You woke up to learn that you can free claim at least 2000$ worth of coins. What is the wise move? Should you sell or hold? maybe even buy some to own more? Eventually your move depends upon what others do with their free claims.
I’ve analysed blockchain data to gather insight on behaviour of UNI stakeholders.
UNI Stakeholders
The chart above is an Euler illustration of 3 different groups of UNI stakeholders; free claimers, buyers and sellers. The size of bubbles represent the number of unique addresses corresponding to each stakeholder group and their intersecting sub groups. The study covers a 7 day time slot between 09/17/2020 00:00 UTC(time of launch) and 09/23/2020 00:00 UTC and covers all of the 3 UNI pools on Uniswap with positive volume (ETH-UNI, USDT-UNI, USDC-UNI). All addresses who at least once sold, bought and/or free claimed UNI within this time frame makes their place in this study.
I will name each subgroup for sake of making sense of them:
F = Free Claimers
B = Buyers
S = Sellers
F — BS = Hodlers (only free claimed, haven’t sold or bought)
B — FS = Speculators (only bought, haven’t sold, not a historical user)
S — FB = Farm&Dumpers and Temporary Router Addresses (this minority group may appear counterintuitive at first. How can an address sell a token, if it didn’t free claim or buy it? These are mainly addresses who received UNI from another address only to sell it as well as eager farmers who dumped their very first yields)
FS — FBS = Rationals (free claimed and sold, never bought)
FB — FBS = All inners (free claimed, bought and never sold)
BS — FBS = Traders (not a historical user, only buys and sells)
FBS = Degens 🙋🏻♂
Key Takeaways/Remarks
-> Looking at the chart one may immediately notice that the value created originated from a relatively small group of buyers. This group collectively bought 85.2 M UNI Tokens. Assuming a weighted average price of 5$ UNI this translates into an inflow of capital worth 426,000,000$ within a single week
-> Furthermore, on chain analysis shows that while %37 of free claimer addresses sold at least some portion of their UNI tokens, %57 never sold a single dime and still holding tight to their free claimed coins
-> Degens make up %5 (9.5k addresses) of the total UNI shareholder pie
-> Trader group, the group who only sold and bought UNI is remarkably very tiny. I assume most of this group is active in CEXs
-> The first liquidity provider created UNI-ETH pool providing 1 ETH and 100 UNI liquidity, signaling an intitial price of 3.8$ per UNI (ETH was 380$ at the time). In retrospect we can say that this was a pretty good price determination resulting in little impermenant loss thus far
I believe in future Uniswap liquidity providers may earn UNI rewards instead of txn fees and txn fees can gradually fund the project team. In any case, the team has managed to create an enormous value and they will do their best to use it for the best of the ecosystem. UNI will be at forefront shaping the future of governance tokens.
Bonus: if you want to calculate your ROI as liquidity provider on Uniswap taking into account impermenant loss and txn fees, check out poolroi.xyz
