# Intro to NFTs
NFTs were “THE” breakout use-case for crypto ecosystem in 2021 with marketplaces popping up on every blockchain. Almost all of the “normies” were talking about NFTs with the sales of some of the most popular projects making headlines regularly.
# Popular Marketplaces
OpenSea on Ethereum and Magic Eden on Solana are currently the top marketplaces by users and volume. OpenSea has had daily sales volumes as high as $200M while Magic Eden managed to reach $6M. For comparison, Random Earth on Terra was doing less than $1M daily at its peak.
To get a sense of scale of the volume of NFT sales, Bored Ape Yacht Club has been in the news for many reasons recently and its popularity shows with more than $500M in sales in 2022 (until April). Mutant Ape Yacht Club is not far behind at $400M sales.
# What is Stargaze?
Stargaze is a fully decentralized NFT marketplace in the Cosmos ecosystem launched on Oct 29, 2021. True to Cosmos ethos, it’s also an L1 blockchain with a specific purpose.
$STARS
Sources:
1. https://medium.com/citadel-one/stargaze-overview-4059644836e7
2. https://mirror.xyz/stargazezone.eth/h9Bc7jODUrYB1Jw4mve3QEGVkBwBsyVebN6NP7tRl_Y
STARS is both the native staking token and governance token of Stargaze. Some of the use cases for STARS include:
- Fees for processing transactions and storing data
- Running validator nodes on the network via staking STARS tokens
- Voting in governance for protocol upgrades and parameter changes
- Voting in the DAO to curate NFTs and fund creators Mint and bid on NFTs
Stargaze aims to be a decentralized NFT market, totally owned and governed by its users. Therefore, the distribution of STARS’ first round of token supply was “fair-dropped” to early ATOM and OSMO stakers, who are also Stargaze’s validators and delegators on Cosmos and Osmosis. Stargaze started off decentralized on day one with a genesis supply that distributes the majority of the tokens to community members.
The distribution of STARS is designed to front-load inflation in order to bootstrap the network. This is a similar issuance schedule to Bitcoin. However, instead of halvings, issuance will be cut by 1/3 each year (by multiplying the current issuance by a reduction factor of 2/3). Osmosis was the first protocol to use a “thirding” token release schedule and heavily inspired Stargaze’s design.
Stargaze will start with an initial supply of 1 billion STARS. An additional 1 billion STARS will be issued the first year. With this “thirding” schedule, the issuance for the following year will be ~667M STARS. This infinite sequence is a geometric series which leads to a fixed asymptotic max supply of 4 billion STARS.
After 5 years, the initial distribution is only 27.6% of the entire token supply. This issuance schedule allows Stargaze to grow and adapt its ownership to new creators, curators, validators, delegators, and other stakeholders.
# STARS Analysis
New projects drop on the launchpad every Friday around 4:00 PM EST. Let’s see if this has any impact on the swaps involving the STARS token because STARS being the native token is required to mint.
Swaps From
Over time, we’re seeing the daily number of swaps FROM STARS have reduced while the amount of STARS swapped has remained around the same with peaks on Fridays i.e. mint days.
Swaps To
The number and amount of swaps to STARS has increased recently with most of the peaks around Fridays i.e. mint days.
Swaps From vs Swaps To
We can compare the number of swaps from vs to directly and see that the swaps from have increased massively while the swaps to have not increased as rapidly. Overall, there have been around ~142K swaps from and ~37K swaps to.
Comparing the amount of STARS swapped there have been 140M swaps from while around 40M STARS swapped to.
## Swaps by day and time
Now let’s use a heatmap to assess what days and times are the most popular. In these charts, the lighter color represents a higher number while darker color is a lower number.
Number of Swaps From
The number of swaps from seem to take off after 5pm UTC. The three hours between 5–8pm seem to be the most popular on all days.
Number of Swaps To
Similar to swaps from, the hours after 5pm UTC are the most popular but not on all days. We can see that Friday around 6–8pm UTC is the most popular times. Generally, the hours after 5pm UTC tend to be most popular.
Amount of STARS swapped from
The amount of STARS swapped from is also spread out across multiple times in the week. The most popular time seems to be 3pm UTC on Wed. Friday 7pm UTC also is a popular time.
Amount of STARS swapped to
For the amount of STARS being swapped to the popular times are all spread out. We can see that Friday around 9am UTC is the most popular time which is around 2pm EST i.e. just a few hours before the mint launch.
# Conclusion
- Stargaze is attempting to be “the” NFT marketplace of the Cosmos ecosystem.
- With a community focused launch, the STARS token does away with a lot of “insiders/VC-owned” claims levied against other tokens.
- Overall, more users are trading out of STARS than trading into.
- While the number of STARS swapped from and to are most popular after 5pm UTC, the amount of STARS swapped is spread out throughout the rest of the week.
# Appendix
The SQL queries used for this analysis can be found here — 1, 2, 3, 4
