Exploring Connectivity Pattern, Wealth Distribution, and Market Behavior: Insights into Decentralized Finance Network

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has transformed financial systems by facilitating peer-to-peer transactions without intermediaries, supported by blockchain explorers like Etherscan, allowing transparency and analyzing transactions. However, understanding DeFi's transactional and network dynamics remains limited. Previous studies only focused narrowly on specific metrics and lacked comparative analysis across different types of subsectors. This study implements network analysis as part of graph analytics to examine three business models of DeFi subsectors—liquid staking represented by Lido (LDO), lending represented by Aave (AAVE), and Decentralized Exchange (DEX) represented by Uniswap (UNI)—to explore patterns of connectivity, wealth distribution, and market behavior. By analyzing over 1 million transaction records from August 2023 to July 2024, we reveal clustering behaviors, the influence of high wealth nodes, and network adaptability to market volatility using degree distribution, modularity, degree centrality, temporal density, and wealth distribution metrics. These insights provide valuable contributions to understanding DeFi network dynamics and offer practical implications for enhancing scalability and stability in a decentralized ecosystem.