Analysis of @steemit Account Powerdown

The @steemit account is the largest single user account on the Steem blockchain with, until recently, over 70 million held as Steem Power. Two weeks ago this account started a power down, a process by which the Steem Power is converted to Liquid Steem over a period of 3 months. The first instalment of this power down was received one week ago.

In this study:

• I examine this recent power down through analysis of the related transfers, power ups, and delegations with the aim of illustrating where the money released has flowed to;
• I look further back into the use of funds from the @steemit account to draw up the full picture over a longer time period - as far back as the start of November 2017; and
• I then draw interpretations from the longer time period to determine whether this recent power down is likely to be a positive or a negative event for the Steem blockchain.

0 Summary of Findings

I start by presenting a high level summary of findings, extracted from the full analysis, for readers who have limited available time. The full details of the analysis are included in the later sections of this article.

This first diagram charts the flow of money from the @steemit account since 9 January 2018:

• All amounts shown are in thousands of Steem (so 5871k is 5.87 million Steem).
• Internal transfers are yellow, power-ups green, delegations blue and transfers to exchanges purple.

The @steemit account is powering down a 71.5m holding of Steem Power. The first instalment of 5.5m was released six days ago on 16 January and was transferred to the @steemit2 account (an additional 0.37m Steem was transferred a few days earlier).

3.5m of the 5.5m was powered up into Steem Power for the @misterdelegation account. This account has then made some very significant delegations to a number of the teams developing applications on the Steem blockchain: @dlive, @dmania, @dsound, and @busy.pay as well as a smaller delegation to the spam abuse team @spaminator.

1m of the 5.5m was passed to account @alpha and this amount appears to be slowly finding its way to the exchanges @bittrex, @poloniex and @blocktrades.

0.5m of the 5.5m was powered up into Steem Power for the account @steem which provides the delegation necessary to give new accounts power and bandwidth.

The remaining 0.5m remains held as Liquid Steem in the holdings of the @steemit2 account.

(It should be noted that the above analysis only shows the direction and amounts of flows on money. Since the @steemit2 account and @misterdelegation accounts already possessed smaller, yet significant, holding of Steem, it is not possible to conclude exactly which Steem were passed and which were retained by the accounts).

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This second diagram charts the flow of money over a longer period, since 1 November 2017, including the transactions for the power down illustrated above:

• All amounts shown are in thousands of Steem (so 11871k is 11.87 million Steem).
• Internal transfers are yellow, power-ups green, delegations blue and transfers to exchanges purple.

The overall pattern is not dissimilar.

The total delegations made since the start of November through @misterdelegation were 6.5m with 2.5m already made prior to the power down. These included 1m for each of @utopian-io and @dtube.

There total amount powered up into Steem Power for the account @steem was over 2m with 1.5m made prior to the power down.

A total of 2.9m was passed to exchanges through the account @alpha with a further 0.6m powered up into Steem Power for the account @blocktrades.

There was a huge transfer to the account @tostitos, a large proportion of which made its way to the exchange Bittrex. I have no further details on this account.

There were other small transfers, for example 50k to Utopian to assist with on boarding of new accounts.

(Again, it cannot be concluded that the 50k passed to Utopian was powered up or transferred. This analysis simply shows the direction of the flows of money).

Conclusions

The delegations made to Utopian at the start of November and to DTube at the start of December have been useful in helping to promote these platforms, both of which are now becoming very significant assets for the steem blockchain. The recent delegations to dlive, dmania, and dsound should, in my view, be considered in the same light: as an excellent investment in the future of the blockchain. Using 64% of the released funds in this manner should have a positive impact in helping the steem blockchain become the centre of decentralised content production.

The use of 9% of the funds to support the @steem account and the on-boarding of new accounts also seems a necessity and a positive impact for the growing blockchain.

The transfer of 18% of first tranche of released funds in the direction of the exchanges does not feel like a positive event, but neither is it clearly negative since it is unclear to what purpose the funds will be put. There will be a need for advertising and external funds once the SMT package is delivered. Without greater knowledge of the use of these funds any conclusion drawn here is in the realm of speculation.

As a final conclusion it would be interesting to understand how the other eleven payments are to be used if the power down is to continue. The above approach does not scale, since there are currently not enough platforms to support with such large delegations, and flooding the exchanges with large amounts of Steem on a weekly basis is likely to depress the Steem price.

As a final point, if you’re reading @ned, I’d be happy to accept some delegation from the next payment!!

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Outline

1. Summary of Findings and Conclusions (see above)
2. Scope of Analysis
3. Tools Used
4. Examination of the recent power down of the @steemit account
5. Examination of money flows over a longer period
6. Impact of recent delegations to Utopian and Dtube
7. Scripts

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1 Scope of Analysis

The analysis is based on the data for the @steemit account and other accounts that have received a flow of money from the recent power down. The data has been obtained through SQL queries of SteemSQL, a publicly available Microsoft SQL database containing all the Steem blockchain data.

Data on transfers and power ups was taken from the TxTransfers table. Data on delegations was obtained from the TxDelegateVestingShares table.

The data has been separated from the overall Steem blockchain data by use of an iterative process through which each recipient of funds was added to a list of accounts to be queried. This process continued until the terminal point for each flow was reached.

The first part of the analysis includes data on transfers, power ups and delegations from 9 January onwards. The second part of the analysis uses data from 1 November onwards. The data has been filtered by date using the timestamps in the respective tables.

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2 Tools Used

Valentina Studio, a free data management tool, was used to run the SQL queries. The raw data was then verified and analysed in the spreadsheet application of the LibreOffice office suite.

Graphs and charts were produced using Numbers, the Mac spreadsheet tool, or using RAWGraphs, an open source data visualisation framework.

SQL scripts are included at the end of this analysis.

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3 Examination of the recent power down of the @steemit account

Section included in Summary of Findings:

This first diagram charts the flow of money from the @steemit account since 9 January 2018:

• All amounts shown are in thousands of Steem (so 5871k is 5.87 million Steem).
• Internal transfers are yellow, power-ups green, delegations blue and transfers to exchanges purple

The @steemit account is powering down a 71.5m holding of Steem Power. The first instalment of 5.5m was released six days ago on 16 January and was transferred to the @steemit2 account (an additional 0.37m Steem was transferred a few days earlier).

3.5m of the 5.5m was powered up into Steem Power for the @misterdelegation account. This account has then made some very significant delegations to a number of the teams developing applications on the Steem blockchain: @dlive, @dmania, @dsound, and @busy.pay as well as a smaller delegation to the spam abuse team @spaminator.

1m of the 5.5m was passed to account @alpha and this amount appears to be slowly finding its way to the exchanges @bittrex, @poloniex and @blocktrades.

0.5m of the 5.5m was powered up into Steem Power for the account @steem which provides the delegation necessary to give new accounts power and bandwidth.

The remaining 0.5m remains held as Liquid Steem in the holdings of the @steemit2 account.

(It should be noted that the above analysis only shows the direction and amounts of flows on money. Since the @steemit2 account and @misterdelegation accounts already possessed smaller, yet significant, holding of Steem, it is not possible to conclude exactly which Steem were passed and which were retained by the accounts).

Additional points of note:

• One transfer of 600k Steem was made to @alpha within the last 24 hours, which may explain the discrepancy between the amount transferred to @alpha and the amounts transferred to the exchanges.

• The @misterdelegation account already holds some funds which explains the discrepancy between the 3.5m of power-up and the 4m of delegation.

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Examination of money flows over a longer period

Section included in Summary of Findings:

This second diagram charts the flow of money over a longer period, since 1 November 2017, including the transactions for the power down illustrated above:

• All amounts shown are in thousands of Steem (so 11871k is 11.87 million Steem).
• Internal transfers are yellow, power-ups green, delegations blue and transfers to exchanges purple.

The overall pattern is not dissimilar.

The total delegations made since the start of November through @misterdelegation were 6.5m with 2.5m already made prior to the power down. These included 1m for each of @utopian-io and @dtube.

There total amount powered up into Steem Power for the account @steem was over 2m with 1.5m made prior to the power down.

A total of 2.9m was passed to exchanges through the account @alpha with a further 0.6m powered up into Steem Power for the account @blocktrades.

There was a huge transfer to the account @tostitos, a large proportion of which made its way to the exchange Bittrex. I have no further details on this account.

There were other small transfers, for example 50k to Utopian to assist with on boarding of new accounts.

(Again, it cannot be concluded that the 50k passed to Utopian was powered up or transferred. This analysis simply shows the direction of the flows of money).

Additional points of note:

Some of the transfers to the @eeqj account passed through other accounts before ending up at eeqj. I have aggregated these transfers for the benefit of clarity.

The total delegations made by @misterdelegation (6.5m) exceed the amount powered up (3.5m). This will be due to funds passed to @misterdelegation prior to the start of November or obtained other than from the @steemit and @steemit2 accounts.

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5 Impact of recent delegations to Utopian and Dtube

It is impossible to separate the impact of the 1m Steem Power delegations from @misterdelegation to Utopian and Dtube from all the other variables and all the hard work that has contributed to the success of these platforms.

In particular it should be noted that Utopian has received many delegations, including those from @freedom and @ned which were of a similar size of larger than that from @misterdelegation. It is also important to note in the Dtube chart that the Steem price rose rapidly over December, causing an influx of interest in the steem blockchain in general.

All we can show is how both platforms have prospered after receiving the delegations, both at a faster pace than the overall Steem blockchain metrics.

For Dtube (seen above in the six month view) there was a clear and rapid rise in the number of videos, uploaders and payouts after the delegation was made.

As noted above it is difficult to separate the delegation element from the rising steem price or the significant improvements in the platform that were made around the same time. However the recent success of the platform is clear both in the chart above and from the trending page on steemit.

For Utopian (seen above in the three month view) the largest delegations, which totalled in excess of 3 million Steem Power, were all received around the end of October and the start of November. The above red line shows the date of that received from @misterdelegation.

Again it is difficult to separate the delegations element from all other variables, but the rapid rise of the platform is clear to see in the chart and also evident from any visit to steemit.

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6 Scripts

This was the script used to extract the transfers and power ups for the first two parts of the analysis; the examination of the recent power down and the longer period of study.

The list of account names was determined by use of an iterative process through which each recipient of funds was added to a list of accounts to be queried. This process continued until the terminal point for each flow was reached.

Not all of the accounts appear in the final summary. Some of the transfers were small, while others passed through a short chain of accounts and were summarised together for clarity.

SELECT
    TxTransfers.id,
    TxTransfers.type,
    TxTransfers.[FROM],
    TxTransfers.[TO],
    max(Convert(decimal(20,3), TxTransfers.amount)) as [Amount],
    TxTransfers.amount_symbol,
    TxTransfers.memo,
    TxTransfers.timestamp,
    max(COnvert(date, TxTransfers.timestamp)) as [Date],
    max(COnvert(date, TxTransfers.timestamp)) as [Time]

FROM
       TxTransfers (NOLOCK)

WHERE
    TxTransfers.[FROM] IN 
     ('steemit',
'steemit2',
'alpha',
'busy.pay',
'c75c39f25a90',
'c91c2dfbf2f5',
'fdcb934e6cce',
'misterdelegation',
'steem',
'tostitos',
'utopian-io',
'eeqj'
     ) AND
    Convert(date, TxTransfers.timestamp) >= '2017-11-01'

GROUP BY
    TxTransfers.id,
    TxTransfers.type,
    TxTransfers.[FROM],
    TxTransfers.[TO],
    TxTransfers.amount_symbol,
    TxTransfers.memo,
    TxTransfers.timestamp

ORDER BY
    TxTransfers.timestamp

A similar but simpler simpler script was used to obtain the delegations. The query used the same WHERE clause as the query above and referenced the TxDelegateVestingShares table rather than the TxTransfers table. No grouping or ordering was necessary in this second query.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading!

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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