The spike on the chart spans over 5 days, from July 26 to July 30. At the peak — on July 27, there were 6,474 new CDPs opened. The activities went down gradually after 2 days and increased the accumulated CDP id from ~19,000 up to ~40,000 now (by July 31 st).

This activity is very unusual considering that in the prior months, the number of CDPs opened per day ranged between 20 and 30, and the number of distinct addresses that were opening them ranged between 10 and 20. As for the amounts deposited in collateral — they were almost always in the thousands, with the average collateral deposit per CDP being in the tens or hundreds of ETH.

In the 5 days mentioned above, these changed by quite a large margin.

Fig 2 — Stats for the CDPs opened between 26 & 30 July

We can see a huge increase in the number of CDPs opened by a number of addresses that is not proportional to historical activity. However, the total and average collateral values deposited when opening these CDPs did the opposite — it dropped.

Fig 3 — CDPs Opened (x axis), Number of distinct users (y axis) and Collateral amount (bubble size) — for days in the past 2 months.

We can better observe the pattern breaking in the gif above. Large amounts of collateral and small numbers of CDPs and users for the baseline behavior — transitioning into small amounts of collateral and large numbers of CDPs and users in the past week.

The data on MakerDAO’s portal also shows that in the last week of July, there were over 22,000 CDPs opened. Given that the latest CDP id is 40,302 — we can see that the total number of CDPs more than doubled.

With a further look into the distribution of CDP activities, we noticed that there’s barely depositing nor borrowing actions on those newly created CDPs: in the chart below, it shows that after CDP id 19,407 — both the deposited ETH and borrowed DAI amount are nearly 0 for all the new CDPs created after.