Executive Summary
This case study explores the behavior of Hegic liquidity miners, by using Nansen dashboards.
The post is primarily intended to show how you can use Nansen for on-chain analysis with a real-world example. However, we did make a few discoveries along the way; notably whales recently exiting the Hegic liquidity mining program.
Links to dashboards are included throughout the text.
Disclaimer: This is no by means a full analysis of Hegic - the entire analysis was done in around 1 hour.
Background
Hegic is a decentralized options trading platform. Currently, a liquidity mining program gives liquidity providers (LPs) rHEGIC tokens in return for providing WBTC and ETH to Hegic.
Here we'll show how to use Nansen to derive insights on Hegic liquidity mining.
In particular:
- who's participating?
- what are they doing with their tokens?
Why would we want to study these questions? Because it shows how other major players are interacting with Hegic, which has a direct impact on price and yields.
Nansen Dashboards for Hegic Liquidity Mining
If you just want to dive in yourself right away, here's a list of useful dashboards:
- Token God Mode (TGM): writeETH
- TGM: writeWBTC
- TGM: rHEGIC
- Who's staking writeETH? [Depositors; linked from Balances in TGM]
- Who's staking writeWBTC? [Depositors; linked from Balances in TGM]
- Who's claiming rHEGIC from writeETH staking? [Recipients; linked from Balances in TGM]
- Who's claiming rHEGIC from writeWBTC staking? [Recipients; linked from Balances in TGM]
- What's the #1 rHEGIC farmer doing with their tokens? [Profiler; linked from Recipients]
- How much writeETH has been staked historically? [Profiler; linked from TGM]
Below we'll show you one way to use these dashboards in practice, with findings from the time of writing this (Dec 17, 2020).
From Macro View to #1 rHEGIC Farmer
Let's start high level, by looking at Token God Mode for writeETH.
Skip the first section "Tokens on Exchanges" since this is not a token that people trade on exchanges, and go right to "Notable Wallets and Transactions".
First observation here: all the 8 largest writeETH transactions are whales un-staking their writeETH! Perhaps not a great sign for staking?
We can drill down on the ETH Staking Rewards contract via Wallet Profiler, and we see that its balance peaked on Dec 8th:
The latest transactions also shows some of the individual whales un-staking:
The anthonygossage.eth* wallet un-staked while I was writing this, so here's another snapshot from Token God Mode:
So who's staking writeETH right now? We can click the "Depositors" link to the very right in Token God Mode Balances to go to the Top Depositors for ETH Staking Rewards:
The whole first page of depositors looks like this:
Next page shows some other interesting addresses, including one of the first YFI farmers:
For any of these addresses, we can dive deeper - running Wallet Profilers on them. Clicking the "Address" link in the Profiler column for the #1 farmer lets you see their individual transactions for writeETH, plus counterparties:
We see that the #1 Hegic ETH farmer has mostly deposited into the staking contract, but on Nov 22nd, they withdrew 2M writeETH tokens. However, these were deposited back into the contract 3 mins later.
So what about their farmed rHEGIC tokens?
Quick tip here - just update the token symbol at the end of the URL from:
to
Here's what the rHEGIC Wallet Profiler for our #1 farmer shows:
Elite Dex Trader means they're in the top 1% on both volume and frequency (number of trades) when it comes to Dex trading.
The balance chart shows they've made two big rHEGIC claims, and then gradually dumped them in batches of 50-100k.
The detailed view confirms that Uniswap is the destination where tokens are sold:
Is this common behavior for other wallets?
Let's back up a few levels and switch to the macro view for rHEGIC via Token God Mode:
In the above view, we've sorted descending by "Received". This lets us surface the addresses that have received lots of rHEGIC tokens. And by looking at the "Balance" column, we can easily spot those that no longer hold these tokens (Balance = 0). The address we looked at actually does hold rHEGIC tokens! But less than what they've received in total.
Let's drill down on another Elite Dex Trader - this one with 0 in balance:
Turns out this is a frontrunning bot that has been doing sandwich attacks on other Dex traders.
But we're mostly interested in liquidity mining, so let's instead click through on "Recipients" (to the right in the balances table) from Token God Mode, looking at ETH Staking Rewards:
The #1 rHEGIC claimer from ETH has claimed >3x more than the next on the list.
Let's look at what they're doing with their rHEGIC tokens by clicking on Profiler:
We recognize this as the same #1 staker above. So we've gone full circle.
Let's look at #2 and #3 farmers as well, to see if they've also been selling, starting with #2:
1 simple claim - and no selling.
Let's look at #3:
Some selling (all of the outgoing transactions went to Uniswap), but mostly they're holding their rHEGIC tokens.
We could continue going down this rabbit hole forever, but let's wrap up by re-iterating some of what you can do with Nansen to better understand on-chain activity:
- Spot large token movements → whales un-staking
- Drill down on a specific holder → ETH rewards contract
- Review top depositors → largest writeETH LPs
- Drill down on specific depositors → #1 farmer
- Discover what exactly an address is doing with a token → Wallet Profiler
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