Waves is a DeCentralized Exchange. I was curious how many people were on the platform. I wanted to know the “real numbers” and so I did some digging. Since, Waves is on an open blockchain and the data is public, I thought it was good to dive into the numbers.
At first glance a lot of exchanges will claim to have a lot a members or accounts. While many times it is free or cheap to claim an account, these do no represent real people using the exchange on a regular basis. There is also a “fake it until, you make it” mentality in crypto. From the beginning, Waves had a series of unusual name registrations. I believe in the first week a computer was set up to register address and fake accounts from the beginning.
We know that both Facebook and Twitter have regularly deleted fake accounts. Even the Well's Fargo bank got in trouble for creating fake accounts. It is also well know that volume can be easily faked by with wash trading. (That is having a few accounts pass money back and forth on the exchange to create artificial volume.)
This is my first time doing analysis on Waves. So I may have a few things wrong. I have done similar analysis on BitShares, so I know what to look for.
First off, waves can LOOK like a great platform. One can say it has
A decentralized Exchange worth 236 Million dollars!
Over 236,000 accounts
Over 21,000 Different Crypto Coins.
This makes it sound great.
The the real numbers are more like…
6,608 customers who cared enough to register a Unique Name.
Most of the Crypto coins are worthless junk.
4,000 account that have a BTC balance of more that 0.01 ($35USD)
3,7000 accounts that have ever traded LTC,
1,500 Accounts with more than $1 USD
2,300 accounts that have every traded a Euro.
What are the exact numbers, well you be the judge.
Let’s take a look into the data
A note about the data, anytime you really want to get a look at what is going on it can be helpful to look at the data, and in as raw as a form as possible. One should sort it look at the highs and the lows, look for similarities, look for differences. Look at timestamps and names. When did the events happen. Most open blockchains have a blockchain explorer, I found one here and mainly used it. From there I took the data into a spreadsheet. I used a few tricks, formulas, separating columns of data help sort, clean and analyze the data. Most of this analysis can be done without all of the work, as a simple glance or basic subtraction, can tell you all you need to know.
How many accounts have an Alias?
http://dev.pywaves.org/aliases/
32,353 accounts.
Do these accounts names look computer generated?
Yes.
Numerous Aliases were registered within minutes of each other, with very similar names.
A quick glance through the data shows that more of the registrations are done via a computer… Here someone for the fun of it even input data into the name registration system.
http://dev.pywaves.org/aliases
/
6,608 Aliases Registered to Unique Addresses
25,744 repeated garbage Aliases…
80% garbage name registrations!
How many people join a day…
27 new name registrations a day in the first part of December.
12 a day in the last half of November.
When some days have 385, 398 or 1077 new names and the next day has 11, 5, 6, or 9 new names one can calculate the number of new people a day.
14 people a day (6,608/470 days) come to the exchange.
About 6,208 names were registered in the first week but only to 1,343 unique addresses.
So 78% were fake from the get go.
I think this tells us a lot about who is doing it and how high up and involved there were in doing so from the beginning.
OK What about Balances?
http://dev.pywaves.org/balances/
(I think this is total value of the account…?)
106,000+ accounts. (Think the webpage died.)
69,370 with a balance above 1 (wave?)
33,000 balance above 10
3,700 balance above 100.
746 balance above 10,000
Waves are worth $2.37 each at coin market cap.
The entire exchange is valued at $236 million.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/wav
es/
How many accounts have Waves?
Not Sure of this but links me here.
http://dev.pywaves.org/assets/6UfBupFwFnWTrnFDWiR73LQjPxRY38CgZ6Bu4m4SySQY
It says CC not sure if that is right address for waves.
236,618 Accounts contain assets
1,172 contain 2 or more coins.
Claims 1 to 8 million waves a day traded.
http://dev.pywaves.org/dexwaves/
If so that is 2 to 16 million dollars in daily Waves volume.
So how many of these are really real.
Good questions let’s look at more data.
How many coins?
21,547 created coins.
http://dev.pywaves.org/assets/
How many accounts with BitCoin in Them?
http://dev.pywaves.org/assets/8LQW8f7P5d5PZM7GtZEBgaqRPGSzS3DfPuiXrURJ4AJS
More than 114,000 (Page seems to freeze)
Almost all have a tiny amount.
2,767 BTC circulating supply
4,321 of the accounts have 0.01 BTC or more.
1300 accounts with 0.1 BTC or more
218 account with 1 BTC or more
480 Accounts with more than 0.01BTC and some amount of USD in them.
That is not so many accounts...
How many accounts have Litecoin?
http://dev.pywaves.org/assets/HZk1mbfuJpmxU1Fs4AX5MWLVYtctsNcg6e2C6VKqK8zk
3,718 total accounts.
1,427 with more than 0.10 litecoin
690 with more than 1 litecoin.
For all of these accounts it is not unusual for a tiny fraction to be left over in the account. This dust, or change is the result of trades. It is sort of like when you come back from traveling in foreign country and you find unspendable coins in your pocket.
Using USD in them?
$11,481,000 circulating supply of USD
6,366 accounts with a USD balance
1,585 with more than $1
787 with more than $10
871 accounts with 10 to 100,000 in USD balance.
786,786 balance of those accounts (with $10 to $100,000 in balance)
$903 average balance of accounts with 10 to 100,000 in balance.
775 accounts with a balance of 10 to 10,000
$148.9 average USD balance of accounts with balance $10 to $10,000
How active is this data? I pulled the same data 41 minutes later and compared.
29 accounts balances went up 14 went down. So about 43 changes.
$88 average value of account change in 41 minute window.
1 account a minute changes USD balances…
If there were to happen for 24 hours that is 1,440 people a day trading USD.
22 hours later there were 6,413 accounts with WUSD in them.
255 changed in 22 hours. (133 went down 75 went up, 47 new.)
280 a day changed balance… (adjusted for 24 hours in day.)
Growth of 47 new accounts with WUSD balance over 1 day.
The 47 new accounts had a balance of $24,000 with 75% of that money in three accounts.
Data source.
http://dev.pywaves.org/assets/Ft8X1v1LTa1ABafufpaCWyVj8KkaxUWE6xBhW6sNFJck
Using Euro’s
How many accounts hold Euros...
2,326 accounts with Euros
676 with more than 1 Euro
313 with more than 10 Euro
304 account with 10 to 10,000 Euro’s
502 Euro Average balance of accounts with 10 to 10,000 Euros.
Data source: http://dev.pywaves.org/assets/Gtb1WRznfchDnTh37ezoDTJ4wcoKaRsKqKjJjy7nm2zU
So how much is a customer really worth?
Well that depends how much money are you making off of them.
Facebook values each customer at $200 to $400 a piece.
(Of course this depends on when you count, what counts as a customer and market cap of Facebook. When you take 400 billion in market cap and divide by 1 billion customers)
If you value each customer at $400, and at 7,000 accounts that would be a total market cap of $20 million. (verses 236 million dollars)
Now if you say there are 236,000 accounts and value them at $400 each, you would then get a market cap of $94 million.
It appear to generating .2BTC a day in fees. (mining?) (That would be $255K a year in revenue.)
(I am not sure if that is mining fees or trading revenue…)
Volume...
We should be able to estimate revenues based on transaction fees and volume.
Looking at a couple of transactions it looks like transaction fees of both an market and taker are a total of 0.7%.
We have a volume Report here…
http://dev.pywaves.org/dexwaves/
These numbers come from the bottom of that report.
The price and Exchange Fees are my estimates.
Most volume reports double count transactions, -as compared to the real world so i would start by cutting these numbers in half.
It looks like that would be $60,000 a day in trading revenues.
In that case it would be revenues of 22 million a year.
I would take these numbers with a bucket of salt.
To cut through the smoke on the number of people on Waves has taken us 5 pages on analysis and various data points. I think volume numbers would likewise take another 5 pages of analysis.
Honestly, considering that 80% of all crypto trading is Fake and we have already identified that 80% to 97% of all accounts on Waves are fake (or inactives, one time use ect).
If we go with the $60,000 a day number and then assume that 80% is fake. We get about $12,000 in real daily generated volume.
Many of our customer estimates have been in the 5,000 to 10,000 active account range.
I am going to pick 10,000 out of the air and say that if there are 10,000 active accounts a day, each account daily is paying $1.20 in commissions. That would $438 a year in commissions per active account. This is a plausible number. However, taking the $120,000 volume number above with 10,000 accounts means $4,380 revenue per users. Seems way to expensive.
I did some analysis on BitShares. Here.
https://steemit.com/bts/@cryptick/why-bitshares-need-sustainable-pricing
Where at one point I estimated cost of running the exchange at $120 per customer per year.
Comparing to BitShares...
When I looked at BitShares. It has a market cap of $95 million now. It has 1.3 million accounts most of which are empty. It had 50,000 accounts with more than $1 of BTS. It had 33,000 active accounts in one month this summer. BTS has had between $6 to 12 million of BitUSD on the exchange spread between 9,171 accounts. Waves has 11 million USD spread across 3,700 accounts. BitShares has 9,850 accounts that have had OPEN.LTC a version of LiteCoin in them verses 3,700 Accounts on Waves that has had Litecoin in them. BitShares has about 4,735 coins verses Waves which has 20,000. (Note only ~200 BTS assets are active every day). These two decentralized exchanges are in the same ballpark.
Web Stats…
One can also look at other indicators to get an idea of traffic. It appears like Waves is very popular in Japan 28%, Brazil 9%, USA 8%, Russia 6%, Taiwan 4%. There is not much usages from China or Europe.
Map...
I have to admit I find this data is odd. Maybe the bots or coders are based in Japan and or Brazil. If four times the amount of traffic comes from Japan, than comes from America, why doesn’t Waves have a Japanese/yen based smart token pegged coin on the exchange? If we look at at the USA
We had 676 accounts with more than 1 Euro and 1,585 accounts with more than 1 WUSD. This ratio would imply that 4 Europeans for every 10 Americans. (This a believable ratio. IMHO) Yet, does web traffic reflect this? No. Maybe it is divided up between a bunch of small countries so it doesn’t show up.
So where does this leave us?
Well we wanted to know how many people were on the Waves Platform. What was actual usage. We know there is a lot of smoke and mirrors. All the data needs to be looked at carefully.
We may come back in a month and see how numbers change.
We do know there has been a campaign to inflate the numbers. There are also likely a large number of accounts that were used once and are now empty. There are not really active customers.
Looking at WUSD, EUR, BTC, and LTC. We get a feeling for the number of people who hold a balance of significance in the account.
These numbers (676, 1,585m 1,327, 4,321) fall in a low range.
Looking at new customers a day, that is possible in the 15 a day. (10 to 40).
Looking at named accounts with unique address. That is 6,600 accounts.
Looking at USD accounts that have any money (6,366).
Looking at LTC accounts with any balance (3,718).
So at the moment it looks like there are 6,000 to 10,000 active accounts.
We do have some data points that are pretty solid. Now we can actually go on and do some estimates with external data. I know that BitShares has 9,800 accounts with open LTC. It had 33,000 accounts “active in the last month”. That would be about three times the number.
If this same ratio holds. Waves has about 12,000 accounts active in the last month.
Looking at USD, BitShares has three times the number of accounts active than contain USD. So that would mean Waves has one third of the 33,000 accounts BitShares has active over the last month. That would be 11,000 accounts active.
We know that there were 47 new WUSD accounts in the last 24 hours. If that had gone of for the last 440 days that would be 20,680 accounts.
On BitShares there is 15,000 Bridge.LTC and 50,000 BRIDGE. BTC accounts.
If that ratio hold on Waves there should be 12,000 BTC accounts.
Bitshares also has 2,000 Open.LTC and 13,000 Open.BTC. If that ratio holds there should be 24,000 BTC accounts on Waves.
Many of these numbers seem to be falling in the same ballpark.
Now there are lots of different ways one can come up with numbers. You can make all sorts of estimates and guess. And one should do a lot of them. But then you start looking at which guesses seem to make sense. Where do low guesses end up, where do high guesses end up. While it is true every exchange is different. There are some things that seem reasonable in guessing. Asset popularity, should be similar. People should be the similar. Trends should spread in similar ways.
So when waves says there are a huge number of accounts (114,000 to 230,000) then I have to question if that makes sense. (I am skeptical.) We already proved from day one, they were registering fake accounts to make the name count alias registration numbers look better, and that was a huge portion of all the names registered, one could just as easily dump a little but of WBTC in each one of hundreds of thousands of accounts to make those numbers “look better.”
Did something like this take place, well I haven’t looked. I think it speaks volume the percentage of accounts that still have a BTC value of $1. So we have every right to be skeptical.
We are dealing with a lot of nonsense numbers. This stuff should be transparent. The number should be accurate. We should not need to second guess every number. But it has been proven we do. Some might take issue with some of my guesses and analytics. There is judgement needed. One also has to ask, what type of accuracy is reasonable? When there are claims of 200,000 Users, and it looks like the number is really 10 to 15% of that, that is very accurate. When you look at a numbers that is 20,000 or 30,000 it looks like a huge variation in numbers. It is not.
There are other ways one might look at these numbers. I am always open for more comparisons and better guesses on data. I do know there can be significant differences in the exchanges, and so that is part of the reason I look at the numbers so many different ways. It gives one the benefit of perspective.
Anyway... this went on way to long. And I wanted to share for others benefits.
Links…
Official list of tickers…
https://support.wavesplatform.com/en/knowledge-bases/2/articles/8141-the-list-of-all-assets-having-ticker-symbol
Data Explorer…
http://dev.pywaves.org/assets/Gtb1WRznfchDnTh37ezoDTJ4wcoKaRsKqKjJjy7nm2zU