TLDR; We're launching defistats.io – an independent source for visually exploring the emerging "decentralized finance" use-case on the Ethereum blockchain. We're launching with 10x analytics for the 🦄 Uniswap exchange protocol featuring 1) the 🔥 trade volumes and liquidity reserves for the ~600 exchanges that make up Uniswap, 2) the individual liquidity providers who contribute including the 💰 returns on their positions and 3) on-chain 💹 prices for the ETH-token pairs from the exchanges on the blockchain.
We will soon expand to other use-cases like lending, derivatives, prediction markets, insurance, etc. There's a lot more to come – we are only beginning our journey of making blockchain data transparent and accessible. Uniswap's available today!
What's decentralized finance?
One of the most exciting developments in the blockchain space is an emerging use-case of "Decentralized Finance" (abbreviated as DeFi), also sometimes known as open-finance or permissionless/censorship-resistant finance. In this new system, users of DeFi products will be able to access censorship-resistant financial products while remaining in full control of their wealth and personal data. Only an internet connection is required to access them – rather than geography, social status or pedigree.
This use-case has always been the ethos behind blockchains – transparent, permissionless and trustless – starting with Satoshi's paper on Bitcoin in 2009.
To read more about DeFi – EthHub is my go-to place for essential Ethereum information.
Why we built an analytics portal for DeFi?
The existing tools available today for the DeFi space are woefully underserving this burgeoning userbase. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the existing tools like blockchain explorers are a disservice to this ecosystem because:
- too nerdy ➡ missing the point of a consumer-focused finance product
- show-case metrics like number of transactions ➡ do not present the opportunity of DeFi
- not personalized to a user's specific needs ➡ showing aggregate-level stats
What's unique about defistats.io?
We wanted to address three pain-points with our first public launch – with the focus on Uniswap:
Get a 🔥 real-time ranking of all ~600 exchanges available on Uniswap, including their historical trading volumes and liquidity reserves. Uniswap lives and breathes like an organism and constantly exhibit various kinds of emergent behavior.
Compute the 💰 ROI for Liquidity providers, including the opportunity cost of investing in a liquidity pool. Here's an example investment analysis for one such liquidity provider for the DAI pool – everything is live and using real data from the blockchain.
On-chain 💹 prices computed directly from the exchanges. Price oracles and their security is an active research area –
defistats.iois another trustless, decentralized alternative. Here are the MKR token prices compared with (volume-weighted prices) from the top centralized off-chain exchanges – remember MKR isn't listed on a lot of popular centralized exchanges and therefore has low liquidity on them.
Shameless plug: defistats.io a good showcase of Covalent's API functionality, including integrated market-data, native ENS integration, querable transaction state, cryptocurrency logos, etc.
How to get started?
If you want to understand how Uniswap works and how the data is analyzed, our previous blog – Uniswap Traction Analysis – is a good primer.
There are many use-cases of our initial product launch:
For liquidity providers: check the aggregate and individual ROI for your various open and closed positions and see if it's worth contributing to Uniswap.
For DeFi vendors: liquidity and analytics on various exchanges to see if an integration makes sense. If your product uses a token, you can make sure you're providing enough liquidity for your community as poor liquidity often results in bad prices. For an exchange, bad price = bad experience.
For traders: plan your arbitrage and back-testing strategies.
For whale watchers and press: keep tabs on sudden liquidity or trade spikes. Certain tokens like MakerDAO's MKR are only available through decentralized exchanges like Uniswap.
Testimonials
Love from people who've seen an early version of defistats.io and have generously given us feedback:
“ Defistats has become one of my go-to tools for analyzing various metrics for the most popular DeFi apps on Ethereum. In particular, Defipulse's Uniswap data is the most complete I've come across as it provides real-time ranking of the more than 600 exchanges available on the platform.
Anthony Sassano, Marketing at Set Protocol and Co-Founder of EthHub
“ I'm honestly pretty psyched for defistats as this is exactly the service I've been wanting to have for so long. It provides me an easier and better way to test out better financial products and calculate ROI and for once gives me concrete evidence not only on what DeFi products I should be using but that I should actually be moving more of my assets to DeFi products.
Aaron Soskin, Founder at Govrn and Uniswap liquidity provider
Who's Covalent?
Covalent is building search and analytics for the blockchain. Forward-thinking businesses use Covalent's search index to delight their users with personalized and scalable blockchain data.