There were 15059 addresses that claimed more than 146 million APE coins from the airdrop. The top 2 addresses received more than one million tokens, that is tens of millions of dollars. There are several options if one received some valuable coins: 1). Hold and do nothing; 2). Sell for immediate profit; 3). Be a liquidity provider and collect trading fees. Lending or staking the coins is a relatively long-term operation, thus not considered here. Speculators can also buy and sell, short or long the coin for profit. The trades are not relevant to the airdrop itself so not a focus here.

https://dune.com/embeds/977293/1692904/be7f9d16-07c0-4d1c-ba25-06daa68d01c9?display=iframe

We start with the APE coin transfers made by the address that claimed APE coins. First, we found among the 15059 recipients, 12087 of them transferred APE coins to other addresses, i.e. 2972 holders did not make any transfers within two weeks. Among the transfers, we aggregate all the addresses that received the coins based on the amount. Interestingly, the number one destination is the Uniswap APE-ETH pool. The two Uniswap APE-ETH pools received more than 30 million tokens in total, around one-third of the total amount.

https://dune.com/embeds/981280/1699852/f6b3ae2b-5874-47ad-9d33-85f1fc6a500a?display=iframe

We can get at least two conclusions about the token recipients: 1). They prefer ETH to USDC; 2). They prefer DEX to CEX as we see no CEX address appeared on the top. Interestingly, if I list the ultimate destination of coins, Binance and FTX share a good proportion. 3744 addresses transferred tokens to the Uniswap APE-ETH pools no matter whether it is swapping or adding liquidity, that’s also around one-third of the total. 

Given DEXes are the top destinations. We listed the trading volume of the pools within two weeks in the table below. We can further conclude with the dominance of Uniswap. Uniswap pools took around 80% volume of the trades.

https://dune.com/embeds/981096/1699491/8e08d33c-ff59-4680-b243-59686e22abbd?display=iframe

We want to find out if the airdrop recipients sold the tokens. We found more than 5913 trading records and 2392 APE sellers. Among the trades, more than 5000 were for ETH or WETH, and only 500 are for USDC. Given the ETH dominance, we show the APE for ETH trades below. We see decreases along the time both in trade count and volume.

https://dune.com/embeds/984112/1704803/9f84ba00-7619-4097-9a56-9087a061809c?display=iframe

Being a liquidity provider is beneficial because the APR can easily exceed 100% at that time. If the recipient is a believer in Yuga Lab, it does no harm to have either more APEs or ETHs. Given the dominance of APE-ETH pools, we will focus on the two APE-ETH pools in Uniswap V3. We get the list of those who collected fees from Uni V3 APE-ETH and APE-USDC pools. We found 33 out of 15059 addresses collected fees from the APE-ETH pools. We can see the top liquidity provider got more than 500 ETHs. Since there are more than 3676 addresses that transferred coins to the pools and there are only 1148 distinct sellers who traded in those pools, so at least around 1500 addresses are liquidity providers. That’s 10 percent of the whole population.

https://dune.com/embeds/981005/1699290/7e434165-c5a0-4329-a5ef-f14f960d28cf?display=iframe

To conclude, we analyzed the flow of the airdropped APE coins and we verified the dominance of Uniswap and ETH in crypto. We see that one thrid of the tokens flew into Uniswap and one tenth of the recipients chose to provide liquidity instead of selling. Hopefully, the results provide you insights and guidance next time you are airdropped some valuable coins. All the numbers, data and SQLs are available at https://dune.com/peiw_eth/ape-activity . Discussions and feedbacks are welcome.

With the rise of permissionless blockchain, the data problem becomes more visible. Anyone can view the on-chain data at websites like Etherscan. And the data analysis process becomes transparent as well. Dune Analytics (https://dune.xyz) is a platform for data experts to play with the data pulled from blockchains. The engineers and open-source contributors extracted, transformed, and loaded (ETL) blockchain data into tables such as ethereum.transactions and ntf.trades. The tables live in cloud systems. The analysts can write SQL queries, build visualizations and create dashboards upon the data. I have seen many times that the dashboards in Dune Analytics are cited as data sources for blockchain news. There is no such a transparent and informative platform in web2 as far as I know. Platforms like Dune Analytics make me optimistic about how the open data and the data analysts can help build a more efficient web3.

I see there are three key factors driving this change. First and foremost, the data access and the value residing inside the data. Although web3 is decentralized, web3 data is “centralized,” i.e., the transaction histories, which are the most important data, lives on the openly accessible mainstream blockchains. The data is not only but also carries a value of high density. Second, a single machine would not be impossible to handle billions of transaction records. Consuming massive data requires advanced hardware and software resources. Luckily, this problem has been solved thousands of times in web2, and many software are open-source. With tools like Spark, HDFS, DBT, and Google Cloud, a small team can quickly build an effective, customized, and automatic data pipeline that can process massive data. Last but not least, the people. Given how big the data market already is, many people are equipped with the skills to work with data. They can quickly find a place in the pipeline, no matter it is ETL, write SQLs or question-driven analysis. MetricsDao (https://mirror.xyz/0x3138165f8d21d4869dbD406CD8bc8055CAC8fb6E/cQtRNHKaXr2OnX0X3QNsDGSusykYkw9D5XwY1PHvvZ4) is a DAO formed by such a group of passionate individuals. The DAO distributes all kinds of tasks to members to build an open analytic community, and the members share the belief that the access to data for analysis should be open and free.

Between the open-minded people and open-access data are the open-to-use, centralized, and extremely costly data storage and processing infrastructure. I am curious to see how the value generated can balance out the cost. This is a good point where Web2 meets Web3, in my opinion.

In Web3, everything starts with a browser extension called a wallet that holds the users’ on-chain account information. With this wallet, users can access many dApps (decentralized applications) such as uniswap, including the ones they never used before. The ownership of the account, the data needed for authorizing on-chain activities, and the assets are all inside the wallet, which is fully controlled by the users. The users are responsible for its safety too.

The above operational difference leads to two entirely different cyber worlds. In the world of web2, the applications are disconnected and the user data are exclusive to the system. Users’ creditability and impact are restricted to isolated systems as well. For example, one’s Amazon account can only be used for purchasing from Amazon. The users’ purchase history and review only reflects the users’ status in the Amazon system. For tech companies, users’ account information is the most invaluable data and should be protected carefully. A small number of people behind controls how those data can be used. They are equipped with big power but not necessarily who we should and can trust. For example, Facebook’s business is accused of being built upon selling users’ data.

In Web3, the average number of accounts that a user holds is smaller, because there are only tens of mainstream public blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Fantom. Hundreds of applications reside in each chain. The result is the usage of a web3 account is way wider due to its level-up accessibility power. Users have access to hundreds of dApps, and can use the same account for both gaming and currency exchange. This largely saves the trouble of keep forgetting this and that password. Another critical shift is the transparency of the on-chain activity data. The blockchain data and on-chain activities are public and traceable by unique wallet addresses. Everything is public and nothing is going on in the background without the users’ permissions. On the other hand, anyone can see and make use of the data for good or for bad. The on-chain data can be analogized as a credit profile and or a LinkedIn profile. One example is airdrop, meaning someone sends free tokens based on one’s historical activities.

In summary, authentication is a fundamental component of any application. The web2 and web3 authentication approaches are fundamentally in many aspects including new account registration, log-in, and activity authorization. And web3’s way opens up a world full of possibilities to be explored.

With the flexibility and control we have for the online IDs, I was long-time puzzled: how should I decide what ID I should use (more recognizable or less recognizable names) for a website or which ID (if I have many) I should choose when I speak? Is it a good idea to use the same username all the time across many websites? Or should I try my best to be anonymous and hide my identity?

I believe the majority of the people hold only one account for one website, mainly for convenience. Managing many accounts and making them secure is a demanding task for a human brain. It is not necessary for most users either. To further ease the efforts, some people even use similar passwords across the websites, while it potentially causes serious personal data leaking. The other benefit of publishing under one ID is maximizing the influence. As a creation behavior, the more and the better you publish, the more you gain. The biggest gainers are the KOLs and celebrities who established and maximized their influence through online social networks.

These IDs also run the risk of being judged, criticized, and attacked explicitly or implicitly for their perspectives. The other concern is that the internet today is a de facto blockchain. The footprints will be public and easily retrieved by anyone in the future. To protect the privacy and prevent potential risks, we could try our best to be completely anonymous, use as many as possible online identities and associated emails, or even adopt more sophisticated techniques. But it requires advanced technical management skills and there will be no credibility and influence established either.

Complete anonymity might be too much. One step back is to hold multiple IDs for different purposes and make them detached from the identity in the real world (a kind of pseudonymity, just like we play many roles in real life). The prevalence of this type of usage is increasing, like Satoshi Nakamoto, an ID only for publishing bitcoin-related ideas and discussions. In the past, the most trusted IDs are attached to a real person who had enough success in the real world. Nowadays, more and more KOLs are behind virtual IDs, trusted purely because of their online activities and productions, regardless of who they are offline. What is behind an ID is a personal brand and the accountability associated. To publish is to build this brand and the credit history. The transition of web2 to web3 will open more opportunities for online builders.