Vincent Van Dough is a prominent figure in the NFT space known for spending egregious amounts of internet money on outlandish pieces such as photorealistic versions of Pepe the frog. You may recognize the name Vincent Van Dough for having membership in TungstenDAO, a DAO which infamously purchased a solid 2,000 pound cube of tungsten for a quarter million dollars worth of Ethereum (ETH) on November 1st of this year. TungstenDAO mints meme NFTs which regularly feature a tungsten cube and are sold for several ETH, of which Vincent is currently an owner.

Let’s take a dive into the purchasing history of Vincent Van Dough. Using data provided by Flipside, we can track how much Vincent has been spending on their extensive collection of NFTs. 

Van Dough has spent $ 41 Million so far on NFTs

As of November 1st, 2021, Vincent has spent a whopping 8,623.3 ETH on their NFT collection, amounting to the approximate equivalent of 41 million USD at the time of writing.

When accounting for the value of ETH at the time of each purchase however, the total USD spent comes out to approximately 23.47 million USD, which is approximately 57.2% of the total equivalent in today’s value. 

And has sold only $1.7 Million worth.

Now for the NFT savvy readers you might be thinking that just because Vincent Van Dough purchased all these NFTs doesn’t mean he actually held on to them; he could have sold a whole bunch of them! While this is true, it turns out Vincent doesn’t sell very often. Their earliest sale was on August 13th of this year for .5 ETH with all subsequent sales occurring in the same month.

The total amount earned from sales adds up to only 372.68 ETH, which represents approximately 4.2% of the 8,886.75 ETH spent on purchases.

It would cost you 39.7 million dollars to be Vincent Van Dough.

The total gas Vincent has spent is already ridiculously high, but how much of the gas used by Vincent was used for NFT purchases? Still a pretty impressive amount. 

At the time of writing, the total amount of ETH spent as gas was approximately 23.1, which is equivalent to approximately $111,157 USD today. When accounting for the price of ETH at the time of each fee paid, the value in USD drops to $72,317. 

Overall gas spent on NFT purchases accounts for approximately 16.1% of all the gas Vincent has used thus far, with total gas spent equating to roughly 686,000 USD in equivalent value today.

Vincent spent approximately 142.747 ETH on gas. Right now that’s $686,761. They used 1,435.636 million gas to send 6.364 transactions, with an average price of 90.4 gwei. 89 of them failed, costing him 5.432 ETH. 

So what’s the damage? If we add up the total ETH spent on purchases (8,623.3 ETH), plus the gas used (23.1 ETH), minus the ETH gained from sales (372.68 ETH), the total comes out to about 8273.72 ETH or $39,713,856 USD in equivalent value today (using an ETH price of 4,800 USD). It would cost you 39.7 million dollars to be Vincent Van Dough today.

The most Van Dough ever spent on an NFT transaction was for 2 penguins and a Pepe frog.

The most Vincent Van Dough ever spent on an NFT transaction was 420 ETH which, at the time of purchase on August 14th, 2021, was worth 1,366,570.32 USD. The pieces purchased were two penguins and a PEG with Pepe the frog on it. ** **

The most they ever spent on a single NFT was for an Art Block.

The most Vincent Van Dough ever spent on a single NFT was 320 ETH which, at the time of purchase on August 14th, 2021, was worth 1,051,886.77 USD. The piece purchased was an Art Block NFT.

QUERIES [Using Flipside Crypto]

PURCHASES: 

https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/dashboard/vandough-nft-purchases-BMIp0b

GAS:

https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/dashboard/van-dough-gas-spent-on-purchases-9VnG6i

SALES:

https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/dashboard/vincent-van-dough-nft-sales-Myd_bw

Sushiswap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) -- which means it relies on self-executing smart contracts to facilitate trading. Rather than using order books to facilitate trades, DEXs use liquidity pools to determine pricing, and allow peer-to-peer instantaneous asset swaps. 

The $SUSHI token is distributed throughout the community as liquidity incentives. It gives holders the ability to participate in governance and earn a part of the fees paid to the protocol as reward. 

The $SUSHI token currently has a price of $12.29, a fully diluted market cap of $2,677,584,963 and a 24-hour trading volume of $178,863,340.

And since launch -- the DEX and its token have been gaining immense popularity. Here are some facts to highlight it: 

1- Sushiswap is available on the most amount of blockchain networks. 

SushiSwap is made up of a collection of liquidity pools across 14 different blockchains, which is more than any other DEX and includes top networks such as Ethereum, Fantom, BSC, and Avalanche. Second in line is Curve finance with half that amount. 

2- The DEX has been gaining 2,000 new users per day and is currently seeing nearly half a million users. 

3- $300 million is being traded daily since late August, and $1 million is collected daily in fees. 

4- In just the past month, the total value locked (TVL) on SushiSwap has gone from $4.2 billion to $5.5 billion.

Compare that to the other major DEXs, and it’s clear that Sushiswap is winning the race. 

But the two metrics that prove that SUSHI is undervalued are really these two:

1. (daily swap volume) / (fully diluted market cap)  Using this metric, SushiSwap has a similar value to Balancer while having 60x the swap volume. And it is valued at 10% of Uniswap while having 20% of the swap volume. 

2. (daily fees collected by the protocol) / (fully diluted market cap)

   Because the holders of the SUSHI tokens are entitled to a percentage of the fees collected by SushiSwap, having a high ratio of fees to market cap means that SUSHI token holders are getting a higher percentage cashflow than holders of the other DEX tokens listed above. In addition to stacking up well against other top DEXs using the above metrics, SushiSwap has had high user growth and a fast increase in TVL which are both indicators of a healthy protocol with a flourishing user base.

** **

One of the biggest challenges for crypto protocols at the moment is garnering enough community engagement around new governance proposals. These proposals are the crucial stepping stones for blockchain projects to grow -- and yet too few individuals are able to participate. 

Their lack of participation is primarily due to two factors: 

1. Too much is happening at once and people don’t know how and where to pay attention 

2. Voting on a proposal is strangely complex and varies per project. There are a lot of hoops to jump through before you can make your voice heard.

We’ve now put forth two proposals that were hampered by late, or lack of, community participation. 

But here’s the thing -- we got REALLY far. On the Sushiswap proposal, 3.3 million votes were in favor vs. 190,000 against. We participated in community calls, posted on Twitter, Sushi’s core team even promoted it all over - but we didn’t make the required quorum of 5 million votes to get the proposal through. 

Turns out only a few whales knew where to pay attention -- 2.5M of our votes in favor came from one whale. 

Ultimately if we wish to fulfill the promise of enabling everyone to have equal access to influence the space, we need to truly embrace the principles of decentralization and allow a wider and more diverse group of users to participate.

We believe the first step towards that goal is providing greater transparency and education around the what and how of open proposals. 

On our Discord, we created a governance channel where @avimeyers and @francisgowen will share our internal memos on the major upcoming proposals that we’re paying attention to, and the details you need to know in order to vote. We want to create a space for anyone to ask questions and for resources to be shared!

With that, we are excited to announce that we are joining forces with our community of analysts to support the amazing work that Angel protocol is doing to donate more to charities.

Many Flipside analysts have been delegating to Flipside Crypto -- to support the creation of more on-chain analytics, and help the ecosystem grow.

Today we are committing to matching our community’s contributions every quarter and delegating that same amount to Angel, up to $20,000 a quarter.

Join us in making your bounty reward count! Delegate your LUNA to Flipside and if you’re new to the game, get started with this Terra Scavenger Hunt to solve your first bounty and earn $LUNA.

There’s been a lot of talk around how efficient Uniswap v3 is:

However, according to Bancor’s Head of research, v3 comes at a price.

In this article we work to evaluate whether Uniswap V3 is sacrificing retail LPs for a better capital efficiency.

V2 has a higher TVL and more active users.

With regards to TVL and active users, V2 comes out ahead with 18k daily users and 4B$ in TVL in comparison to just 8.45k daily users and 2.5B$ TVL in V3.

But V3 has 4x the volume with half the TVL on V2.

V3 has 6.79B$ in daily volume which nearly quadruples the transaction volume on V2.

At first glance, capital efficiency on V3 is the real deal. It generated 4x more volume than V2 with only half the TVL required.

Despite the capital efficiency, why do people still keep their liquidity in V2? With the volume / TVL ratio of 2.79 in V3 and only 0.71 in V2, you should earn at least 3.8 times more if you migrate to V3 right?

Well, the true story is not so simple.

V3 and Capital Efficiency

To understand how v3 works, let’s take a look at their unique mechanic: concentrated liquidity.

“In Uniswap v3, LPs can concentrate their capital within custom price ranges, providing greater amounts of liquidity at desired prices. In doing so, LPs construct individualized price curves that reflect their own preferences.

LPs can combine any number of distinct concentrated positions within a single pool. For example, an LP in the ETH/DAI pool may choose to allocate $100 to the price ranges $1,000-$2,000 and an additional $50 to the ranges $1,500-$1,750.”

Source: https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3/

Moreover, “Swap fees are not automatically reinvested as they were in previous versions of Uniswap. Instead, they are collected separately from the pool and must be manually redeemed when the owner wishes to collect their fees.”

Source: https://docs.uniswap.org/protocol/concepts/V3-overview/fees

On V3 not only do you have to actively monitor and adjust your position to get the best yield, you also have to manually claim the rewards if you want to compound them. On v2, the only thing you need to do is deposit your funds into the LP pool.

Note: you can use this Uniswap v3 Fee calculator to understand more on how different ranges affect your yield on V3.

This effectively gives an edge to a small group of people who:

• Have a working strategy and are hedging to battle against the high impermanent loss on concentrated position.

• Have capital that is large enough to outweigh the high gas fee on each rebalancing position / claiming reward on Ethereum.

Indeed this small group of people will see their capital efficiency increase by 4000x compared to others.

What happens if I just provide liquidity to Uniswap V3 the same way I would on V2?

To evaluate the impact of not adjusting your position on V3, let’s use this Uniswap calculator and look at the USDC / ETH pool with a 0.3% swap fee.

The widest liquidity concentration in the last 30 days is around 20% - 30% with most of the day being only around 5%. Let’s use 20% as an example.

There is a 10x difference between a user who actively adjusts their position inside the 20% range and a normal user who just provides liquidity in the 0 - infinity range (v2).

The fees you earn in a pool are distributed based on the ratio of your liquidity over total liquidity.

The top 10 LPs on V3 hold such a high concentration of the total liquidity that their effective liquidity will increase 10x compare to those who provides liquidity without a range on v2.

Meanwhile retail users will earn 90% less fees if they don’t adjust their range accordingly.

Retail investors will earn 4x more in rewards on V2 than on V3.

Rewards for retail users:

• With the v2 pool, the fee/liquidity ratio is 184,461 / 218,728,477 = 0.000843.

• The same ratio on v3 is 703,170 / 332,460,000 = 0.00211. However since you don’t provide liquidity in a tight range / actively manage your position, your actual ratio will be divided by 10 or 0.00021.

V2 gives out 0.000843 / 0.00021, i.e. 4x more rewards than a v3 pool.

Moreover, on some days, liquidity is only concentrated around the 10% range:

In this case v2 gives out 8x more reward than v3.

Therefore, while v2 makes everyone receive the same reward per dollar deposited, v3 allows some small group of people to receive more rewards at the detriment of others receiving less.

Will retail users be able to enter V3 LPs in the future?

While layer 2 might solve the gas problem on Ethereum, it won’t remove the technical barrier (the complexity of adjusting the range to maximize the profit). Unless someone can propose an optimized strategy that no one else can beat, there will always be a winner and a loser in this game.

Somehow in the end, the liquidity provider’s job on a decentralized exchange is handled by a centralized group of people.

TL; DR

• All Terra bounties are funded through yield from delegated $LUNA.

• When you delegate yours to Flipside, you are giving to the ecosystem: 100% of yields go directly to analysts. 

• Once you’ve connected your Terra wallet to Terra Station, delegating only takes one click. Follow these steps to get started.

Our mission at Flipside is to help blockchain projects realize their full potential. A key component of that is effective on-chain analytics that delivers ecosystem trust, support and growth. 

Groundbreaking projects like Terra are the ones we choose to partner with. Starting with key metrics to track overall ecosystem growth, followed by on-demand analytics available for free to new protocols (Mirror, Anchor, Pylon, Neptune, Angel…) -- we continue to be relentless in providing the Terra community the data they need. 

So how do we keep up? We have an amazing community of analysts that we reward with crypto bounties. We provide the labeled and curated data for free - and analysts use it to create a steady stream of analytics. 

By focusing heavily on education and onboarding, we’ve seen newcomers become stellar analysts able to tackle harder questions and earn more. Top analysts have already earned $50K worth of LUNA in just 10 weeks -- on a yearly scale, that’s more than $250,000 in gross income from bounties alone. 

What’s more - we found that 97% of the LUNA we paid out in bounties has stayed in the ecosystem. Once you understand what Terra is doing, and where it’s headed, you’d be crazy to sell your LUNA.  [consider us #LUNAtics]

But you should also be staking it. 

Delegate to Your Fellow Analysts 

Keep your airdrops but put your yield towards growing the Terra ecosystem.

At first, staking your LUNA (also known as delegating) was all about earning ~4% yield, claiming airdrops, and taking part in governance. But what if your delegation could have more of an impact? 

As the market matures, new opportunities for delegating have appeared that allow you to use your yield for good. You still get to claim airdrops and vote on governance - but you also get to support projects like Flipside! 

If you delegate your $LUNA to Flipside’s validator node - 100% of your yield will go towards funding Terra analysts. Terra has already delegated 1.1 million LUNA to us to enable healthy ecosystem outcomes - your contribution continues to grow the outcomes for all.

In this case, we’d make sure 100% of your delegation is used to fund more bounties for Terra. 

Since May, there’s been a lot of talk about Polygon “flipping”  Ethereum -- at first in terms of transaction count (at its peak, there were 8M transactions per day happening on Polygon, compared to 1.2M TPD on Ethereum) and just last week in terms of active user count -- rising to a record high of 566,516 active addresses on Saturday, surpassing Ethereum for the first time.

However, it’s also been reported in a Polygon forum that the network has been under a spam attack since May, which has been inflating network utilization numbers by 90%. Every block was full of users sending meaningless transactions and just paying for the gas fees.

With 1 gwei in gas price, or 0.000000001 MATIC / gas, and a 20 million gas limit per block, it only costs around 0.02 MATIC to spam an entire block on Polygon, or $1,000 for an entire day.

So it’s cheap to flood a whole block - but still, what’s the incentive?

This article sheds light on the mechanism happening behind these spam transactions, and the profits at stake. Our research suggests that increasing gas fees to 30 gwei could be very effective in this case.

The Arbitrage Bot Behind these Spam Attacks

Identifying the Sender

On average, the top 10 dapps in terms of weekly transaction count add up to 3 million transactions per week, or 420k transactions per day. With 4M – 6M transactions happening on the whole network daily, the top 10 applications account for less than 10% of the total network - so where are the rest of the transactions coming from?

With a simple query we were able to find the top 10 addresses in terms of total transactions. The top two contracts, “0xa81ce04168e41a47f68a975d67a00fbef729af9b” and “0x84e5bc3df0df0f543648f250443c6f4077218312”, have been interacting with 2 million transactions daily -- which accounts for roughly 30% of the network’s total transaction count.

Source: Polygon dashboard

Identifying the Recipient

Looking at the details of their transactions, we can see that these two contracts are arbitrage bots. They are the target of millions of transactions every day, and initiate thousands of daily transactions to DEXes themselves.

For example, in the above trade, this contract sent out 0.153 MATIC worth 0.23$ and receive back 4.33 MATIC worth 6.5$

An arbitrage bot is a bot that captures the different exchange rates between platforms to make profit. For example, if Uniswap has 3700$ / ETH and Sushiswap has 3600$ / ETH, you can simultaneously buy on Sushi and sell on Uniswap to capture the 100$ difference.

We now have the full picture: spam attack transactions act as the trigger for these arbitrage bots to make their own transactions on DEXes.

By plotting the total transactions sent out by these bot contracts, we can see that they make around 2,000 – 4,000 transactions per day, which is nothing unusual.

Source: Polygon dashboard

We don’t know the contract’s code so we cannot explain why it needs so many input transactions versus just 2000 – 4000 trades per day.

The likely theory is that the owner just wants to spam the contract so others cannot front-run the real trade. So someone has a bot that floods a block with noise to protect from front running, as opposed to using priority fees to ensure they are always first in the block. But is it really cheaper to buy a whole block than to just pay exorbitant prices to be first?

How much is this spammer making?

By tracking the contract creator we can see that the bot was initially funded with 14 ETH (~$3,775) and made multiple transactions back for a total of 218.5 ETH (equivalent to ~$825,000 at the time of writing) that was bridged back to Ethereum.

That’s an average of $6,800 a day in profits over the past 120 days - which is how long the bot has been running.

Increasing Transaction Fees

On October 5th 2021, the network’s co-founder recommended increasing the minimum transaction fee from 1 gwei to 30 gwei - raising the cost of spamming an entire day to $30,000 to disincentivize spam transactions from happening.

Shortly after the adjustment, the spam transactions dropped 75% from 2M to just 500k TPD. Polygon’s daily transactions also dropped 50% from 6M to just over 3M TPD. This is clearly shown in the graph above.

As shown in the graph above, the network’s utilization rate also dropped down from 90% back to 60% which is a healthier rate. This leaves a lot of room for others to build on Polygon.

It’s worth noting that even with the 75% drop, spam transactions still account for 16.7% of the network’s daily transactions. This means bots are still spending around $5,000 a day at the current gas price, or 83% of their daily profit, to keep this operation going.