March '19 New STEEM Account Report

Each month I will be producing a report with details of New accounts created on STEEM.  It has long been established that the account creation route via Steemit Inc has flaws, with delays, batch account creation and users never activating accounts once they have been created.

At one stage Steemit Inc acknowledged this problem and issued a post stating they have put in place measures to track every stage of the sign-up process, from first landing on the sign-up page to logging into their newly created accounts.  However, we have seen no further information from Steemit Inc to see where the exact problem is.

HF20 implemented changes to account creation.  These changes made is easier for others to create accounts using free account creation tokens.  However, this process still requires delegation, so accounts have enough RCs to transact.  There was also a change in accounts created with fees where by under the new system, the fee would be burnt.  These changes allowing others to create accounts,  although technically ready and rolled out, have yet to have a major impact on the volume of accounts being set up by Steemit Inc.

If you missed last months post you can check it out here

https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/february-19-new-steem-account-report-1551439309050

Aim of Analysis

The aim of this analysis is:

• Establish how many new users registered

• Establish what % of accounts have posts and voted and are just wallet holders.

• See who is claiming account creation tokens

• Establish if delegation is been given to accounts so they can transact. 

Repository

https://github.com/steemit/steem

Overview

March 18

  

Year to Date 2019

  

March 19

  

March ‘18 was a great month for account creation with over 126k new accounts created.  The crypto crash of 2018 had a major impact and from here in 2018 we being to see the downturn in new account creations.

50.68% of accounts created in March have never transacted on the blockchain via wallets or posts or votes, this can be compared 47% in Feb 19. If we look at all accounts set up in 2019, we can see this is running at about 47% for the year to date.  Of the 47% accounts that did not transact in Feb some of these have now become active and the non-active value for Feb is now 41%.

March 19 shows Steemit inc again creating the bulk of new accounts (81.98%).  

Two interesting values I keep an eye on are the % about profile complete and the % of accounts with website on their profile.  These values give an indication of the calibre of user.  Those with intent of using the platform for a social purpose will have more tendency to complete their profile.

@oracle-d had a fantastic month for account creations again. In Jan they created 0.76% of new accounts and this rose to 2.55% in February and 3.15% in March.

For clarification on the Account activity levels

• Fully active accounts have both posted and voted

• Not active accounts have not vote/posted or made a transfer

• Wallet users have not vote or posted but have made a transfer out from their account.

Nov ‘18 seen 15K new accounts and although Feb and March are around 19K each I am rather confident that the downturn in the number of new accounts set up each month has reached a plateau. 

  

Activity Level by Creator

Taking the top 6 account creators, below we can compare the activity levels of the accounts created.  @Partiko stands out with @Oracle-d as having the highest % of accounts that are wallet users only.  @Blocktrades stands out for the highest % of wallet users that posted and never voted. Steemit Inc and @steemhunt stand out with the most accounts that have never become active.

 

HF20 Changes

Under HF20 accounts can now be set up by either burning the STEEM and sending delegation so the accounts can transact, or they can be set up with discount account creation tokens where the fee is 0, however these accounts also seem to need delegation to transact.

 

97.52% of new accounts set up, were set up with the newly introduced account creation tokens.  The balance, 471 accounts, were created by burning STEEM at 3 STEEM per account.

However, when accounts are set up, without delegation, there resource credits and voting mana need to be boosted so they can really transact on the block.  So many new accounts have received delegation?

82% of accounts set up in March have received delegation.

Of this 82% of account that received delegation, just over 98% received 30K Vests which we can see in the pie chart below.

The first table below shows the new accounts, who set them up and how much in delegation they received.  The second table shows the people setting up accounts and how much in delegation they sent accounts that we set up.

   

Account Creation Tokens (Year to date)

The introduction of account creation tokens in HF20 allows users claim the right to set up an account.  In total 61K account creation tokens were claimed in January.  Below shows who has been claiming these account creation tokens.  We can see Steemit Inc has claimed 17.7% of these, yet they have set up almost 86% of new accounts year to date.

     

Conclusion

2018 seen a down trend each month on the number of new accounts created.  Due to the standstill of accounts created by Steemit Inc in Dec and the catch up in January, its hard to tell if this trend has bottomed for sure, but it is looking positive.

Although there are many new account creation services, such as Steem-ninja, we have yet to see a large shift in the % of accounts set up by Steemit Inc v’s others. Delegations are still required so new accounts can transact. Steemit Inc has the fund to do this so it is still favourable for Steemit Inc. to be the main account creator.  However, the % of inactive accounts is higher with Steemit Inc over other account creation services.  As Steemit Inc are now creating accounts on a more regular basis (daily), maybe waiting on an account did not play as big of a factor as originally thought when it comes to activations.  It would be really interesting if Steemit Inc could share some light on this and release some data on the account creation process (shout out to @ned and @elipowell)

The Data-source and Query

As always to produce this report I connect to Steemsql (paid subscription services held and managed by @arcange ) with Power BI. The SQL query used to gather the data for this report was:

Select *

FROM Accounts (NOLOCK)

where   

( created >= CONVERT(datetime,'01/01/2019')

To get details of who set up each account I used the following query

Select *

FROM txAccountcreates (NOLOCK)

where   

timestamp >= CONVERT(datetime,'01/01/2019')

and to get details of accounts that used their wallets I used the following

select [from], timestamp

from TXTransfers

where   

timestamp >= CONVERT(datetime,'01/01/2019')

The query used to find out who is claiming accounts was

Select *

FROM TxAccountClaims (nolock)

Once I loaded the data into Power BI, I then carried out transformation and calculations using DAX language. 

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