I don’t know where else to ask this question, so I’m asking here.
Recently there was a post on r/cardano that shows Cardano transacts more value in 24 hrs than Ethereum. Here’s a link to the post.
The post is basically just a screenshot of this messari.io page.
I’ve seen quite a few criticisms about this stat, mostly stating that utxos somehow inflate the transaction amounts, and/or something about the sending wallet amount being included in the amount. I looked at a few of the transactions I’ve made over the years, and I am able to see the “sent” utxo and the “return” utxo, so clearly there is a way to distinguish.
So, I’m inclined to believe messari got it right. But, I’ve tried to verify this by looking at all of the different blockchain explorers to see what transaction value stats they have, and none of them seem to be reporting that data. If this data is simple to derive, why isn’t it more readily available? Is there a way to verify messari’s data? Is there a way to see this info on any blockchain explorer? I think this transaction value metric is very interesting and as the Cardano ecosystem grows, this will be a metric that can/will be used to compare and distinguish Cardano from other blockchains. I think it’s important that we get this metric right.
Yes. There are many site that aggregate Cardano block data. Here is one I use on occasion.
As for those stats from Messari, I am not sure what the data actually represents. The term "Transaction Volume 24h, USD) could mean many things. Maybe it counts full Epochs or just blocks. Maybe it counts all Tx including UTxO change plus staking rewards, maybe not. There is no explanation on that site. Can’t really check something when there is no explanation on what it is in the first place.
If you check the Epoch data on the site above you will see total transaction amounts from 2 billion to 100 billion per Epoch. Each Epoch is 5 days, so that gives average 24h transaction range of 400 Million to 20 Billion ADA per 24h.
Awesome! Yes, I figured there must be some blockchain explorers keeping track of this. I’ll still need to see if I can verify that the Tx amount does not include the “return” utxo. But this puts me way ahead of where I was. So thank you for that.
I did some spot auditing of adastat looking at random transactions, and it appears that they always only use the actual transaction amount for their statistical data. No wallet totals or return utxos are included in their totals.
Also, from 10/2 - 11/1 the Cardano blockchain transacted, on average, 1.35B ada per day. With an average cost of roughly $2 for the month of October, that gives us an average daily transaction value/volume of roughly 2.7B ada per day for the month of October. That’s 4 - 5 times LESS volume than what messari is reporting.
Well, it’s not exactly good news, but I’ll take honest statistics any time over inflated stats.
