• NEAR continues being a zombie chain up until the middle of August, when suddenly the total transactions and user counts spike upward and stay elevated (Chart on the RIGHT)

• Not only that, but there was a sudden influx of new wallets being activated (Charts BELOW)

• The new wallet influx was especially extreme toward the end of August where there were days which had a new wallet participation upwards of 65%

Author:

• Twitter: @lelaughingman
• Flipside Bounty Hunter: TheLaughingMan
• Discord: theelaughingman

Overview

• We are going to be looking into how a new App's (Kaiching/CosmoseAI) usage of NEAR as an infrastructure layer is contributing to overall chain spam and exaggerating chain metrics

• This dashboard takes cues from MoDefi's work here

• This dashboard focuses on NEAR's metric changes and overall spam arising due to CosmoseAI rather than a deep dive/focus on Cosmose's app. Check Mo's work for the latter.

So what exactly happened?

• Did NEAR suddenly solve Cancer?

• Some epic MEME coin get launched?

• Some killer ponzi app get stealth deployed?

‏‏‎ ‎

Enter CosmoseAI / KAIKAI App.

• The App comes out of nowhere and now makes up >60% of NEAR's daily transaction traffic.

What the App doin' ?

• The KAIKAI app means to serve as a FIAT onboarder for the masses, they accept FIAT from the Users and then convert the Users' holdings to their stablecoin Kaiching.
• The stablecoin can be used across their various e-commerce offerings with minimal friction and transaction costs.
• Not only this, but the App also pays out rewards for interacting/watching/playing content on the App.

‏‏‎ ‎

As a result of the above...

• The majority of the activity arising from the app comes from individual Users claiming their rewards from the App
• This seems to be closely followed by the app's hotwallet running scheduled jobs on-chain where it transfers each User wallet small amounts of NEAR for transaction fees so that the Users can continue claiming/redeeming their holdings/rewards without having to worry about the underlying blockchain concepts

Some additional points to keep in mind:

• The app's on-chain ecosystem so far seems to be a closed loop.

• There is no composability at all with the rest of NEAR. No stablecoin dex pools, no trading and no defi participation.

• The User wallets are likely custodial/app controlled, with the User having very access/control on the chain wallet.

Now that we are aware of the App Design/Usage... Let's call the majority of the traffic from the app what it truly is: SPAM....

Breaking Down the Spammy Parts:

User Claims:

• Why are all Users individually claiming each reward?
• Why aren't claims a batch process run by a central contract that distributes all rewards periodically, say every 1-2 hours or once a day to all qualified Users/Wallets.
• The reasoning for keeping things this way is likely to keep User more engaged with the app... The User has to manually interact and claim each individual reward increasing their App Screen time. Also, it's likely claiming a reward isn't as simple as just a click!

‏‏‎ ‎

Gas Transfers:

• The whole issue of Gas arises because each User wallet executes its own claim/transfer transactions.
• This could easily be avoided if the rewards are given out as a batch job, eliminating the need for manual claims.
• Additionally, with such an approach it would make sense to initialize the User wallets when creating them with X amount of gas that can last them a lifetime of gas on NEAR.

‏‏‎ ‎

It's almost as if...The App has been designed to lead to as much spam as possible... 🤔

‏‏‎ ‎

Additionally, when did you last see a Chain's foundation be heavily invested in a Project/App deployed on it's chain?

TechCrunch Article