The question
I wanted a concrete exercise in going from a large raw on-chain dataset to something you can actually read. Uniswap V3 emits an enormous stream of individual trades; on its own that’s noise. So I set myself a question: if you roll a full year of it up into daily volume, do the biggest days line up with things that actually happened — and if so, what kind of things?
The data
- Source — Uniswap V3 trades on Ethereum mainnet
- Period — 1 January to 31 December 2024
- Tool — SQL on Dune Analytics
I aggregated every trade into a daily volume series, pulled out the ten highest-volume days, and annotated each one with the market event that coincided with it.
The biggest days of the year
| Date | Volume (USD) | Event | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-08-05 | ~$5.07B | Black-swan crash — $500B wiped, $1B liquidated | Panic |
| 2024-03-05 | ~$3.35B | Bitcoin breaks its all-time high at $69k | Euphoria |
| 2024-05-23 | ~$3.25B | SEC approves spot Ethereum ETFs | Regulation |
| 2024-12-05 | ~$2.87B | Bitcoin crosses $100k for the first time | Milestone |
| 2024-12-09 | ~$2.68B | Flash crash — quantum-computing fears + $1.7B liquidations | Panic |
| 2024-11-21 | ~$2.58B | Post-election bull-market peak | Political |
| 2024-05-21 | ~$2.53B | Bitcoin halving-cycle consolidation | Cycle |
| 2024-03-15 | ~$2.49B | Bitcoin sets a new ATH at $73k | Euphoria |
| 2024-04-13 | ~$2.46B | Pre-halving high, institutional ETF inflows | Cycle |
| 2024-11-12 | ~$2.45B | Trump win drives BTC to $91k | Political |
What it says
At the top of the list sits the 5 August 2024 black-swan crash: about $5.07 billion in volume across ~132,000 swaps — roughly 50% more than the next-busiest day. The biggest day of the year is a panic, not a rally.
Reading down, 6 of the 10 highest-volume days were driven by regulatory decisions or market crashes rather than organic growth. Volume on a DEX isn’t a steady hum that rises with adoption; it’s spiky, and the spikes are mostly headlines and fear — ETF approvals, liquidation cascades, all-time highs, election results.
That only becomes visible once you put the raw trades next to a calendar. The trades alone can’t tell you why a day was big; the value is in the join between on-chain data and the outside world.
The dashboard
The full analysis — the daily-volume chart, the August black-swan detail, and the query behind the table — lives on Dune: Uniswap V3 Volume Analysis 2024. It’s public and interactive.