One of the most important features of a permissionless DLT is that every transaction is transparent to everyone. One might expect that this would make it easy to see who is doing what on the Tangle and how the network usage is developing. Nevertheless little is known about how iota’s Tangle is actually used. We know the number of transactions per second, how many of them are confirmed and how many have (nonzero) value. Check iotaprices.com for an up-to-date overview of those basic stats. Thanks to thetangle.org we can also view the inputs and outputs of any transaction or address. But that’s about it. Since I would like to know more about the real usage of the tangle, I delved into the data. What I am particularly curious about is what we can say about the users of the network. Can we distinguish between hodlers, speculators, developers and other economic actors? Is it possible to identify the flows to and from exchanges? Would it even be possible to say something about the number of users or the number of active services/applications?

Exchanges and value transactions

For the first analysis in what might become a series I started by exploring (chains of) value transactions. And because they always start (and usually end) at an exchange, I tried to specifically identify the activities of the exchanges. My assumption is as follows: a large exchange makes a bundle of transactions several times a day (probably even several times an hour). These bundles often contain a large input, an output in the same order of magnitude, and in addition one or more smaller transactions (collecting the deposits and disbursing the withdrawals). The largest output of such a bundle is in turn the largest input of the next bundle. With these principles it seems indeed possible to identify a number of series, at least as far as the withdrawals are concerned.