Exploring the tangle (part 4)
The tangle, one year later
It has been exactly one year since I wrote an article in which I did some exploratory analyses of the tangle. Among other things I looked at the number of value transactions and their average value. I also proposed a method to calculate the value of a bundle. If you haven’t read that article yet, I advise you to do so first because the rest of this article uses its definition of bundle value (all values except the largest output) to calculate the statistics.
Now that we’re a year on, I think it’s interesting to see how the use of the tangle has changed, especially for value transactions. I’ve identified all the bundles in which at least 1 iota is moved in a period of 2 weeks in December 2020 and compared them with exactly the same period in 2019. I only look at ‘clean’ transactions: transactions in which actual value is transferred to another address, having the (negative) sum of inputs equal to the sum of outputs, and have been confirmed. In the next article I want to zoom in on the value transactions that do not meet these conditions, but for now I will ignore them.
The period in question is from 29 November to 13 December (in 2019 and in 2020). There is no special reason to choose this period, other than that I have a complete dataset of good quality at my disposal for these two comparable periods (if someone has a good dataset over a longer period and wants to share I would like to know!). As far as I know there were no peculiarities on the tangle in these time windows.
Fewer transactions …
In the first weeks of December 2019, the value of iota then fluctuated between $ 0.19 and $ 0.22, there were an average of 1496 value transactions per day. In the same period of 2020, at a value between $0.26 and $0.36, there were fewer value transactions, averaging 1202 per day. If we only look at this parameter, we might get the impression that economic activity on the tangle has decreased.
… but much more value
But what is striking is that in 2020, only 17% of bundles represents a simple transfer from a single address to a single other address. In 2019, this was 88%. In other words, a year ago, most value transactions were of a type where the full value was simply transferred to another address. In theory, this could also be a transfer to another address belonging to the same seed, i.e. the same owner. Now, in 2020, the vast majority of value transactions are of a type where part of the value is split off from the principal. With this type of transaction it is more likely that there is an actual financial value or economic activity in return. This could be a withdrawal from an exchange, but also the purchase of a good or service. This is therefore a strong signal that the economic activity on the tangle has strongly increased.
A total of 7.8 Ti per day was transferred in the period under review in 2020, compared to 485 Gi in the same period a year earlier. That is an increase of 1500%. The average transaction value rose to 6.5 Gi, 1895% more than the 324 Mi of 2019.
All in all, we can say that in one year a lot has changed. The amount of value that has been transferred on the tangle has significantly increased. Still the amount of value transactions is relatively small, compared to the number of zero-value transactions. Much more can be said about all types of value transactions, so more articles will follow.
Questions or suggestions? Feel free to drop them in the comments!
