ON–026: DeFi (Part 2)

• For every transaction that goes through Terra, a variable tax rate is charged and redistributed to staking token holders. This tax rate is designed to support a continuous increase in staking rewards so that in times of slow network growth it expands and during times of high growth it contracts. This feature was introduced with the Columbus-3 hard fork on December 13th and was held at 0.1% prior to that. It has since its introduction been climbing from 0.5% to now currently 0.8%, coming closer to its maximum of 1%.

To better understand where these rewards are actually coming from, a look at Terra’s merchant integrations through the CHAI wallet is necessary. There are currently 24 merchants integrated with CHAI and rising. These merchants range from food delivery services to classic e-commerce websites. The CHAI data is uniquely insightful into consumer spending behavior at scale. For example, across all merchants, a consumer is 20% more likely to make a purchase on a Monday vs a Thursday or the percentages of processed refunds fall by 33% on weekends vs the weekly average.

Note: All numbers have been converted to US $ for the readers’ convenience. All CHAI data is provided by DSRV Labs who are operating chaiscan.com. Terra underwent a hard fork in early December and only data since then is being taken into consideration.

• Breaking this data further down into merchant categories provides additional insides. Some categories such as Marketplaces or Retail have a much higher purchase frequency than other higher-value categories such as Luxury or Fashion. It comes as no surprise that the lower the purchase frequency is, the higher the refund rate becomes. Overall return rates are slightly higher than those reported from Amazon US and generally decrease with higher shipping fees. South Korea (as a small country with a very concentrated population) has naturally lower shipping fees and therefore a higher likelihood of returns.

• Although the cryptocurrency ecosystem is generally relatively uncorrelated to real-world events, you don’t have to wait for quarterly reports to see the impact of Covid-19 on specific merchant categories on Terra. The hospitality sector on CHAI was driving over 50% of volume in early December, a number that has now dropped to around 25% of total volume (hospitality has dropped sharper in the west because South Korea experienced almost no Covid-19 related lockdowns). For some merchants in the hospitality category, the recent weekly volume was even negative, processing more refunds than actual purchases.

• The Celo Mainnet has been up for ~2 months now, with the network coming up on its millionth block. Block times have stayed at 5 seconds, with total transactions and addresses growing steadily.

• The validator set in the protocol remains decentralized, with 62 unique validator groups electing at least one validator as of Thursday, 6/18/20. Registered validators hail from around 40 countries, allowing the network to have significant geographic distribution (source: Polychain Labs).

• On-chain governance has seen significant engagement from the Celo Native Asset holders. Six governance proposals have been submitted successfully since network launch, including one proposed by the Celo community to rename the native asset on the network from cGLD to CELO. The first community proposal passed with 96.7 percent voting in favor.

• Interest in building on Celo keeps growing, as seen by the activity on the Celo monorepo. The winners of Celo Camp, an incubator for building on Celo, will be announced June 24. 250 teams from over 60 countries were curated into 7 finalists teams. 3,937 celo-monorepo clones from 305 developers over the past 14 days (source).

• Coinbase recently featured the Celo integration of Rosetta, a standardized blockchain querying API, to allow developers to integrate with many networks at once. $CELO is the first asset to integrate Rosetta in the Coinbase Custody platform. Read more here.