • Ethereum and Near Bridges, didn’t suffer a big lost in activity and we can see that from Q3 2022 to Q4 2022 the Bridge Activity increase for these type of bridges.
• But the $USD Volume doesn’t follow the previous correlation, instead from Q4 2021 Onwards the $USD Volume goes in an Uptrend, reaching the highest Value for all type of bridges in Q2 2022.
  • But After that quarter the amount of Quarterly $USD in Q3 2022 decreases considerably reaching the lowest value for the Near ↔ Aurora Bridge.
  • In the last 2 Quarters of 2022 the total $USD Volume for Ethereum ↔ Near seems to be similar in comparison with Q4 2021 and Q1 2022.
• $USD Volume bridged between Near ↔ Aurora is really High in comparison with Near ↔ Ethereum.

Near ↔ Aurora Activity in the Rainbow Bridge suffers the biggest Downfall during 2022.

Quarterly Summary

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Here is NEAR Performance in 1 Year between Q4 2021 to Q4 2022.

• Q4 2021==: By far this is the month with greatest growth rate in Transactions and users, but the reason behind is because data of Near starts on September 2021 so Q3 2021 only have data of 1 month.

  • Active Users increase each month of this Quarter.

  • Stake/Unstake Activity and Users reached their spikes.

  • NEAR Crowd was one of the popular smart contracts with 13M times deployed this quarter.

  • Bridge Activity and Users of Near ↔ Aurora reached their spikes.

• Q1 2022: This is the Quarter with most growth in transactions in 2022, it has a much larger number of transactions than the quarter before, and stays over the 90% of Success rate for transactions.

  • The amount of Active users is really low in January and February in comparison with December 2021.

    • There is a big amount of Transactions during January, in January 16 there is a spike in Successful transactions of 1.6M

  • In March 2022 there is a flow of new users during the week of March 14 to 20, with March 15 the day with most New users (225,557) in 2022.

  • Stake/Unstake Performance decreases and Rainbow Bridge Activity/Users also decreases, but the amount of $USD being Bridge increases.

  • Aurora contract dethrones Near Crowd as the contract most deployed 19M against 13M.

• Q2 2022: This is the Quarter with most Transactions in 2022, and also the quarter with less user activity in 2022.
  • The amount of Successful transactions is 2M more than Q1 and it has 9M more failed transactions than Q1.
  • Stake/Unstake Activity and Users keeps decreasing, but the $NEAR Staked/Unstaked Increases significant.
  • The amount of Smart contracts being deployed reached their spike, and Aurora was the contract with most calls reaching their spike with 30M Calls.
  • Bridge Activity and Users keeps decreasing, but the $USD Volume being bridge reached their spike in all type of bridges, with Near ↔ Aurora having the most $USD Flow.
  • Because of the lower amount of users and high amount of transactions, is highly possible that bots were responsible of the high amount of failed transactions.
• Q3 2022: This Quarter have the worst Success Rate for transactions, and most of the activity in Near goes in a downtrend here.
  • In August 20 there are 1.7M failed transactions (Spike) and less than 300k of Successful transactions.
  • User activity goes in a downtrend until the Half of September 2022, September 15 is the day in second place by amount of New users.
    • September is the Month with most Monthly Active Users and the amount of New users in this quarter surpass the 1M.
  • Stake/Unstake Activity keeps decreasing, and the Staked/Unstaked volume presents a slightly decrease.
  • Total Smart Contracts Deployment decreases and Aurora was only 10M times deployed and Near Crowd with 9M.
  • Rainbow Bridge Activity, Users and $USD Volume decreased.
• Q4 2022: This Quarter was the best in User Activity.
  • The amount of New Users reached their spike and this is the first quarter with a significant amount of Active users from past quarters.
  • Stake/Unstake Activity and Users slightly increases and the $NEAR Staked/Unstaked Volume reached their Spikes.
  • Total and New Smarts contracts deployment reached their lowest numbers.
    • Sweat Token becomes the popular Smart Contract being deployed
  • Rainbow Bridge Activity keeps in the lowest numbers.

In the End NEAR ends 2022 with a high amount of New users, which will be important for 2023.

Methodology

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Using ==FlipsideCrypto== data tables of ==NEAR== (Curated by ==MetricsDao==):

• First i used date_trunc(‘quarter’,block_timestamp) to get the quarterly aggregation, but i used a Case condition to assign a name to the quarters, is important to give alphabetical priority to order them, thats the reason they have a/b/c/d/e in their name.
• Transaction Activity: With near.core.fact_transactions we can get data about general transaction activity on Near:
  • Count(distinct tx_hash):To get the total transactions.
  • tx_status :To know if the transactions was failed or successful.
  • To get the TPS/TPM/TPH, i used CTEs, with a daily aggregation and then divide the total transactions by 86400/1440/24 to get them, after that with another CTE i can get the average and apply the Quarterly Aggregation.
    • For the TPD/TPW/TPMonth, is easily because i only need to count all the transactions with the daily/weekly/monthly aggregation and then get the average with the quarterly aggregation.
  • Success Rate: Quarterly Successful Tx *100 / Quarterly Total Tx
  • After Getting all the Transactions per Time and Success rate i joined all with dates in the last CTE and then select all and apply the case for the Quarter name in the final select.
• User Activity: With near.core.fact_transactions again, we can get user activity with tx_signer.
  • I used SQL Recipes to get the DAU/WAU/MAU, Stickiness Ratio, New users. you can see the recipe by yourself, this is my first time adding Quarterly aggregation to my recipes.
• Stake Activity: Using near.core.dim_staking_actions :
  • Action = ‘Stake’ or Action = ‘Unstake’ to filter by type of Stake.
  • count (distinct tx_hash) : To get the amount of Stake/Unstake
  • count (distinct tx_signer) : To get the amount of Stakers/Unstakers
  • sum (stake_amount/pow(10,23)) : To get the amount of $NEAR staked/unstaked
  • Because i did a quarterly report i wanna provide Daily/Weekly/Monthly Average data so i extended a bit myself in the query, there are a lot of ctes getting all the data with the same methodology as transactions.
  • For the Stake Pools i used a query from JacktheGuy i modified a bit to provide quarterly data.
• Smart Contracts: Using cypher query modified to provide quarterly data.
• Rainbow Bridge: Using mhm query modified to provide quarterly data.

Made by Popex404, Twitter Link Here

Last Words Regarding my Report

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• There is a lot of information condensed here, and it could be much larger if i added more metrics.
• But because of the length i decided to keep these metrics only.
• Transaction and User Activity are my main focus for the Report, and they have the biggest analysis.
• I decided to keep it short in the following analysis for Stakes/Smart Contracts/ Rainbow Bridge.
• You can see my short summary of each Quarter in the end if you want to skip the text.
• I didn’t include Block Metrics / Decentralization Metrics this time, and focused more in the important Metrics.
  • Stake is really important to know if the users trust Near in the Long term.
  • Smart contracts show us the diversity of projects in the Near Ecosystem.
  • Rainbow Bridge will tell us about how was flow of $USD Between Near and Aurora/Ethereum.
• I hope that my reasoning behind my choosed metrics can be understand now.
• Methodology and Quarterly Summary at the end