Exploring Heterogeneous Decentralized Markets in DeFi and NFT on Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain applications have grown tremendously recently, especially in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-fungible Token (NFT) markets. The DeFi and NFT markets generate massive transactions and research-worthy data. However, few studies have systematically processed and analyzed them, preventing users from understanding the ecosystem. The main challenge of analyzing the DeFi & NFT markets is the heterogeneity of data that different markets have heterogeneous businesses and data. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a framework to explore the heterogeneous decentralized markets in DeFi and NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Based on this framework, we analyze the data of 21 exchange/lending markets in DeFi/NFT, with 184,173,656 records in total. We investigate the activity, profitability, and security of these markets. We obtain several findings to help market users through quantitative analysis. Datasets and codes are released.