Fredrik Haga: Dune Analytics – The Open Data Platform #472

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Felix and I'm here with Frederica Ernst today today we're speaking with Frederick Hagar who is the co-founder of tune analytics June is an analytics platform focused on blockchain Data before we talk with Frederick about dunean analytics we'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week Omni is your new favorite multi-chain Mobile Wallet Omni supports more than 25 protocols so you can manage all of your assets in one place across all major EVMS layer 2's ZK sync and starnet coming soon and non-evms but what's really special about Omni is that you can do all the most important things in web 3 directly within the wallet itself want to get yield Omni allows you to get

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so welcome Frederick to epicenter thank you so much very excited to be here epicenter was one of my first main sources for understanding this crypto world when I got excited about it back in 2015 so cool to be here yeah awesome I think we actually met at a epicenter Meetup in Defcon 4 in Prague so really awesome to have you on today and obviously you come a long way I I think that's also where we wanted to start right like basically how did you come up with the idea for Dune kind of like can explain a little bit what is you and how did you get into crypto and and to build Dune for sure yeah so uh me and my co-founder

we were working at the big company back in 2017 when when the sort of hype happened uh for the Ico craze and all that and uh we I was working full time on on blockchain I was already interested and managed to sort of work on it because of all the interests um and then I met my co-founder he was also interested um and uh we ended up forming a small team doing a lot of prototypes and playing around with the blockchain and and building on ethereum first and foremost and build prototypes and did hackathons and all that and then over time we realized that so during the Spring of 2018 that you know the hype is

kind of dying and people are not that interested anymore and this technology is still very young and clunky and so like this big Corporation might not be that interested anymore which was fine and understandable honestly um so but we were nevertheless just as excited about the technology and the potential for you know open finance and programmable assets on the internet and whatnot so um we started thinking about problems to be solved really um in the space and we had since we had built and deployed some smart contracts we knew that getting the data was was pretty clunky and hard um and so so that kind of what seeded the idea for starting Dune and then over time um we also understood that the fact that

this data is inherently open is like a total game changer for how you can build a data product uh in this space and you know it's it's a huge Paradigm Shift whereas previously all data and all data tools is like in close environments like inside the in you know engineering or product organization building uh web 2 product or inside of a financial institution and the name of the game is really closed and um you know building tools around proprietary data sets and whatnot um and so I think that the thing that we understood pretty early on was that oh when the data is open like you can actually aggregate you know aggregate

all of this knowledge and and building that people do in the space as opposed to defaulting to to private um and we sort of flipped it on its head and said it's default public right um so so that's kind of how we we got started and then in the beginning it was like really hard impossible to raise any funds we didn't have a salary for many months and um yeah we traveled to a few of these like eat hackathons and Devcon and whatnot on like a very tiny budget sharing Hotel bedrooms lots of me and and just try to find anyone that was interested and it was hard because not that many products were actually live with the reusable products um at the time right so uh the sort of Market was small but you know they were

a dedicated group of people that kept building and were excited um and those were the ones we tried to serve and and I think that has turned out to be a good idea to bet on on the people also betting on on this future so in a way what you've done is kind of you've um aggregated a an enormous database that people can easily query right and basically your products kind of fall into two divisions so the dashboards and the API um can you kind of talk about the distinction between those and what exactly they offer sure so in its simplest form what we do is we take data from the blockchain nodes we put it in the database we do some

transformations to make it easier to work with so you have Smart contract events um you have other abstractions on top of that as well so you can see oh this is a uni swap trade but you can also say oh here's a table with all the trades from all the dexes and you know easily query that so we put a lot of effort into good sort of data ux and what we do then is to allow anyone to go to our website uh browse all these tables write SQL queries on top of it get results and then visualize it and turn it into dashboards and and I guess what I alluded to earlier is the fact that this is all public by default so if you go on June

and you do something someone else can see it they can see the SQL they can Fork it um they can make their own version and whatnot so it's all kind of remixable and uh open for anyone to to build on top of each other um and then um also we're about to launch an API product which has been highly demanded for a long time um and essentially you know take any of these endpoints that underpin these dashboards and and query results and turn it into programmatic uh programmatically accessible API endpoints which I think is going to be a massive enabler for a lot of people to to not have to do all of this tedious um data infrastructure and maintenance of pipelines and whatnot to

to query this data yeah we're gonna get a bit into like what the use cases are I think one question that maybe people are interested in is like if you talk about the dashboards obviously we have a lot on on June do you have a favorite dashboard yourself and then which one is it so I I've had a favorite for a while and I think it's maybe even more fashionable right now um which is uh maker dolls balance sheet uh built on Dune um and I think this was a particularly exciting example I think they built it out a couple of years ago really um but the fact that you can have a real time

balance sheet feeding from the blockchain that anyone in the world can go and look at on a website and they can see what which query created this balance sheet and you know if you don't like it you can Fork it and you can massage it right so it's it's really very scrutinizable and the fact that it's real time and you can see which assets which liabilities all these things and the revenue right block for block you can see the revenue coming in um and so you can do like all the way from like oh Financial auditing to even investing and you can say oh I can have a real-time price to earnings ratio for the maker token right you can look at that metric that analysts in the traditional Equity world would figure

out once four times a year whenever the PDF drops you could say oh now it's priced this relative to the last quarter earnings right but like literally you can do that every 12 seconds on ethereum blockchain um with the Dune dashboard and I think this was very Illuminating because it displayed you know people have been looking at all kinds of weird metrics on Dune but this displayed you know the old world kind of but in in this new world of our story on blockchains and I think that was a very Illuminating example and then of course with with the FTX pull out recently and and their cooking of books and and whatnot or lack of books altogether maybe illustrates how insane it is that maker Dao and whatever other Financial

product built on on the blockchain is there for people to audit to monitor real time and there's no hiding you know it's like completely illuminated and ethereum has been uh called this like Dark Forest but I think like you know Dune is a huge flashlight into that dark Forest Illuminating everything you want to see really you can you can get there and you can look at it and I think the beauty of doing is that this is not you don't have to be deeply technical to to go there you you can look at what other people have been doing and you can Tinker around them you don't need to set up data pipelines and infrastructure to understand which I think is powerful the dark pool allegri is usually used to

to refer to the mempool though right it's not I mean so basically everything that happens on blockchain is by default um open I'm not going to say transparent because I I totally hear you that basically getting the data is not always easy it is possible though um but maybe let's talk about the difficulties um that you guys um have uh navigated the challenges that you have uh grown to um with Dune so basically why why is actually getting this data together why is it difficult yeah no it's it's a great question um so I think well so a blockchain is a system that's

built for like verifying transactions and you know activity as it happens and letting people sort of write to the blockchain right but it's not necessarily optimized for getting data out of it in in large quantities um right so so already building a blockchain is a hard engineering problem and the constraints that you would focus on is is the verification how many can easily you know verify it and then you can actually uh make transactions and and interact with it um so the whole sort of let's call it Big Data aspect of it is not really what that system is designed for

um and so that means that it's actually it's surprisingly complicated to get the data out um and you know you need to go block for block and ask for all the different things that that happens in the chain um and since like a no there's a piece of software that's not optimized for this this is way more messy than most people think and and it's not like you just hit play and all the data just arrives like things happen there's where transactions that stole the uh the system and I think the most you know extreme example or or clear example of these things are these um

sort of get Forks so something like binance smart chain or polygon that have tweaked the parameters of the get node with essentially lower block time and higher um throughput right um and so what happens then is that some of these nodes have a really hard time sort of reproducing something that happened let's say you know a million blocks ago and so it it means that they're if their block time is three seconds but they might spend so uh spend like a minute producing a trace of something that happened

and that means when you're backfilling that chain like you diverge from heads if if it takes one minute to get a block and is produced you know 30 or 20 blocks in that time you've gotten one more block and then you you're 20 bucks behind right further behind than what you were before um so since these are systems that are not really built for taking the data out you do have the uh issue of like all these kinds of bottlenecks and quirks um and so it requires a lot of hand-holding to just get the data out and then of course just like having a performant infrastructure and system in place to efficiently query uh what's becoming a

lot of data and you know there's ethereum but there's also these other ebm chains that typically have more throughput than produces more data and then you have things like Solana which kind of think in in less than a week produce more data than the whole of ethereum's History um so uh you know there are non-trivial amounts of data as well um to query yeah I totally get that maybe maybe let's dig down a little bit uh deeper though um just I mean maybe let's say on ethereum uh exclusively because I totally understand that basically the other chains uh with uh you know different block gas limits and so on um have have higher amounts let's say I have an archival node running

um and that basically gives me the state of um each variable at each block right so um why why would it be difficult for me to kind of run a query on that archival node I mean I I mean running an archival node itself is a non-trivial thing right but I mean if if you're gonna do that um what exactly is the bottleneck for me if I want to grab like say um the uni swap volume for a specific token pair over the last two years yeah so you know you I think you need to know then exactly what you um

exactly what you want to look at which is also not trivial right so you say Okay I want to look at Uni spot volume for the last few years okay that's I don't know the exact number but it's probably at least in the tens of thousands maybe in the hundreds of thousands of contracts so you first need to figure out like which contracts do I care about um which are definitely a lot because they deploy a new contract for every Market that they create or every pair right um so so you need to somehow know what data you're looking for from the node um and then of course you get that then that in and of itself won't give you the answer because you also for instance would need a USD price like if you wanted to aggregate all this

volume you need to know okay if like the you know cat coin and though coin are traded what are those actually worth that that's you know some data you would get from the blockchain but wouldn't be practically that useful to you need something else so you need the USD volume so you need to fetch that somewhere and and and um uh join it and and you know multiply the amounts um so you have that type of problem and then you have other sort of higher level sort of curation problems where there's a lot of spam for instance so some will create some sense of nonsensical token you know do you want trade that makes it worth a billion and then you can do a massive

trade that looks like it's like one billion dollars worth of volume but it turns out it's like you know just some folks uh training with each other on some WordPress token right so so there's also like that element to it so uh I think it's like both technically non-trivial uh there's also a lot of context um that you need to to do this yeah so so basically it's the integration of different sorts of information into one database together with kind of the categorization and curation of different uh contracts and feeds is that is that high level correct yeah I I'd say so uh you know also

so the benefit of what we do is that we we fetch absolutely all of the data right um and so you can sort of have that as a starting point but if you interact with the node um you know if you do want to answer some specific question you do need to know what data you want to do but then and you can run that and it's going to take you long long time and you have to sort of hand hold the process and then if you say oh but actually I want to check this other thing or match it with this other thing you know then you have to do that whole exercise over again where it's like oh but actually you know I want a question related to balancer pools uh you know then then you have like a whole process going um and so uh yeah I think it's

essentially just in theory doable but in practice like a lot of hard work and a lot of uh you know mess even for a sophisticated sort of data engineer right and you recently also upgraded I think maybe going a bit to the technical part of it from like a V1 due into V2 can you talk a little bit about what what you've changed there and how it improves the the tune experience or also like what what's the problems with the tune experience so far yeah for sure um so we had a postgres based system for for you June V1 which was a great start for noon

um a great piece of technology but um with a lot of data it became a problem so um basically a lot of queries would time out um and and like a postgres type of system is good at sort of being fast on relatively small amounts of data but not great when when it comes to a lot of data um and so there were a couple of limitations in addition to like performance over large data sets like you couldn't you couldn't um look at say like median gas price over the history of the ethereum blockchain we just time out we rent for like 30 plus minutes and then you know you wouldn't get a result um there there's also there was also the

problem that like each chain we added was a different database and you couldn't work on uh across them so you couldn't Benchmark data on polygon and ethereum um they had to be like separate queries um and then furthermore like all the data pipelines of creating these tables that we have like Dex trades and nft trades and these abstractions I talked about was like very messy because these were like scripts that pulled some data and sort of referencing each other like very very complicated to to maintain and understand which data relies on which data um on what tables and and and whatnot so essentially we we've now launched um through Dune engine V2

which is based on like a daily Lake and more like a modern cloud data warehouse architecture where we have all the data for all the different blockchains in in like a data Lake and then we have a gray engine on top of it um currently spark based but we're also doing some exciting new things there um and essentially allowing you to Traverse all the different uh sources so you can you know benchmark Solana and ethereum and polygon and all these things in one simple query um it allows us to have way better pipelines and checks and balances on how the tables are created also we can now have Community

contributions on the data layer so not only can people write queries they can also create new tables uh with something with a product we call Spellbook um so people can then you know create all kinds of derived data sets that are easy to query they can write their own tests and ensure that the data is so high quality um and so uh it's it's a system that's way easier to maintain we can have invite the community into uh contributing more um and sort of self-serving on to more use cases and then yeah there are some amazing performance benefits um and sort of what what the typical modern data stack looks like we're kind of you know creating that and enabling

that for for the community um where you can do median gas price in in you know a couple of seconds or or a few minutes at least yeah you just alluded to the fact that you now also support Solana which is a new development so previously it was only evm chains and despite the fact that kind of the broadcast limits and block times kind of vary between different evm chains and I assume um the basic infrastructure is fairly similar between all of these um how how are things different for Solana and how did you make the decision to support Solana over a number of other non-evm layer one projects that also have traction like Cosmos or substrate

or Avalanche or similar yeah um great question so so first of all like we we want to support all blockchains and and everything that that's interesting so it's not the goal in and of itself to to limit it uh I think what we have cared a lot about is the user experience of uh you know using the data on you and I think that's frankly one of the things we got right where you know the the the easiest way to make some money being a Data Business in like 2018 or 2019 was to like just integrate with all the chains that I raised a ton of money we didn't do that like we stuck to ethereum where

essentially no one would pay us to do this but um we figured you know this is where people are building so let's serve them um and so for us the important thing is that there's um an ecosystem of developers of applications of users and communities that actually want to query this data and you know do interesting things with it um and then sort of we do the work of of the Integrations um and as you alluded to it's been way easier for us with evm chains because all the infrastructure all the processes are the same so when we add something like polygon like it is um there's definitely challenges with

every system one learns but but you know in Broad Strokes a lot of the architecture and processes are the same um so with something like Solana um you know this was actually the first also blockchain we put on our new unb2 uh engine so we we figured this was a nice stress test to the system because it they produce a lot of data uh but we saw that there was a lot of people building on it there were actual products being built users using them and and then we decided to integrate it um and we honestly also have built out this new platform uh which has been you know also a learning experience and something with had to to work a lot on

and therefore have been painfully slow honestly in integrating some of these new blockchains but now the the new platform is getting into a more stable uh State and then we can go more aggressively on integrating new chains so um it's not something we deliberately sort of try to avoid but we try to make sure that the ux when we do integrate is good and that there's an interested Community to to work on top of it and of course like the technical complexity plays in if it's entirely new system then it is more work to to get it right cool yeah we wanted to talk a little bit about kind of Tunes business model and also I guess

the user basically you mentioned already like the community and everything I think one one interesting thing about June is that it's it's basically one of the few products that has this kind of SAS model let's say in the in the web 3 world and we were interested to hear a bit about you know like also how many users are there on you and how do you think about this pricing how much people uh revenues are there whatever you can you can tell us about kind of how this this all works um we'd be happy to learn yeah where did I start um I think we have built a very strong community on the end um I think we've actually

and without the token which I think actually has been been a good thing for us frankly um because there is like a kind of proof of work on getting into Dune you do have to you know make some sacrifice uh put in some work um and that has made our community very sticky and healthy I think because people actually put in work to to get there and learn um I think we we Empower a lot of people so as I alluded to earlier like it's not only developers that use tune but a lot of non-technical people learn SQL with them for you and they do some tutorials they Fork some queries and they get started and suddenly they get paid uh to work on you and they pick up bounties they get a

job like a lot of people that claim like fantastic top jobs in protocols and Venture firms and whatnot starting from basically nothing and having no online presence and then working on doing building some nice important dashboards and and getting like top jobs right um so I think that that's very important part of it that I often think of so our community and and sort of the Dune team building the product in in terms of this um Spider-Man meme where they're like oh so you know you built a great tool you helped me do this and we're like no you you did like a lot of cool queries and you helped us uh you know uh so I think there's a lot of sort of mutual appreciation uh between the people building noon and our community which I

think is a fantastic thing so in terms of like how big it is um we have like a few thousand people creating queries a month um we don't have like a huge user base on the Creator side but since June is kind of like a Marketplace all the way almost where you know people can come in and see anything that's built it's like a Creator side on a consumer side and so we believe that if we empower uh you know creators they can make amazing things and a lot of people can benefit from that so we don't necessarily need a hundred thousand query creators you know if we have

someone that's very engaged and create amazing things we can have we do have like millions of page views um and then some of those convert to creators learn the crafts and and you know get into it so so that's kind of the the dynamic um we have about 50 000 dashboards on Dune um underpinned by like 300 000 queries um so it's quite substantial yeah so I I think that the heart of the question goes to this So currently you operate under this you know subscription uh model right so basically there's different tiers so basically you have to pay for kind of keeping your dashboards private and having the watermark removed

and so on um and then this kind of um when you compare this with um your recent raises Congratulations by the way so you raised repeatedly over the last couple of years so at first it was uh two million and 8 million and recently 70 million had a valuation of 1 billion um so my question goes to this um the so the investment that's been made was that an equity investment or was it a soft or I mean basically trying to reframe this question is there a plan to introduce the token so because basically I it it kind of I struggled to kind of make sense out of the software as a service business model

that you're currently running with the with these variations because I mean sure there's kind of companies for this for for whom that works like the sales sales forces of the world but obviously your um uh your your addressable Market is so much smaller so how does this how does this all fit together yeah sure um so so let's start with like the business model uh which I which I didn't intend to to skip over uh from from the previous question so um essentially you know what we do is uh we allow anyone to use this tool for free um we swallow all the infrastructure costs all the work in in terms of making this product um super useful

um and then our philosophy is if you do it on in the open anyone else can Leverage What you do you build sort of in public and so that's free what we essentially charge for is if you want to keep things private you want to do it only for yourself if you want to come use more resources so have more performance on your queries have more beefy infrastructure underneath it have shorter wait times these type of things and if you want to export data which essentially means that you can do you know proprietary research build your own business whatever it might be right um so these are kind of the the three main Dimensions that we think make sense to to monetize along and I think now to back up a bit

um there are different ways to build the system um and sort of say you know what what do we kind of give away and what do we maintained to make a business or whatever um and I think we've kind of our approach is like we wanted we want to solve problems we want to be as useful as possible and what we've figured out is like if we do it in this way we can have the most impact because so many people so like yeah we sure we could open source everything and just like everything that we ever did is open source but that actually would have way less impact it's our hypothesis because so many people wouldn't be able to interface with these nodes to actually run this data infrastructure to operate and maintain this thing uh you know we have almost 50 Engineers working

full-time on this it's not a trivial problem um and so you know that's the model we've taken where we think you know the community can get a lot from this uh and and we can monetize the people that have extra needs um in different ways but also sort of you know have more of a business use case typically uh rather than you know just contributing um so so that's kind of the the philosophy we've raised uh Equity uh if you know it's not that I want to completely rule out any other sort of web tree play but I think for us we're very concerned with taking long-term Solutions and want to you know that if we wanted to get rich as quickly

as possible like we would have done dude in a different way but we care about building something that you know is long-term that is uh sensible even though prices are up 100 or down 90 like I don't really care um and so for for now we haven't found a model where we can swallow you know massive infrastructure bills and also kind of have a different structure but over time we definitely you know try to give economic opportunities to our creators as much as possible Wizards building on Dune and so it will always be mindful of the toolkit and what we can do uh but I think it's also from our side like ensuring that we don't get ourselves into works but where

we fall prey to some hype and then suddenly like six months later you're in a really bad spot because you did something that actually doesn't make that much sense um and also like just pragmatically solving problems every single day and ensuring that we're massively building something useful for for the community yeah and you are so freyrick I've I've used your dashboards and I've built my own dashboards and uh Dune is such a fantastic tool and I don't I mean this in the least address I know this sounds a little bit adversarial but basically so I'm a little bit struggling to understand where your mode comes from right so basically even if I mean you have 50 engineers and maybe we'll talk

about what what they do on a day-to-day basis in just a little bit but say you're paying your engineers a really good salary say 200k here that's 10 million a year for for 50 Engineers right um and then maybe add uh the same amount again for your AWS bill which is probably around the right number I'm guessing so it's 20 million a year for to to to recreate something like um uh like June but you still have this enormous valuation so basically where's this expectation of profit from the VC is coming from yeah no great question I'm not going to

comment particularly on on your estimates of how much it costs you to run you in but but fair enough um I think you know I think we're at the end of the day we're trying to build something useful and I think we're abstracting away a lot of hard work for a lot of people and I think if you run the protocol um or VC or you know other type of players like we have big big brand names and whatnot playing in the space now um you know you care about this data like it's important for your investing for your um running all of your business and and whatnot and I think you know the the things I mentioned like having more performance

and working with this data uh having a private environment where your team can collaborate with this data uh exporting this data through API and these type of things I think is like massively useful and people will pay for that convenience and I think that's valuable and the fact that people can come together and as I mentioned like you know we get a lot of people that contribute and we the trade-off we've kind of made is like we say okay we will swallow all these bills we will make this system run we will ensure that like you know everything is up and running and correct which is a massive effort and then I think there's uh you know a lot of demand for build getting more out of that tool and I don't think that is you

know necessarily like we care deeply about the free experience of dude and so it's not like we will suddenly just like rug all the free users and you know extract massive amounts of money from them uh it's like we will make tune more powerful over time and let people pay for extra features and I think it's important sort of context there as well that like we did a play on like the long time when we focused on the community in 2018 and yes like I didn't have a salary for seven months because every single VC was like there are five people you can sell this to and we don't see this as a lucrative business and we were like actually we think this five people is going to become like thousands and then

thousand then tens of thousands and what not you know over the over the years and and that's still the play we're doing yeah yeah don't don't get me wrong I think Yoon is a fantastically useful to it totally um how how do you feel about the comparison that's sometimes made with Bloomberg Tamara I think that's um understatement of what Tunis and can be um so I think as I alluded to earlier like the fact that this data is open is like a total total Game Changer and Bloomberg is a fantastic product for a niche uh in in the finance world that you know care

deeply about having sort of proprietary understanding of what's whatever is happening in these financial markets but and so you know amazing product and fantastic what they've done and the position they have in that World um I think the fact that you can have open-ended interaction with this data uh as like together with the rest of the world is is just enormous uh and so I don't think um like I really don't think there's any product uh out there that is comparable to what we're doing because it it has some of the aspects of like a GitHub where you know a lot of people

come together and build on each other and and you know it's a tool for uh uh for developers uh but and then you have the product of that which GitHub doesn't have but which kind of you know it's more of the Bloomberg thing with like oh there's actually a bunch of charts and a lot of people can just look at which is incredibly useful uh uh but then you also have you know the fact that this is public uh and uh which I think is um a huge deal and I think big kind of Technology paradigms uh typically what you see to succeed is like someone that that really builds for some novel new aspect of a new platform or a new piece of technology and to me

that is really what we're doing here um we're not trying to recreate Bloomberg or recreate you know some tool that people had for their uh product analytics uh and they would like pipe their whatever sort of usage data from their website into a tool like that like we're trying to build something that is uniquely enabled by and driving open data um and understanding and utility of that data and just the fact that if when there's a trade on on like a balancer pool previously like there would be like one or two stakeholders to that data point would be like the PM and the leader of that company that built that

product like now there's like this explosion of stakeholders where it's like literally anyone can go on the internet and look into this data point and like make sense of it in whatever shape or form they want to and I think it's still hard to grasp and appreciate like how big of a deal that is that like the world is the you know audience here and and of course not every single person in the world will go there but uh it's an opportunity and and I think that is you know the premise of what we're trying to do is like people can learn faster if they see what what other products are built and they can see the open source smart contracts but they can also see how well traction that's what contract got how do people use it how do people

abuse it you know and I think what the blockchain is one of the exciting things about the blockchain is like anyone can build anyone can participate um and you have this sort of bet on human creativity that like you just give people tools to do whatever they you know there will be a lot of stupid ideas but there will be some really good ones uh and I think what we're enabling in that is that you can actually dissect what worked not just uh with the thing you built yourself but with everything that anyone ever built and then you have this amazing sort of feedback loop and evolutionary Force that's just so much faster and so much you know it's it's harsh also because if you build a product like it's out there

like anyone can go and look at your metrics not just your manager which is of course intimidating but it's also like I think progressing this space way way faster than any other industry that you can think of yeah awesome that I I want to dive a little bit deeper into that so we we had mentioned a little bit right the maker Dow balance sheet we have also mentioned kind of other dashboards that have been built I I would be curious to hear from you you know what other use cases you found like really interesting or even like people building on top of Dune in a way that maybe maybe you didn't expect or also if if that hasn't happened yet what what you would like to see build on June

I I guess there there is kind of like two different things one one is uh or two different worlds one is when we we launch the API um uh which is it's going live by the end of the year for self-serve and we have kind of like a wait list private beta right now um you know that's going to be an explosional uh opportunity but uh inside of the Dune app um I think frankly I do think um that in many cases the the crypto Community should learn a little bit more from the the sort of old world I think a lot about you know what what are features and what are bugs of

the whole world and I think all still too many crypto people think there's only bugs uh you know in in the old world and then everything needs to be reinvented and I think maybe you know there certainly are some bugs and I think we have an interesting new design space but there might be some features after you know industries that have been around for a while um and I still think kind of startup 101 metrics are underrated what what's you know the attraction of your product what's the user base uh what's the retention on that user base uh you know what's the distribution of activity across different users and you know I I still think what like a typical startup PM would want to look at is actually not

that far from what people should look at in crypto as well and like I'll do the boring stuff just like figure out are we rotating users like will this person come back or not and if they don't come back like why right um so I think that is still a bit under appreciated and and people like to look at sort of tvl and uh some high level like trading volume which is probably a better metric than tvl at least but um you know I think that some of those kind of more sobering uh metrics is something that would be nice to to look at uh there was also like a very cool longer form research piece by a Community member last week uh on just like the uni airdrop and you know what

did that turn into um and you know those are some pretty sobering uh metrics in there where it's like okay I I can't remember the exact metrics but it's something like 90 sold more or less instantly um it's like seven percent of all the airdrop holders still hold the token um and like a tiny fraction on that sort of increase their exposure and and even smaller smaller um portion participate in governance right only like a Time Time bit uh and is the unisport volume driven by people that got the arrow no like that also fell

from like 60 a year ago or something to like five percent now right so so it didn't retain users uh most people just saw it as free money and dumped it and it didn't actually turn into like strong governance participation right and so I think that's those type of metrics and lessons right where people should say what what's the return on this initiative that I did like what did we try to achieve and what did it turn into it's like an exercise that more people in crypto should should do I think and and be honest with themselves and I think obviously like these times when when prices are down the sentiment is

down like you kind of have to do these things um and they matter I guess less when when everything is up anyway um so I feel like you know in general like letting being a bit hard on yourself and thinking about the the stickiness of your product the ROI of your activities um um and and in that post maybe we can link to it you know there are other airdrops as well that uh you know you can look at the metrics and just see for yourself like you know did they actually engage your community by doing this or did they not them if they didn't like it's an incredibly expensive you know one-off marketing gig that kind of you know I can I can get a lot of people to use my

product if I just go out and say hey here's like a thousand dollars on the street right doesn't necessarily mean that I'm building a fantastic product or business uh so um yeah I think it's uh good timing for for just like reading up on some startup one-on-one and start to think about the ROI of of your initiatives so user experience and um a good hard look in the mirror um I mean clearly that's super advantageous for projects do you think there's um something for the ecosystem uh that the ecosystem can use to its Advantage

because obviously I mean volatility in crypto is large despite the fact that in principle a lot of the data is public so I mean obviously there's some data that's not looked at or that that that kind of subject to externalities do you think um we can kind of Leverage Dune um to that end as well I guess you can definitely you know learn a lot from from history right and and I think it's probably a good you know now we've had a lot of lessons and the pace has been incredibly High uh you've had prices going up and prices crashing down and you have all all these

systems that's been built and all these things that happen the airdrops and and vampire attacks and whatnot so I think it's probably a good time to be uh you know student of the Unchained activity right and and maybe uh you don't even have to be an engineer to do that right but if you're looking for uh products to build uh I think it's like an amazing time for for learning some lessons and there's been a lot of stress tests and um I think now instead of just the end you know the fire nft project being thrown together in the week and then racing 10 million dollars in two weeks uh you know people can actually sit down and say okay you know did any of this actually work are

there interesting pieces here so um I don't know exactly what to look at or not frankly you know but but I'll be mindful of especially this like you know what I think one thing that's underrated a little bit in crypto is like if someone is getting paid for something someone is picking up the bill in one way or another like there are no free lunches like if you have some kind of like token emission scheme related to using a product like the other token holders are taking dilution um there's no way ever that money just like appears out of thin air um and so uh I think that is at least something to be very mindful of uh that

you know the way you design these things someone's going to pay a price if other people are receiving money so uh you know think about that yeah absolutely um you have been extraordinarily successful in kind of building this community of Dune visits as you call them I would actually struggle to to name one infrastructure project that kind of has a better Community than you guys um how did you do that let's do it and what are your learnings well thank you for that like so so for the first two years Dune was just mozami like the only we hired no one and a

submission you know have had no salary and very little salary and we didn't hire anyone after our first fundraise or anything like that so we're very lean but I think we had a very very deep passion for helping people on Dune and making them succeed like are telegrams and Twitter DMS and like we there were there weren't that many like there were pretty few users but we were extremely committed to making them succeed and we did very Hands-On support for helping people succeed and this includes several people that didn't know SQL but we like helped them learn sequels so that they could use their view right and and for instance to from then researcher at the Block and then now at uniswell p

he was like Hey this seems like a cool product can I get it in Excel and I was like no but I can learn you how to do SQL and we had like a bi-weekly call where I would like you know give him lessons in how to to your student uh so that was the level of commitment and I think that has been you know kind of snowballed in into what is the new community because you know our first Community manager uh bloxer uh he had that similar uh passion and I think every single person that has come into the Dune community and felt this support and people saying yeah let's get on a call you know let DM into to the late hours on like trying to make this query run uh

I think that has really you know compounded to to a culture where where people say oh yeah you know let me help you out and and I think one of the things I'm most proud of with everything we built is is really the Dune community and just like going to the Discord during this course like several thousand people but it's still like mostly just people asking about Aquarius and getting answer to those queries um it's not a ton of crap and you know I think it's it's still very much active even though prices are down 80 90 um and I think that comes from you know a passion for for really helping people and um being as you know uh there was this funny thing where like mods my

co-founder he recently realized he had like all his telegram notifications turned off uh but he had like an exception for one of our early users so that would like get straight to the home screen of his phone like if they dm'd him on telegram like it would pop up on his phone on a Friday night and he would like get in there and you know make that query run so so I think that you know passion that we put into it is is something that has actually escaped uh into what we're commuting yeah super interesting so so you're saying you didn't have to give thousand dollars to every Dune wizard to to use the product exactly not right awesome yeah I think maybe I guess are you

working on like specific things we know there was also the Dune con maybe you can also talk a little bit about that first conference but I think from what I hear it's a lot yeah it on the field like helping in Discord but you also have certain I don't know learning material like documentation is that something you're working on or how do you improve that even even further yeah no definitely uh we're working on a lot of educational efforts uh we have a big Community team now um we're doing meetups and yeah we did tune con which was a massive success in in Berlin a couple of months ago um so so we really tried to get people engaged and and help them out uh both sort of hands on but but definitely also

it's a little more self-serve with the educational series and whatnot um so we are working on several sort of bigger initiatives um it is one one thing that's you know honestly a challenge is like we were doing this like system migrations and like we had the v-bomb and then we have the V2 and like there's a different dialect of SQL and like you know these are kind of some of the the messy things of building a company where it's like oh yeah we want to have all the best educational resources obviously but then you know oh there there are different versions and which one you know can be supported and what features do we have today then what do we have tomorrow and and whatnot but um yeah we're certainly keep investing in in education and letting people

become powerful Wizards um and sort of leveling up and giving them Bounty opportunities and we have a job board and all these type of things and we have seen several people sort of pivot their careers into just doing this which is fantastic um and then yeah there are some you know I we touched upon it but the Dual API I think is huge uh huge game changer like the the what you can do with data in this space is going to be forever changed uh when you can just click a button and turn any query result on your internet endpoint that you can leverage for building or trading or researching or you know whatever you see fit uh so uh I'm pretty

pumped for that so SQL is um pretty straightforward in terms of you know programming languages or databases so if you know two things about databases you can carry it but still there's a lot of people who are kind of afraid of um code right and in principle it should be relatively easy or comparatively easy when compared with other programming instances to kind of open this to natural language processing kind of like far from alpha has done for Mathematica right have you looked into that because it would immediately

um balloon your target audience you know from a couple of thousand people to literally millions yeah great great question um take the the Big Challenge there is kind of going from I think it's like relatively easy to build a cool prototype that you know take some of the like most obvious things and and turns it into like a result and like creates a SQL query for you and underneath the Hood um so I think you know that is very cool I guess what I'm wondering is you know to what extent does that extend to like all kinds of weird messy things that that humans you know would actually put

into like a search box and uh how could use to what extent can you serve that into a compelling product experience and how many people will actually go and do that versus just like look at something that's kind of pre-curated um so I think for us like we're very mindful of just trying to do like you know the most obvious thing first and and we feel like still there's a lot of work to just like make the querying experience on Dune better I have clear tables have it run faster um you know some of these uh type of things that just gonna make writing SQL onion even easier even faster and more

powerful and then over time like we're excited about other ways of interacting with this data if that's Python and notebooks or um you know some natural language sort of experience but um I think it's it's it's still you know we we still think that we have some more basic things to to get to uh and and I'm also I think yeah one thing to be very conscious of will people actually use this product and like how good will it be and especially if you're thinking more of like a consumer audience it it needs to be very polished and I don't think you can have that many rough edges before people sort of just get annoyed and don't use it so yeah yeah fair enough

um in a way basically if you look at you and Trends I actually do this regularly at least every other day or so just because it's super interesting to kind of see what other people find interesting inquiry right so um in a way you kind of get a front row seat to developments in the ecosystem um so what's your take on where we're at and uh what what should we collectively pay more attention to yeah no I I definitely have a hope that that people can it'll be be a bit less on Twitter and be a bit more on on trending dashboards on Dune and we can get even better at surfacing like what you should actually

look at and and that uh hack can just as well be uh you know discovered by by looking at trending dashboards on doing as as on Twitter per se um but yeah I think a good thing to think about now is is kind of risks you know there's uh all these fallouts obviously a lot of this was actually not on chain products but sort of things uh just like in in the industry that that was uh off chain um but I think uh understanding you know the the risks uh I think is is a good uh idea and I guess people are now second guessing sort of everything and all their exposure and all kinds of

different products and What mechanisms kind of actually make sense so I feel like you know again this is one of the powerful things of the universe like instead of sticking your money into you know a black box and hoping that someone is taking care of it like you can actually do your own research in terms of what that box is and what's in it and you know what the exposure might be or not so um I feel like you know some of these uh so dissecting like as I mentioned maker now have actually done like a really good job at exposing their balance sheet but but that type of exercise for for more products I think makes sense what's you know in there if you're getting some

interest rate you know what what what's the reason for that you can actually see what kind of exposure sits on the other end right I guess one thing that we also shortly mentioned at the start was basically FTX and and um that Fallout as you mentioned so I guess one question is obviously Dune focused on unchain data um do you think Doon can also help these kind of centralized parties or do we need to like move everything on chain what's your what's your take on on that yeah I think we can we can definitely help um we have uh relatively new like labels data set that anyone can contribute to and uh

I'd say you know we have some work to do to maybe streamline this and make it easier for the exchanges to to actually show um you know what their addresses are but my sense is that you know the the actually legitimate exchanges now seem you know they they care a lot about the confidence that people have in in their business so they are quite Keen to to show you know what uh their exposures are and what they're on chain activity looks like um and definitely I think you know we have helped surface some of that and and the Dune Community you know one thing I find amazing is like whenever something happens there is instantly dashboards

you know right away that that track uh what's happening on chain related to whatever event including FTX and Alameda uh but um I think we we have a job to do to make it easier to sort of have the exchanges actually you know verify this or say you know these are our addresses and easier instead of just like sort of submitting a blog post or whatever with like a list you know actually make it into an experience where a user can say oh you know this is what they said their addresses are on here it's the related activity on chain right yeah but it can only ever be like a part of the puzzle right because there's no way of really tracking liabilities on chain depending I mean obviously some

liabilities you could but you know no no that's true that's true of course like you know uh and I think there will there will always be off chain lending and leverage and agreements and and whatnot so we can of course only track what's on chain but of course the one chain products uh there you can actually see the exposure so I guess the solution is both more info from from the of chain uh businesses but also hopefully a bit more Unchained uh usage as well yeah so I've kind of like what's what's next for June uh you have 50 people working on stuff so what can we expect just uh

uh you can expect uh the Dune API which uh is a very powerful um thing I think um and you can expect we are launching more team functionality so people can more easily uh collaborate uh both in the private and public setting so you can get you know into it with your team we're working on more ways for people to create data sets and contribute um you know make it easier to cast spells as we say in the Spellbook product create more of their own data tables um we're working on some very very exciting sort of ways to make this interacting with this data more performant um and sort of we are investing very

deeply in the querying querying experience on Dune um helping both in sort of the interface layer but also in the data and query engine layer to to make it the most performance experience out there that's one of the benefits of scale we have is that we you know you asked earlier like what what do the people do and part of the answer is like we're really so something that's not announced yet even but like we're going very deep into the stack and customizing it for the world of blockchains and I think it's a unique thing that we have this predefined data set that's like somewhat structured and we want to build something that's like uniquely tailored for that experience versus most

other data products are built for some arbitrary data set being plugged into it um because the nature of data sets has been very heterogeneous um so uh in general you know we're just trying to make it easier to do more experiments do more building and learning um and in various different ways so yeah that's what we're up to super exciting so where do where do people go to kind of learn more about you know get help building their first carries is is the Discord where everything where everyone is at yeah there is student.com where you can see all the dashboards see what's trending all that good stuff uh we have

a community tab on top right next to the new query button where you can um you know see all the learning material uh find the Discord and then connect with the community uh we're at tune analytics on Twitter uh where you can see a lot of what's what's being built uh we have a Weekly Newsletter with a lot of great breakdowns and Analysis Based on data for instance the new uniswap research post on like what happened with the uni token airdrop and what that turned into on chain so uh yeah we're pretty accessible it's uh if you're curious and and interested in data um I think we're pretty easy to find and uh hopefully will make your life easy

and exciting yeah awesome thanks so much Frederick for coming on I think this is a great place to wrap up so yeah we're excited to try out the API and uh yeah hope to have you on at some point again in the future thank you so much for having me and congrats on I don't know 478 episode or something is that where what we're at uh that's a very impressive consistency I think it's uh 472. almost 10 years now we've missed one week this is still a whole spot for us but yeah that's uh so impressive it's not to be underestimated how hard it is to do something for a long time so uh well done congrats to you guys

thank you Frederick