Who uses DeFi, and how? Zerion behind the scenes.

Transcript

um i have extreme promo because i really wanted to do this in person but unfortunately coverage being south african not having a free pass meant that i was not able to come in person so we're going to be doing this virtually and i'm really glad that this is still happening i actually literally did just pack up my stuff but this is awesome i have prepared a presentation that's going to be looking into some of syrian's analytics and um obviously can't ask you guys to raise your hand of who here actually is in syria maybe you guys uh i mean you could log in and use the chat but that's okay so brief intro on xerian we are a d5 investing platform somebody might be familiar with us if

you've ever connected an ethereum wallet or checked an asset page or use it to do portfolio tracking or actual investing or one of the apps that we would use um i currently grow the efforts interior and i'm originally from south africa and i've been at the team for about a year and a half now so i'm super interested in digging into some of the analytics because i think that as d5 scales we have this question of well who's actually using d5 and how do we design the consumer products to make the investing experience a little less jargon filled and a little bit less complex than it currently is so with that being said i'm going to share my screen and we'll basically just get started i'll also try and keep this to around under 15 minutes so that we do have an

opportunity for a q a at the end yes yes give me a second to pull that up thanks okay here it goes this is mapping the d5

crowd um can you just give me a verbal indication if you can see this awesome awesome all right so i guess the first place to start is just to acknowledge that d5 has been exploding um if we look at this three main metrics that we often talk about we've seen like a 57 increase in the number of ethereum wallets um 12 month x volumes are up 489 percent and if you look at total value loft on a d5 pulse that is up 22 times and of course my personal favorite is that my grandmother is now sending me emails asking me things like what is an nft and what is total value loft i think for me that was the real sign that okay things are things are getting mainstream now

um but this also begs the question of are these metrics that we should be looking at and how helpful are they because we see these things shared a lot in media and social media and it's obviously something that protocols and dexers will look at the most because it makes the most sense to be focusing on volume but from the perspective of users and designers and builders we do have to question whether it's guiding us into building better product products and that's the question that i want you to keep back of mind as we go through this presentation because arguably these stats don't actually say much about who uses d5 right they don't tell us how people are using protocols in fact

you'll find there's actually very little correlation between things like the volume and number of traders and that's barring you know the obvious ones like uni swap when you get into some of the weeds of the stats it becomes a little bit more ambiguous and becomes more difficult to craft an actual narrative about the kind of people um and what their needs are and then of course that also does lead us into a situation of sometimes not having the best signaling of where we find information right so this goes down to user personas on the product side but also in terms of the narratives that we create about around who the d5 community actually is unless you're in a community yourself often there's just very bad signaling

and so we end up getting those signals from echo changes and places that perhaps aren't based on the actual data but are sometimes based on you know who is the loudest in the room or what gets the most mimified and what gets the most shared so in this presentation hopefully we're going to cut through some of that and look at the actual data of how people are using some of the most popular d5 products endearing obviously being one of them before i do that though it is obviously worth talking about how zirin handles data so as with most d5 products and protocols we're pretty strong in terms of how we feel about music privacy and data and i want to make it clear that any information that you are going to be

seeing on this presentation can largely be taken on chain or it's based on anonymized product analytics that help us create a better user experience but there are a couple of things that are worth mentioning here um the first is that you know we obviously are a zero kyc product so we wouldn't be collecting things like user emails involuntarily or as a requirement to use the product we also don't do any cross association of wallet data so if you yourself use zirin and say you have 10 wallets connected there is nothing on our back end that would enable us in the first place to even cross-associate those we wouldn't be able to match wallet a to a b c and d um that's information we just don't have access to and then we obviously don't

collect things like ip if you have an ad blocker that means you're also applying to your data and so forth and of course if you have any questions about that afterwards please do feel free to ask um but that is the gist of where this data is coming from and how that's been handled that being said um sirian is in a pretty good position to talk about how people are accessing d5 so we are one of the most widely used product products sorry for how people access this in terms of just their day-to-day investing up we serve users in 150 plus countries we have anywhere between 200 thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand monthly active users and we saw that number go up by about

276 percent and this is since july 2020 so looking at the last year um in terms of more detailed demographics given google analytics isn't always going to be the most accurate here because a lot of our users do use ad blockers but it's probably pretty representative to say that we have an 8020 gender split um six months ago that was 9010 so you know we're making progress and we have a median trade size of a thousand dollars and really do serve everyone from complete newbies who are creating a wallet for the first time on our platform to your degens and your whales you know who have a million dollars plus in their portfolio um and some of them are using it for just tracking others are using it for

actual investing as well because we do things like dfi aggregation and i suppose just to illustrate what that distribution actually looks like if you look at the wallet balances here and you might not all be able to see this because i noticed there was a pretty big screen up but you know we have a fair distribution from people who have less than a hundred dollars in their wallet um about 140k you have between a hundred dollars and a thousand and then going further down those buckets ten thousand one thousand to ten thousand dollars ten thousand to fifty thousand dollars and then above fifty thousand dollars um and this to be clear is also just data on every single wallet that has ever connected to zirin

so um that explains the numbers that you're seeing here same diversity is also seen in wanted providers um so this chart is also again looking at any wallet that is ever connected to zirin we have many people use our product purely for watching different addresses so you'll see that there's usually distinction between the wallets that you use for everyday trading we call that the my wallet section and then we have the watched wallet so people would use that just for whale watching or we've also seen use cases where people are using that to see active hacks that are going on unfortunately you have a history page that usually does pause things really easily but you have a pretty fair distribution um an unsurprising one as well we have met

most people using metamask quite a few using trust while they connect coinbase um and what you can't see is like i am token ledger and some of the other popular wallet providers so that's just a general overview of how people are using zirin but it's also interesting to look a little bit deeper into user personas um and to be clear these are based user personas there are probably so many different ways that you could categorize this uh the three buckets that we've chosen for this presentation are really just newbie explorer and pro but you can imagine you could delineate these along the lines of risk right so you could be looking at things like percentage of total d5 portfolio that is

expressed as debt you could be looking at uh things like how many social tokens does a person interact with and so forth and so forth but for the purposes of this i'm only mainly going to look at the just like main data points that we would use to categorize different user personas so for a newbie right this is someone who is either just starting out with d5 or crypto you'd see them having a personal wallet value lower than a thousand dollars average trade size is well less than 500 and they're probably interactive interacted with less than two protocols for an explorer this is kind of your in between where someone who's interacted with two to

three protocols um they might be failure fairly familiar with d5 and crypto they might even have more than one wallet but their total wallet balance is going to be anywhere between a thousand and ten thousand dollars and then finally your pro bucket which would be anyone who has a personal wallet balance above ten thousand dollars is trading on average above a thousand dollars a trade and has interacted with several protocols and you also tend to see them using some of the more you know quote-unquote advanced features right so looking at the actual history stats clicking on those different um balances and transactions and then perhaps even doing things like using our browser for exporting csvs and using that for tax purposes

so that's like the general definition and you do see these categories coming out pretty clearly when you actually look at say the last 90 days of how people have been using the app so if we look at just trade sizes alone under the newbie category you'd see a median trade size of around 80 so fairly low um but the 90th percentile there is still well under 500 and that's around 407 meaning that this is pretty much the highest uh bucket that you the highest trade size that you'd see in that bucket for explorers a median trade size of 340 and that's over the 90-day period 90th percentile of 2800 so we clearly have a much higher range here this is a much

larger proportion of users as well and then for pro median trade size of 2 000 with the 90th percentile at thirteen thousand five hundred um but you know obviously you could go into the 99 and that tends to be a lot higher as well uh we haven't created a separate category for whales so i'd imagine those numbers would also be very different there but all of this being said um this is how we would look at things like portfolio value and trade size what's also super interesting in terms of the data that we look at is just seeing how across these post owners you often see a very strong correlation with where the market is and the chart that you're looking at

right now is just general syrian activity with ethereum price and it is almost surprising how closely that is tracked so when i say activity this is really just any event on the app this could be something as simple as connecting a wallet it could be clicking on an asset page it could be placing a trade um just a generic you interacted with the app in some way and this is across the mobile ios android apps and the web apps itself interestingly if you zoom in around january you might see this spike in activity and that alone can be contributed to just one viral treat that elon musk happens to like so

we really do see strong correlation with the kind of activity on social media which itself is very market driven and i think that that is unlikely to change anytime soon but we also see this in way more detail so in this chart you're looking at the number of people that are sharing on asset pages so if you've ever gone on to an asset page on xerin you'll see that we have this tweet button and that too is very closely correlated with ethereum price movement this here is a smooth chart so this is anyone who is deciding to share an asset page this is sort of a generic tweet that we the the tweet template that you can share um and this probably also speaks to the fact that

prices in general and crypto are also very correlated um and you know so most prices tend to be correlated with the ethereum um and that's basically what's going on here because even if you're sharing for a different asset page usually is the case that it's you know on a bull run when ethereum is on a bull run and vice versa but this isn't always necessarily a good thing um one thing that really surprised our team recently was realizing that the average user on our mobile apps was opening it nine times a day and that seems insanely high but that is the average uh and that's looking at 150 000 users in total

across android and ios at the peak that was actually 15 times a day and so it's moments like these whereas a team you know we have to pause because these are numbers that are far higher than say social media we also get a lot of community members saying things like you know zirin is replacing checking instagram or twitter or facebook um that is probably dependent on the direction of the market um but that's the kind of feedback that we were hearing at least during some of the you know the highest frenzy say towards the beginning of the year and you can zoom out there's a lot more studies being done now around things like just general health and sanity checking and with with financial markets um you can go and find them there's

really one interesting one around btc price volatility and its correlation with stress and poor sleep so this is something that our team does actually spend a great deal of time thinking about because obviously we love designing beautiful apps we love designing things that people use that are useful to them you know bringing an aggregated seamless experience to what can sometimes be a very fragmented and complex space but we also want to do that in a way that is scalable and sustainable um because ultimately you know we don't want to just be repeating the mistakes of the traditional financial world so i kind of want to segue into this which and i'd love to actually bring in a q a here which is

just how do we build design and communicate a better g5 two things really stand out which is firstly catering to all user types and i think this is something that all apps including ourselves can do a lot better on and the next steps they are ready to combine quantitative and qualitative data so perhaps etc five next year maybe we can do that one in person as well and then also just having apps that respect our privacy and our sanity and i think the two rarely go hand in hand um so i'm gonna stop there i'd love to open this up if you have any questions um i'm sure you could just ask out loud or maybe there's someone that could

moderate that but that's essentially all from me and i'll leave the rest for the q a thank you uh

yeah that's a great question so to clarify um all the stats that we would give around daily active users or monthly active users are based on user ids right so this is not what it's right this isn't you know a couple a handful of people who each have 100 connected or anything like that when it comes to separating between the wallets or at least attempting to separate between the wallets and then match them to user ids that's something that we actually don't do um so as i mentioned if you're someone that does have 10 wallets on xerian we're not going to be able to say your wallet a is associated with your wallet b obviously that's data that you could

probably try and scrape on chain i mean anyone can do that um but we don't do that because that actually just doesn't really align with our privacy policy and this is something that we are thinking about because obviously as we scale there is the question of well sometimes it is also just very useful to have this kind of data um and i mean i'm very open to hearing ideas around that but at the moment it's not something that we even attempt to address we hope so too unfortunately it isn't there i mean we do get some really interesting questions though um one thing that i that i would share is like we recently had a user who said that he was using

different google profiles um because sometimes there's a lot of ambiguity and you can go and check our privacy policy it's a xeron dot io slash privacy.pdf um but you know a lot of people are sometimes paranoid that we are doing that association of wallets and so this person was using different google profiles on chrome and having different wallets on them but you know that's that's not a very good fix and it's not one that you necessarily need anyway thanks so much cheers

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