This is issue #63 of the on-chain analytics newsletter that reaches nearly 10k crypto investors every week 📈

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This week our contributor analysts cover Emerging Networks / Themes: Flashbots, OpenSea, CryptoPunks, and Reflexer.

Flashbots is an R&D organization working on mitigating the negative externalities of Ethereum MEV. Today 5 mining pools are running its MEV-geth software, which in total account for >12% of the Ethereum hashrate.

Miners running MEV-geth have seen an average increase in income of 0.13 ETH per block so far in March, which is also a ~3x increase MoM. In total, miners collected 174 ETH in Flashbots fees in February, up by more than 6x the amount collected in January.

• Total extracted MEV (including non-Flashbot extracted MEV) has grown significantly. In January 2021 a total extracted MEV of $57M (47.6k ETH) was recorded, a year over year increase of 316x in absolute dollar amounts (43x in ETH).

• Finally, the number of unique Searchers who have landed a bundle has continued to climb and is on track to increase 3x in March. Searchers are users that submit transactions to be prioritized through Flashbots. After the removal of API keys the growth of searchers is expected to accelerate.

• OpenSea’s daily trading volume in March 2020 was around $27k. As of March 2021, volume has risen to about $5.8M, an increase of 21,500%, showing an exponential rate of growth during the NFT-spring. Trading volume YTD is ~$200M, which would put it on pace to total ~$800M by the end of the year.

• Since launch, the number of unique monthly active users has been steadily growing, as has monthly transaction (txn) volume. In Jan. 2021, this pace accelerated to over 30k users per month with ~1.3 txns per user per day. With the uptick in activity, median txn size also increased from ~$65 in Dec 2020 to ~$700 in Feb 2021.

• Increased activity on OpenSea is partly due to new creators & sellers but also due to the resurgence in popularity of some older art/collectibles. In particular, CryptoPunks and Mooncats accounted for ~20k ETH in volume this past week. A handful of artists/collections have tended to dominate volume in 2021.

• There are 10,000 punks and 1,834 unique wallets that hold punks, with 1,593 wallets owning 5 or less punks. The number of unique wallets has been steadily increasing as investors and collectors have realized the long-term value of owning a CryptoPunk.

• The total value of punks sold over the last year was $192M. The forecast for the market if current conditions remain consistent has the following breakdown:

  • (a) Past month sales equaled around 1.8k punks

  • (b) Average floor sale price for the past month was ~20 Eth

  • (c) Total sales for the next 12 months at the floor price would be around $767M

  This doesn't factor in mid/high-grade punks, which would raise total sales to $1B+.

• Since January 21st, the floor price for Punks has increased by 450% to ~22 Eth, with the # of Punks for sale increasing 70% to over 1,200. While some NFTs have seen their prices drop as supply increased or new projects emerged, CryptoPunks have been resilient to this trend. This is a primary case for Punks as a bluechip NFT.

Note: Punk Mafia contributed to this post as well with insights and edits.

• In the first month post-launch, the RAI TVL soared to $350M+ and the RAI supply grew to 48M+. Currently there are more than 1K positions with RAI debt.

• The PI controller managing RAI pulled its moving peg (aka redemption price) down in response to high market demand. The system found a new equilibrium around $3.014.

• There are more than 1K positions with RAI debt and with an average collateralization ratio of 250%.