This is issue #60 of the on-chain analytics newsletter that reaches 8000 crypto investors every week 📈

1inch, whose v2 offers the best rates by discovering the most efficient swapping routes across all DEXes—swap on the customizable new UI. And also Aave, where you can experience DeFi: Deposit, Earn, & Borrow on Aave.

This week our contributor analysts cover The Graph, Chainlink, Numerai, Handshake, and Arweave.

• Chainlink’s holder community moved from 183k to 400k wallets all along the last 6 months, representing a 118,5% growth over the period. Wallets labeled as holders here are holding at least 1 token on their wallets, with a residual balance evolution (+/-10%) and a residual on-chain volume (<20% of their balance) on a weekly basis.

• The overall on-chain volume has also reached a new ATH recently, with our indicators being at $3.8B representing the value of weekly on-chain flows. The average transaction value sits at $30k. Both figures have been multiplied by 3 since the beginning of the year.

• This growth has been fueled by an increasing number of incoming investors on LINK, moving from 15k to 30k wallets on a weekly basis. Incoming investors are defined as wallets having a balance evolution superior to 10% of their balance.

• Finally, LINK rewards have skyrocketed the last quarter, moving from 700k LINK in early January to +2.5M in late February, representing a 257% growth (source).

• For Numerai the name of the game is staking and the platform has maintained a positive growth trajectory in locked value from Q4 2020 well into Q1 2021. The classic tournament recently clocked in over 248,000 NMR staked across 1,299 model submissions. This was an over 4x year over year increase in value locked in the protocol.

• Signals is Numerai’s more generalized tournament that focuses on capturing insights from models built on datasets procured by the participating data scientists. Naturally the barrier to entry for this tournament is higher, but with the aid of collective community on-boarding initiatives, Signals has reached a new all-time high of 2,700 staked NMR.

• With solid increases across multiple on-chain metrics, Numerai has shifted their efforts toward promoting more community-developed content. The community forum contains sample code and guides that walk new participants through the process of making their first submission. Webinars discussing data science techniques have become a bi-weekly staple and more technical content is being regularly published to Numerai’s Youtube channel.

• 2021 is off to the races with over 11B queries processed in January by The Graph’s hosted service, which is 37% MoM growth or ~20% 3mo MoM, with avg daily query volume exceeding 400M. DeFi continues to be the main volume driver but adoption of NFT subgraphs is picking up.

• It’s been 2 months since mainnet and there are 160+ indexers and 5,000+ delegators contributing to The Graph network. Delegators stake GRT on indexers to earn a cut of their rewards. To date, ~17.7M GRT has been awarded to indexers and ~33.2M GRT awarded to delegators (and rising)..

• Each indexer has a delegation cap of 16x their stake to guarantee a base level of security and decentralization, after which rewards are capped to encourage re-delegation to other indexers. The delegator to indexer stake ratio is currently 3.08x, so delegators are receiving a substantial share of indexing rewards.

• Indexing reward cut is a delegation parameter that indexers toggle to attract delegators. The lower the cut, the great the share of rewards earned by delegators. Today most indexers take over 90% of rewards, but others take less to attract delegators. Interestingly, the distribution is bi-modal and another smaller cluster of indexers has chosen rewards as low as 10-20%.

• Finally, the volatility of indexing reward cuts is an indication of how stable indexers have kept their indexing reward cuts over time, which is an indicator for the predictability of delegator income. As seen below, rewards have not been perfectly stable, which may mean indexers are delegating to themselves to deter other delegators.

• As of 1:41PM UTC on Feb 25th, there are 56654 Arweave wallets, and 57% (32302) of them have been active in the past 6 months. 58% of these active addresses own PSTs (Profit-sharing tokens).

• At least six notable projects now use Arweave to back up their code bases: Polkadot, Solana, Skale, Mirror, Nervos, and Mask Network. Arweave is differentiated in the crypto ecosystem as a L1 which can provide essential utility to other protocols.

• With the new SPORA (Succinct proof of random access) mining algorithm implemented on Wednesday, each piece of data uploaded to Arweave is checked for integrity once every ~14.4 seconds by miners. Mining incentives are now biased toward data storage.