Reddit is responsible for 90% of activity on Arbitrum Nova since launch (and other analysis of the 1st three days)

Excellent work! You Moon-farming degenerates were responsible for over 90% of activity on the Arbitrum Nova network since its launch 3 days ago. Here are some data from the L2 network since launch.

Account and Transfer activity

The top 2 tokens with the most accounts are overwhelmingly Moons and Bricks (~250K accounts). You were responsible 98% of all holders and ~90% of all token transfers (over 270K) over the past 3 days. USDC and WETH were responsible for another 9% of token transfers, leaving the rest of the remaining ~20 unique tokens with only 1% of transfer activity.

That’s not too surprising since Tuesday’s token import was sent to all active Reddit Community Point (RCP) accounts.

Batch transactions for imports and minting

Due to high numbers of batch transactions, the Nova network has seen ~5x more token transfers than transactions. This was because much of the Moon and Brick token importing and minting were done as one-to-many batch transactions (similar to what UTXO networks keep boasting about). Here are 2 examples of blocks where tokens were batch-minted and sent to 100 different accounts per batch–each batch for a total transaction fee of $0.60 per 100 transfers, or 0.6 cents per transfer:

https://nova-explorer.arbitrum.io/block/19367/transactions https://nova-explorer.arbitrum.io/block/1688/transactions

I’m curious if there’s an upper limit to size for batch transactions and if they can be even more cost-efficient.

Transaction fees

Most individual transactions for Arbitrum Nova cost about 1-3 cents each (compared to 20 cents for Arbitrum One). Arbitrum Nova is special in that L2-to-L2 transfers don’t pay fees to the L1 network for aggregation costs. This is because Nova does not regularly post rollup updates to L1 and is thus able to avoid L1 aggregation fees. (You only post if there is fraud.)

Note that the average fee/Tx was noticeably higher than the median due to a few expensive batch transactions skewing the average cost upward, especially on Tuesday.

3-day activity

Here’s what activity on the network looked like for the past 10 days:

Note the massive spike on Tuesday (8/9) and Thursday (8/11). Tuesday was very expensive for importing RCP accounts, and Thursday was expensive for distribution to RCP accounts. I’m estimating that Reddit paid ~$1700 for importing to 252K RCP accounts and about ~$180 for the monthly distribution to 13.5K + 14.1K accounts. (Feel free to correct my math if it’s wrong)

Date Total Fees (USD) Total Tx Avg Fee / Tx 8/1/22 $0.02 16 $0.00 8/2/22 $0.42 36 $0.01 8/3/22 $0.29 36 $0.01 8/4/22 $11.68 66 $0.18 8/5/22 $1.29 22 $0.06 8/6/22 $0.14 4 $0.03 8/7/22 $1.64 16 $0.10 8/8/22 $2.52 37 $0.07 8/9/22 $2,579.39 5842 $0.44 8/10/22 $952.86 14840 $0.06 8/11/22 $1,592.65 21893 $0.07

Sources for all data are from Arbitrum Nova explorer’s website and API.