An Analysis of Hacker Blockchain Usage — Locker
At Locker, we originally conceived of a product that could save users money each time they used the blockchain. Think of the company, Acorns—they round up users’ transactions to the nearest dollar and invest that money each time users transact with their debit cards. Could something similar be done with blockchain usage?
The answer is yes. With the programmability that account abstraction provides, money can be be saved or invested each time users transact on the blockchain.
In the case of Acorns, most users transact with their debit cards multiple times a day. Suppose the average amount saved per transaction is 50 cents. At a hypothetical average of 3 transactions per day, that’s $45 saved per month—not bad. Now, what about blockchains; how frequently do people use them? That’s precisely the question we wanted to answer, thereby prompting this investigation.
We wanted to identify a concentrated group of addresses that are reasonably representative of folks that use blockchains regularly. With this in mind, we chose ETHGlobal hackathon winners, as they represent a technical group of crypto builders who are likely to use blockchains regularly. ETHGlobal is an organization that hosts EVM-based hackathons globally, multiple times a year. All team members at Locker have won multiple hackathons, for which bounties were received. We therefore decided to look at the on-chain transactions that distributed those bounty payments. There, we found the recipient addresses of other hackathon winners. Great—but one hackathon wasn’t enough, so we extended our sample to include winners of 7 hackathons, spanning multiple regions of the world over the last 2 years.
