Ignite the Crypto Winter: Web3Go Decrypts Hooked Protocol with Onchain Data

Summary

• $HOOK listing has been a success so far with Binance Launchpad users earning 25x returns at the current market price.
• Looking at onchain data, the daily active user of Wild Cash (Hooked Protocol’s first product) has seen a large fluctuation between 150K to 500K, partly due to speculation by data scientists.
• Web3Go will continue to monitor the development of Hooked Protocol by providing in-depth onchain data analysis.

It has been 9 months since the last Binance Launchpad, but the current bear market obviously cannot extinguish people's longing for the wealth creation effect of Binance Launchpad, with previous listing successes including Sandbox, Axie Infinity, and StepN.

The Hooked Protocol, backed by Sequoia and Binance Labs, has given new meaning to this crypto winter with the long-lost IEO. There is too much analysis about Hooked Protocol from product perspectives, so this article will avoid repetitions, and instead will restore the truth from a data perspective.

The Hooked Protocol governance token $HOOK was listed on Binance at 14:30 UTC on December 1st. The IEO price reached highs of $5.00 from launchpad price of $0.10 upon launch, and currently hovers around $2.2-2.6 at the time of writing. The listing was a success: launchpad users made ~25x profit and $HOOK achieved $100 million trading volume within the first hour. Binance has lived up to everyone's expectations.

Beyond market price, what the onchain activities reveal is far more fascinating.

Before $HOOK was listed on Binance, between November 25th and 27th, a few data scientists discovered and took an advantage of a product feature of Hooked to quickly generate a large amount of uHGT, and directly interacted with the uHGT contract through the PancakeSwap Pro mode to earn quick money. A total of 171 billion uHGT (worth $1.25 million) were traded onchain.

According to the on-chain data captured by Web3Go, the most profitable address 0x05cfa0bdf3c98d3fefa6b612bfb66ea8fa892362 has earned 23,904 USDT of profit from this bug, while this address still holds 1 billion uHGT til this day.

But this exploitation did not last long. The influx of a large number of data scientists also attracted the attention of Hooked Protocol. The project quickly took countermeasures and fixed the bug.

Judging from the on-chain data, this action had an immediate effect. After the official intervention, the on-chain transactions shrank to 1/10. But still, there was a slight upward trend after November 28th, indicating that even under a strict crackdown, speculators still hold high expectations on uHGT.

Besides contract bugs, the largest scale of arbitrage actually happens in Wild Cash. Since Binance officially announced on Nov 23rd that HOOK will conduct an IEO on its platform, Wild Cash has attracted the attention of data scientists.

According to the data captured by Web3Go, after Binance’s official announcement, the number of mints of Pickaxe, the most important interest-generating tool in Wild Cash soared to nearly 16 times the data before the official announcement. There were still nearly 96,000 mints on December 1st when Hook was launched. It can be seen that data scientists’ expectations for the Hooked Protocol are far from over.

Judging from the data of tokens minted daily and user volume, the current noise in the market mostly comes from data scientists and speculators.

On November 26th, uHGT token minted data peaked at 31.3 billion. While the actual number of participating users was only over 1,200, less than 1/10 of the peak in mid-October. Additionally, it's not difficult to find from the data of October 14th, the number of user accounts was very small but the number of tokens minted was very high.

Let's go back to early October. On October 17th, Hooked announced that it has brought 50,000 DAUs to BNB Chain.

The actual data on the chain shows 70,000 daily active users, and the overall data is actually better than the official announcement. Since October 13, its number of active users has grown rapidly.

Its mainstream Web2 platforms such as Tiktok and Facebook are also showing a trend of traffic explosion in Southeast Asia, which is consistent with the on-chain data. Considering the user acquisition cost, this data can be considered real DAUs.This also means that Wild cash has attracted the attention of a large number of web2 users through effective marketing strategies in the early stage, and successfully created a trend.

On October 24th, Hooked released product-related information in an orderly manner. This is also the first time that Wild Cash has appeared on their official Twitter account.

Observing the influence of the news from the onchain data, the number of new users has also increased significantly as anticipated, reaching a peak on Oct 26th, an increase of nearly 50% compared with the same period. Taking into account the situation of user account abuse, the number of real users might not be accurate. But it is certain that from this point in time, Hooked began to really attract the attention of Crypto’s core users.

After this, the project has gone through a quiet period of nearly half a month, and the growth rate of users has slowed down significantly. A new round of marketing was the most reasonable choice at that time. According to the data forwarded by BNB Station On Nov 10th, Hooked’s UAQ (Unique Active Wallets) was 127.54K, which has almost caught up with the UAQ of PancakeSwap, the only leader of BNB Chain.

According to the streaming data captured by Web3Go, this data is actually higher than imagined. The actual number of active addresses is as high as 155,000.

Comparing the number of new users and the number of Pickaxe minted on that day. It can be found that the two data are highly consistent, indicating a stable sign. This means that Hooked does not exaggerate its data in its marketing.

Now we see the story at the beginning of the article when Binance officially announced the Hooked Protocol IEO campaign. And a new peak was rekindled, with daily activities approaching 500,000.

In general, Wild Cash as the first product of Hooked Protocol, is not perfect in terms of product completeness in its current stage, but is still well-functioning as intended. At the same time, the official minting limits are strict, which requires users to put in more effort and time. It also makes user growth in Southeast Asia more valuable. Fortunately for users, Hooked Protocol fixed the product feature bug in uHGT quickly; it is not uncommon for a project to die off in the early stage due to data scientist abuse.

In terms of risk, Hooked's current product lacks diversity and new content from an ecosystem perspective. In addition, the product output is highly dependent on incentives to attract new users. As a result, a large number of users have poured in. However, it is challenging to retain active users using a purely Quiz application. Whether Hooked Protocol's next move can enrich the BNB Chain ecosystem will be a key factor in the next stage of product development.

The open data analytics platform Web3Go will continue to track and bring more effective on-chain data to the market.