SideShift.ai Weekly Report | 15th - 21st October 2024

Welcome to the one hundred and twenty seventh edition of the weekly stats report - your one-stop shop for all things SideShift.ai.

This past week, SideShift token (XAI) experienced gradual and steady upwards movement, climbing from a low of $0.1188 and peaking at $0.1259 over the 7-day period. At the time of writing, XAI is priced at $0.1238, with a current market cap of $17,364,118, reflecting a +4.47% increase from last week.

XAI stakers were rewarded with an average APY of 10.92% throughout the week, with a daily rewards high of 51,745.8 XAI (an APY of 16.15%) being distributed directly to the staking vault on October 16, 2024, following a daily volume of $2.7m. This week, XAI stakers received a total of 248,945.23 XAI or $30,819.42 USD in staking rewards.

An additional 4 WBTC were added to SideShift’s treasury this past week, bringing the current total to a value of $15.96m. Users are encouraged to follow along directly with live staking updates, via sideshift.ai/treasury. 

Additional XAI Updates:

Total Value Staked: 125,789,626 XAI (+0.3%)
Total Value Locked: $15,811,894 (+5.2%)

General Business News

This past week saw a notable rise in the crypto market, with BTC climbing toward the $70k mark before facing a minor pullback to $67k (-2.1%). ETH followed a similar trajectory, making a strong upward move before settling at $2.6k (-3.2%). Despite these brief corrections, institutional interest remained a driving force, as CME Bitcoin futures open interest surged to an all-time high, reinforcing confidence in BTC. Meanwhile, the recent AI meta has taken center stage, with several AI coins emerging unexpectedly and delivering substantial gains throughout the week.

SideShift recorded a gross weekly volume of $12.5m, marking an increase of +7% from the previous period, and also representing total volume growth for the third consecutive week. User volume carried on rather steadily and summed $8.5m, a decline of -5%. Conversely, liquidity shifting took a jump and increased to $4m, which was required to even out the one way shifting of many coins. This was demonstrated most clearly by the ongoing demand for SOL, which has continued to rise steadily throughout the month. The ETH/SOL pair finished as the most shifted pair among users for the third week in a row, this week ending just shy of $1m. 

On the shift count side, we rounded out the week with a total of 8,970 shifts, reflecting a -5.6% decline compared to the previous period. This dip led to an increase in our average shift size and resulted in daily averages of $1.79m on 1,281 shifts. As shown in the chart, this week’s shift count remains relatively consistent with recent trends but sits approximately -4% below our YTD average, aligning with the general tapering seen across the past few weeks.

This week SOL took the top spot with a total volume of $4.6m (-2.1%), marking only the second time in 2024 that it has finished first overall. SOL's sustained interest was evident as its settlement volume held steady at $2.1m (-5.6%), while deposits dropped to $1.1m (-30.1%). Over recent weeks, SOL’s shift count has frequently rivaled or even surpassed ETH, signaling renewed enthusiasm for the coin among SideShift users.

ETH came in second place with $4.5m (-26.1%) in total volume, marking a noticeable decline compared to the rest of the month. Settlement volume fell to $1.6m (-26.9%), while deposits also saw a drop, reaching $1.9m (-19.5%). What’s more, this week’s total ETH volume sat more than 60% lower than the level seen just 4 weeks ago, reflecting a clear downtrend in shifting activity throughout October. Nevertheless, ETH remains a consistent performer and is still garnering more attention than BTC, for the time being.

BTC finished in third place with a total weekly volume of $3.9m (+25.9%), driven by a strong increase in settlements, which rose to $1.3m (+37.7%). Deposits also increased to $1.7m (+19.9%), indicating a modest recovery in user demand from last week’s local lows. However, despite these rises, BTC’s total volume finishing below $4m remains uncommon, and something that has only occurred a handful of times this year.

Growth among stablecoins played a key role in maintaining SideShift's total volume this week, particularly as large-scale shifts have been notably absent as of late. The below chart outlines how the lack of whale activity (shifts over $10k) has impacted our overall volume - the lines represent the nominal weekly sums, while the percentages represent the whale shifts proportion of our weekly total volume. Following the sharp decline seen at the beginning of October, the recent gradual recovery was supported by strong stablecoin performances, most of which involved generally larger shift sizes on average. This week saw USDT (ERC20) volume increase to $2.9m (+61.1%), USDT (TRC20) rise to $1.2m (+68.5%), and USDT (BSC) surge to $998k (+174.6%). These ranked in positions 4 through 6 overall, and helped to fill the gap left by top coins such as BTC and ETH, which are seeing less action than normal. 

This week, alternate networks combined for $10.0m (+12.6%), surpassing the $8.5m (-1.0%) volume generated by the Ethereum network. The Solana network remained dominant with $5.3m (-4.5%), exceeding the combined volume of all other alternate networks. The TRON network surged to $1.7m (+97.4%), primarily driven by the return of USDT (TRC20) shifting, which crossed the $1m mark once again. The Binance Smart Chain (BSC) network followed closely at $1.3m (+110.9%), with stablecoin demand boosting its performance. Smaller networks like Polygon and Arbitrum also saw gains, but their volumes remained far behind the top performers.

In listing news, SideShift recently added support on the Ethereum network for HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu , MOG, MEW and NEIRO. Shifting of all of these is now live, directly from any coin of your choice. 

Affiliate News

This week, our top affiliates combined for a total volume of $1.92m (+15.9%), accounting for 15.29% of our weekly total. Despite the increase, integration volume remains far below the more typical levels seen throughout the year. The ranking order remained unchanged this week, with our first-placed affiliate contributing $590k (-4.3%), while our second-placed affiliate saw a notable boost to $587k (+25.5%). Our third-placed affiliate followed with $273k (+9.5%), alongside a shift count of 335. 

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading and happy shifting.