Linking Social and Wealth Metrics to Portfolio Outcomes in DeFi: A Statistical Analysis of On-Chain Portfolio Data

The emergence of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms presents new avenues for studying investment dynamics in cryptocurrency markets. This paper examines portfolio performance in DeFi using a dataset from DeBank, a portfolio sharing and monitoring platform. The study focuses on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem and covers the period from August 2023 to February 2024. It analyzes how the net worth and social influence of Web3 users relate to their portfolio performance and compares it to a benchmark index. The findings of the research indicate that an increased number of followers is statistically positively correlated with portfolio performance. This suggests that the wisdom of crowds effect may be at play. However, our findings indicated a negative correlation between net worth and performance, which challenges the prevailing hypothesis derived from previous research. These findings suggest that there are distinct patterns within the DeFi space that diverge from traditional financial market characteristics.