This summer the DexGuru trading terminal processed over one billion dollars in total volume - let's break it down.
At DexGuru, our mission is to provide the best on-chain analytics for traders in a digestible and beneficial way. There are a few ways to quantify our success as a trading terminal, whether by paired wallets, indexed AMMs or accessible chains. For the sake of this article, we will focus on total transaction volume. Although a small subset of traders may use DexGuru analytics and perform their swaps elsewhere, we believe that most terminal users use DexGuru to its max capacity and enjoy the ease of the swap tool routed through the 1inch 0x protocol. Ultimately, this long-winded intro about quantifying success is our way of saying we have passed one billion dollars in total volume!
With our heads down building, we passed the one billion dollars in total volume benchmark this summer. One billion dollars sounds like a great accomplishment, but let’s try and understand how much it is. One way to conceptualize the hefty billion is by using time as a reference - one second is short, one million seconds is 12 days, and one billion seconds is over 31.5 years! With half a lifetime of transaction volume, we are continuously thinking about what is next for DexGuru.
Billion Dollar Breakdown
Being a hub for on-chain data, it would be a disservice to discuss our accomplishments without a data breakdown.
Let’s first look at where DexGuru users made the most transactions. The treemap below shows that a whopping 62.08% of total transactions were routed through Pancakeswap AMMs on BSC, with the Polygon native Quickswap coming in at number two with 14.38% of transactions. Further down, we see Spookyswap on Fantom along with Uniswap v2 and v3, each occupying over 3% of transactions. It looks like DexGuru traders love swapping on Binance Smart Chain!
To no surprise, Binance Smart Chain also occupies the largest share of DexGuru volume after looking at the transaction data.
However, BSC dominates transaction volume significantly less than expected. There are a few conclusions that can be drawn from this data. The first is that chains like Polygon and Ethereum have more DEX diversity compared to BSC, where most transactions are executed on Pancakeswap. Another interesting fact is that Ethereum and Polygon each have a much larger average trade size than BSC, as shown below. In the case of Ethereum, this is not surprising due to the high gas fees at specific points during the latest bull market. Logically, traders will need to have more significant positions to avoid transaction fees eating into their positions.
Continuing to dive into the data, we can see the most popular tokens purchased on each chain. Avalanche has a wide distribution compared to other chains, but WAVAX takes the cake with 21% of the total volume without surprise. On BSC, BUSD and WBNB dominate the market, each at around 26% of the volume. Celo has less trade diversity, with CELO and cUSD accounting for 87% of total trades combined. Ethereum is well divided with USDC, WETH and “other,” each occupying large volume shares. In this case, “other” refers to tokens not in the top 10 in trade volume, showing the diversity of trades on the Ethereum mainnet. For Fantom, Optimism and Polygon, USDC conquers the volume charts showing the importance of stablecoins to traders in DeFi.
Just the Beginning
Although the billion-dollar benchmark is a great success, we are sufficiently humble when comparing ourselves to other DeFi projects. The most popular DEX in the world and DEX on DexGuru is Uniswap - which has a whopping 1.1 trillion dollars in lifetime volume. Sushiswap, another DeFi staple, is sitting at 226 billion dollars in volume. These protocols aren’t competition for DexGuru but are an inspiration for scaling in DeFi; ultimately, we are building a trading terminal for ALL DeFi users to benefit from. The next steps on our journey to 100 billion in volume are big ones. We’ll continue to add AMMs and EVM-compatible chains to the terminal for trading and offer more on-chain data in a digestible way for traders. In one way or another, everyone can benefit from more data, and DexGuru will provide it!
