Stellar Submissions: Near - Analytics: Comparing Top Projects

Stellar Submissions is a series of articles by MetricsDAO wherein we highlight bounty submission best practices by showcasing the grand prize winners of our bounty programs. Our goal with this is to sharpen the skills of on-chain analysts, raise the overall quality of bounty submissions, and share the unique insights uncovered by our stellar analyst community.

In this edition of Stellar Submissions, we will highlight the first place winner of our NEAR Analytics bounty where we compare the top projects in NEAR’s ecosystem.

Key Takeaways on Best Practices:

1.  Go above and beyond

Bounty submissions can take a lot of effort. It takes full comprehension of the topic at hand so it is understandable to just conclude the analysis once the main requirements have been fulfilled. However, it is definitely great to give a full picture by exploring other questions or topics in the periphery. Going deeper, even just by a bit, can go a long way.

2. Make it timeless

The usage of filters and parameters like time-based ones can make a dashboard usable for a long period of time. It allows the audience to go deeper into the analysis, and explore trends in the past and connect the dots to future data as they come in. The commentary for the moment might be outdated but the dashboard can still stand the test of time.

3. Follow a structure

Have an intro, main body, and conclusion in your analysis. Set the tone and context in your intro, go deep in the main body of the analysis, and wrap everything together in the conclusion. This gives the audience a good flow to follow when reading your analysis which makes things easier to understand.

First Place Winner

Analysis: Comparing Jumbo Exchange and Ref Finance

Author: Adria Parcerisas

The ask for this bounty is relatively straightforward: compare a couple of projects built on NEAR using at least two metrics. That did not mean our analysts just mailed it in for this bounty as a lot of them went above and beyond, perhaps none more so than stellar analyst Adria when he compared Jumbo Exchange and Ref Finance.

Adria starts off by giving an introduction to the projects he is analyzing, describing Jumbo as “an AMM DEX that offers a cheap, seamless, and unfettered way for anyone to trade on” and Ref Finance as an important DeFi platform in NEAR with a general DEX and a stablecoin swapping venue as its main products.

In the next part, he lays out the metrics he wants to focus on, which is where we see the first thing that makes his analysis stand out. Instead of going with just the two metrics asked, he goes above and beyond to enumerate five in order to give a complete picture. In fact if you want to get technical about it, one of them is a general metrics bucket so there are actually more than five.

As we dive into the metrics in the next section, another thing you will notice is Adria provided time period and granularity controls. This not only provides a way for the audience to interact with his dashboard but also allows it to have more longevity and flexibility. Let’s explore.

When speaking about the transaction metrics, Adria says that Jumbo’s daily transactions have ranged from 100 to 400 during the period of the analysis (~Nov. 19, 2022), showing a downward trend. Using the time filter he provided, we are able to strengthen this finding as we can see how far this has fallen from its peak of 2,420 back in September 29 and how since the start of December 2022 the number of transactions have not gone above 100.

Ref Finance is in a much better place transaction-wise having 10x more on a daily basis than Jumbo, although you can also see how it is far from its 3 month high.

Zooming out, the peak of 1M+ transactions on Ref Finance on August 20-21 seems like a long way away now.

As for the fees generated on each platform, while there might be too much noise on a daily basis to see any specific trend, using the weekly view, we can see how this has been decreasing over time. This decreasing trend is much more apparent with Jumbo Exchange compared to Ref Finance.

The last and perhaps most underrated component in any analysis is following a simple structure of having an intro, main body, and conclusion. Adria concludes with a summary of his findings to wrap everything together. First is that Ref Finance has maintained a higher and more stable level of transactions compared to Jumbo Exchange. In terms of fees, Ref Finance has had higher total fees overall but on a per transaction basis, Jumbo’s fees are higher.

The final point to note is on transaction success rates. Both are doing sub-optimally, but Ref Finance is doing much worse compared to Jumbo Exchange.

There are also other metrics such as user, transfers, and token metrics that readers can explore. Thanks to the dashboard’s time granularity and period toggles, we can see if these findings are still relevant or if they have changed in any way. We might even discover new findings once this dashboard is revisited in the future.

Overall, Adria has provided a way to compare two important NEAR projects in two ways. First  by sharing his timely analysis when this dashboard was first submitted and second by building in enough flexibility via the time toggles to further push the useful life of the dashboard down the line.

Check out the currently active bounty programs by MetricsDAO here and stay tuned for the next set of Stellar Submissions!

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