New User Inflow on Terra Blockchain

Understanding the staggering growth of Anchor, and Mirror

This is based on my solution for the “New User Inflow” challenge of Flipside Crypto. I’ve answered it in two sections, where the first is focused on measuring new users for Terra as a whole, and doing the same for both Mirror and Anchor. The second section is focused on the adoption of whales for the new Mirror and Anchor protocols. I hope you learn as much as I did with this fun exercise!

1. Measuring Active Users

For our purposes, we’ll define a user as an address with a non-zero balance (whether staked or not). This means that the “join date” of a user is the first date where the address had a non-zero balance. Naturally, we can use Flipside’s `daily_balances` table for this.

To measure the “New Users” per date, we will count the distinct wallets that “joined” for each date. For clarity, a user is considered to be a “new user” for “2020–01–01” if the join date for the wallet is “2020–01–01”. We derive the join date for each wallet address by getting the earliest date with a positive balance (whether staked or not).

For users on Anchor and Mirror, we define a user as one who has made any transaction on the respective platforms. You’ll notice that new users for Anchor were noticeably high during the first few days, which indicates that much of the existing Terra community was jumping into the stable 20% yield value proposition.