Marinade Finance, MNDE airdrop
An analysis of crypto-inequalities
Recently Marinade has started their retroactive token (MNDE) claim for early adopters and they released the data for the first batch of users, let’s do some quick statistical analysis and search for other hints.
Marinade is a platform for liquid staking, it allows users to stake any amount of SOL and receive a SOL IOU that accrues value and that can be used in DeFi and other activities without missing out the opportunity cost of not staking.
A retroactive airdrop is just an airdrop for users that interacted with the platform in the past, I was one of the first user to stake on their platform and received a decent amount of $$$
The first airdrop period is for users in the following range “Aug. 2nd — Aug. 9th 2021”, in total 1.7 millions SOL got staked worth circa $68M $ with SOL at $40. The airdrop affects 666 address, that’s to say that Marinade had at most 666 users (one users could have multiple addresses).
The MNDE allocation is very close to 1:1, which means by staking 1 SOL you would receive 1 MNDE. MNDE is currently trading at 1.07$ so this is effectively a 44bps dividend on top of all the other rewards, not bad!
So, for the analysis just use the panda library in python, split the addresses in buckets and run the describe() method. There are 666 users with a average deposit size of 2’571 SOL and standard deviation 5’872 SOL
Summary statistics on such broad data do not make sense so I split the amounts in buckets by order of magnitude: [0,1], [1,10], [10,100], [100,1k] , [1k,10k], [+10k]
The results are summarized in this table, you see how many users belong to each bins, how much they deposited in total, which percentage of the total they own and what’s the average deposit made.
Interesting! Usually the number of users sorted by money deployed has a different distribution, more specifically higher wealth bands have always less and less people, see the image below.
To assess the “inequality” of the distribution I plot below the Lorenz curve of the distribution, the go-to way to graphically assess inequalities. The orange line represents perfect equality (N users, W wealth, each owning W/N), the blue line represents wealth distribution in Marinade per SOL deposited. Not bad! The Gini coefficient for this distribution is the ratio between (area between the orange and the blue line) and (area below the orange line).
The Gini coefficient of Marinade Finance it 0.06 for “Aug. 2nd — Aug. 9th 2021” is 0.06 only
When a distribution is more unequal, the blue line will be banded down much more. I wonder how this distribution will change once Marinade release future data!
