Why Steem witness @blocktrades continues to sponsor contests

With over 2500 participants and over 2000 SBD in prizes, the @blocktrades World Cup competition was one of the biggest contests on the Steem blockchain to date.

I took part in this competition but a bit like England, failed at the final hurdles and am not amongst the winners listed in this post: https://steemit.com/busy/@worldcup-russia/winners-or-the-blocktrades-world-cup

Congratulations to all of these people, especially @alexicp who collected the humongous first prize of 600 SBD!

Repository

https://github.com/steemit/steem

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Introduction

The competition was sponsored solely by @blocktrades, a Steem blockchain witness and owners of https://blocktrades.us/ - a website in which digital currency can be exchanged and other services are offered, such as the purchasing of a Steem account and delegated Steem Power.

Contests are a good method of increasing engagement, but they are also an opportunity to raise the profile of an account, and indeed a Steem witness. This analysis is a look at how the World Cup competition has potentially raised the awareness of https://blocktrades.us/, and the @blocktrades witness.

The initial contest post was released on the 31st of May 2018, under the account @worldcup-russia. To date, 58 top level posts have been created by this account, and these posts contain over 3450 comments - almost 60 comments per post. Entrants to the contest were asked to use #blocktradesworldcup as their first tag, and (excluding author @worldcup-russia) 7188 top level posts have been created to this criteria.

The data collected covers the period from the 2nd May to the 30th July.

@blocktrades Witness votes - prior/during/following contest

As stated, the initial @worldcup-russia post was submitted on the 31st May, looking at the chart below which shows the witness votes cast/removed for @blocktrades for the timeframe analysed as mentioned above, it is possible that there is a link between this opening post for the contest, and a sharp rise in witness votes for @blocktrades.

The red circle covers 3/4 days following the initial contest post, the witness votes rising sharply compared to the two weeks prior.

On grouping the witness votes cast for @blocktrades into the two weeks prior to and following the initial contest post, there is a noticable rise in the number of votes cast.

Week	Votes cast
wk 3 May	160
wk 4 May	156
wk 1 June	214
wk 2 June	194

The witness votes cast/removed only tell part of the story. On the 6th June 2018, I produced an analysis which listed the number of VESTS voting for each witness. At this time @blocktrades had 59925.46 MVESTS supporting their witness, and were positioned at number 12 in the active witness ranks.

Today, the @blocktrades witness has an active rank of 6, and is supported by 64,167 MVESTS source. This a percentage gain in MVESTS of 7.1% since the 6th June, and is the 2nd highest increase in supporting MVESTS, during this period, of the current top 20 witnesses.

Rank	Witness	MVESTS 6th June	MVESTS Today	% gain/loss
1	gtg	75704	74511	-1.6%
2	jesta	74580	71402	-4.3%
3	roelandp	71472	70453	-1.4%
4	timcliff	69655	69331	-0.5%
5	good-karma	68019	67670	-0.5%
6	blocktrades	59925	64167	7.1%
7	ausbitbank	64028	63661	-0.6%
8	aggroed	61033	61626	1.0%
9	curie	58595	61042	4.2%
10	clayop	61002	60987	0.0%
11	smooth.witness	60398	60978	1.0%
12	someguy123	61318	60368	-1.5%
13	lukestokes.mhth	59831	59999	0.3%
14	followbtcnews	58183	59052	1.5%
15	thecryptodrive	61854	58684	-5.1%
16	anyx	58975	57047	-3.3%
17	xeldal	56526	55153	-2.4%
18	pfunk	54925	54543	-0.7%
19	cervantes	49432	53993	9.2%
20	riverhead	52690	51736	-1.8%

The chart below shows the loss or gain in MVESTS for the current top 20 witnesses, over the past 90 days. @blocktrades is one of only 6 to gain MVESTS, and is a clear 2nd in the number of MVESTS gained.

Although there are many other factors to consider, it certainly looks like the #blocktradesworldcup has raised awareness for the @blocktrades witness.

Number of transfers To/From @blocktrades - around the time of the contest

Taking a look at the transfer activity around the time of the event, the data suggests that there is little correlation between transfers and timing of the #blocktradesworldcup contest.

Around the beginning of June, there are two peaks which show higher activity than the previous weeks and the rest of June, but this isn't a strong case to show that the contest boosted the number of transfers.

Summary

The transfers to/from @blocktrades around the time of the #blocktradesworldcup contest seemed unaffected by the contest. However, the support of the @blocktrades witness, both in number of votes and supporting MVESTS, has certainly increased over this period.

Around the time of the opening post for the contest, @blocktrades listed Monero as a option to buy and sell. It is possible that this move generated additional witness votes, but I would like to think that the #blocktradesworldcup has had the greater influence.

Script and Tools used to generate the data and produce the analysis

The charts used to present the data were produced using MS Excel.

The data is sourced from SteemSQL - A publicly available SQL database, managed by @arcange, with the blockchain data held within.

The SQL queries to extract the data have been produced in LINQPAD 5 SQL Server Management Studio and are as follows:

-- Votes added
select left(timestamp,11), count(*) from TxAccountWitnessVotes where approve = 1
and witness = 'blocktrades' and timestamp > getdate()-90
group by left(timestamp,11)
order by left(timestamp,11) desc

-- Votes removed
select left(timestamp,11), count(*) from TxAccountWitnessVotes where approve = 0
and witness = 'blocktrades' and timestamp > getdate()-90
group by left(timestamp,11)
order by left(timestamp,11) desc


-- Transfers To
select  left(timestamp,11), count(*) from txtransfers where [to] = 'blocktrades' and timestamp > getdate()-90
group by left(timestamp,11)
order by left(timestamp,11) desc

-- Transfers From
select  left(timestamp,11), count(*) from txtransfers where [from] = 'blocktrades' and timestamp > getdate()-90
group by left(timestamp,11)
order by left(timestamp,11) desc

blocktrades.us website: https://blocktrades.us/

Witness voting: https://steemit.com/~witnesses

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Cheers

Asher