Making blockchain data accessible: Our investment in Dune Analytics

By Urvashi Barooah

One of the hallmarks of blockchain and crypto is that every transaction, i.e. every purchase and sale of an asset, is recorded on-chain on a public ledger. This means in contrast to traditional finance where data is fragmented, opaque, and inaccessible, blockchain data is publicly available for anyone to use. At least in theory. In practice, making sense of raw ethereum data is challenging. For an average non-engineer like me, I wouldn’t know where to start.

We are now at a point where crypto is taking off massively. New Dapps are being created weekly. NFTs are taking the art, gaming, and creator economy worlds by storm. DeFi is reinventing traditional finance enabling users to borrow, lend and trade assets without any centralized intermediary. And this is just the beginning. With every new application or protocol or L2 that is created, the amount of data generated multiplies. Keeping up with this data — for users of crypto and for investors that want to trade on these trends — is critical.

Enter Dune Analytics.

Dune is on a mission to make crypto data accessible. They take smart contract data and turn it into a human-readable format that anyone can query and analyze using SQL. Want to know how many DeFi users are out there? Which crypto wallets have the most traction? Which NFTs are most widely owned? Or how stablecoin supply has evolved over time? You can do all of that on Dune with just a few lines of code. Users can run queries on blockchain data, create live dashboards and share their work with the world. Dune is building the most powerful and flexible interface for accessing blockchain data.

While a number of crypto analytics platforms have cropped up recently, what sets Dune apart from the others is that it looked less like a Bloomberg terminal and more like GitHub. All dashboards and sql queries written by users are publicly available so anyone can fork someone else’s dashboard and create their own. This has led to a vibrant grassroots community of crypto enthusiasts, analysts, investors and protocols themselves creating and sharing their work with each other. The Dune discord is buzzing with community members giving each other feedback on their work and crypto projects posting jobs for analysts to track their product on Dune.

What makes Dune all the more special is their team. Co-founders Fredrik and Mats have been building Dune since 2018, persevering through a long crypto winter as a two-person team. From our first meeting, we were struck by their thoughtfulness around product design, their passion for driving data transparency in crypto and their deep understanding of data transparency in crypto — as well as their knack for creating a community around this mission. Redpoint has invested in a number of category defining companies in the data stack including Looker and Snowflake, and we recognized in Dune the potential to become the standard for accessing blockchain data in the web 3.0 world. We are excited to participate in their Series A alongside Union Square Ventures, Dragonfly Capital and Multicoin Capital.

Dune is hiring for engineering roles across their stack. Check out their job board here or drop me a note if you’d like to discuss!

Source: https://medium.com/redpoint-ventures/making-blockchain-data-accessible-our-investment-in-dune-analytics-2ffffc46269?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency