On the User Base of Decentralized Exchanges

A graphical analysis of the traders that have been active on Ethereum based DEXes

Danning Sui, Johannes Pfeffer (editor), Alethio Data Science

The data that decentralized exchanges leave on the Ethereum chain is written history. The artifacts, log entries, transactions and contract messages, are there to stay.

Of course you can explore DEX trades on our monitoring platform (http://dex.watch/). But as always, there are many ways to look at a data set and we’re constantly exploring the possibilities. One interesting view on trading activities is the the co-currency/percentage matrix of traders. It counts all unique trading addresses that are active on the DEXes. We think it can provide useful insights on user distribution and movement between different platforms.

Unique Traders

Dex.watch is currently monitoring 17 DEXes. How many of the traders are solely active on one platform? How many use multiple DEXes? Below you can see a chart showing the number of addresses that were trading on 1 or more platforms. We collected the data on October 17 — on that day, our database contained 6,634,760 trades and 214,391 unique traders across 17 DEXes.

We further excluded 76,034 small traders who only had 2 or less than 2 trades in their history. The distribution of the rest of the traders in the dataset is below:

Fig 1 — Distribution of Traders Using Only 1 DEX, 2 DEXes or Multiple Platforms (excluding small traders with ≤ 2 trades)

The largest group of traders is trading on only 1 exchange. There also is a large portion of traders with orders across multiple exchanges. The reason for this could vary, ranging from arbitrage opportunities on price differences, trading preference or just experimenting the leverage of different mechanisms.

By arranging the DEXes in a matrix and counting the traders each pair of DEXes share, we get a type of heat-map of shared customers.