Introduction

One of the best use cases of crypto market is its ability to lend and borrow almost instantly. These are financial tools which facilitate your financial decisions and ease you from complex paperwork of traditional finance. Kashi is one of these tools, produced and rendered by the famous and trusted crypto protocol SushiSwap. With Kashi you can lend your assets to earn APY (other users will benefit from your provided liquidity and pay you some fee), and also borrow from a wide range of assets by putting other assets as collateral.

Stable coins are of the most important bases of crypto market and as you know (and probably are hurt!) there has been a lot of discussion around this concept since the beginning of crypto. Of most important use cases of stable coins is being used as collateral to borrow since the price is stable (theoretically!). But People are also willing to borrow them since it’s easier to calculate and take action. In this dashboard we are going to see how Kashi users are using their Stable coins in different operations.

In Next step, I am going to assess the same metrics for borrowings. I will talk about notable points and invite you to check the graphs as you continue.

• Similar to lending, number of stable coin borrowers are higher in USDC in both Ethereum and Polygon. DAI is more popular in Ethereum than in Polygon.
• Most popular asset to borrow when stable coins are put as collateral is SUSHI on Ethereum and WETH on Polygon.
• USDC claimed its number 1 seat on borrowed asset from DAI but the competition is very close.
• USDT is the post popular stable coin to borrow on Polygon.
• Same volume pattern of sudden decrease is also visible in borrowing stats.

Final Metric that we are going to take a look at is the amount of borrowed assets when stable coins are put as collateral.

• As you can see, DAI is the most trusted and used stable coin as collateral on Ethereum but this title belongs to USDC on Polygon.
• Few to none have borrowed on USDT as collateral which also is interesting.

Methodology

Kashi supports both Ethereum and Polygon networks, So structurally, I am going to compare each metrics for these two chains. What are the metrics that is will be investigating?

On lending:

• Volume, Popular Pools and number of those who lend their stable coins.
• Weekly volume of Lending Stable coins.

On Borrowing:

• Volume, Popular Pools and number of those who borrowed stable coins.
• Weekly Volume of Borrowed Stable coins.
• Borrowed amount when Stable coins are as collateral.

It should be noted that Polygon data is bounded to past couple of month and there might be some deficits in database too. Once these issues solved, I will rerun the query

Data & Analysis

There basically 4 stable coins which we’ll dig deep into their stats: USDC, DAI, USDT, sUSD.

I will begin with Lending action.

First comparison shows the number of distinct users who had lent their stable coins on Ethereum or Polygon:

• USDC is the most lent stable coin in both cases but the dominance in polygon is far more.
• USDT and DAI are close in Ethereum which and sUSD is not popular between users

Kashi users have wide range of options to lend their stable coins. these options are Kashi markets or isolated pools which other users are able to borrow from. Next, we want to see what are the most popular markets for those who lend their stable coins:

• Pool popularity distribution on Ethereum is more diverse comparing to polygon which WETH/USDC has ~95% of the share (stressing again that polygon data is limited)
• DAI is performing better than USDC in this case and stole the number one seat with SUSHI/DAI pool.
• Even USDT performed better than USDC with WETH/USDT pool, which is surprising to me considering the popularity of USDC in DEFI space.

Next chart also showcases the Volume for each stable coin which again shows DAI as the number 1 on Ethereum and USDC on Polygon

To look at this from another angle, I demonstrated the weekly volume for each stable coin. interesting point is the sudden and severe decrease in Ethereum Lending starting from Jan 2022.

Conclusion

One point that cache my eyes is that USDT is not popular at all in DEFI. despite being the most used stable coins in crypto, USDT lose the competition to its rivals in most cases and is more popular in CEX activities.

Also it seems that retail prefer USDC and more professional users prefer DAI. Because there USDC is more dominant in statistics about count, and DAI is more dominant is Volume statistics.