What is it? How does it work?

What is Dune Analytics, the company that earned unicorn status just three short years after its creation?

In this fast paced world of crypto, investors, analysts and crypto enthusiasts are starting to drown in a sea of ​​data. But luckily, Dune Analytics, now known as just Dune, offers a free tool that everyone has been looking for – a tool to get users the exact blockchain data they need.

Here we explain what Dune Analytics is, along with how it works.

What is Dune Analytics?

Dune Analytics is a data platform that crypto-asset analysts and investors use to research specific projects such as NFTs, DeFi platforms or blockchain ecosystems. Anyone can query the data and create visualizations using Dune.

The platform currently supports data from Ethereum – including layer-2 solutions such as Polygon, Optimism – Binance Smart Chain and Gnosis Chain.

Dune Analytics was created with the express purpose of making Web 3.0 data available to everyone. Dune Analytics allows anyone to publish and access crypto trends in real time. It is a community-based open source data provider, and it is freely available, so anyone can access data and publish it without registering or paying.

What brings Dune Analytics new to the crypto world is the fact that it makes crypto data available and consumable on the chain. Initially, the creators intended to create a tool that allowed anyone with an Internet connection to analyze a few dozen smart contracts products.

The service’s name, Dune, comes from the fact that their data cards look like dunes, and it also relates to Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel, Dune. It recently rebranded from Dune Analytics to just Dune.

The team behind Dune Analytics

Founded in 2018, Dune Analytics was launched in 2019 in Oslo, Norway by Fredrik Haga and Mats Olsen.

Fredrik Haga has an impressive background. He obtained his master’s degree in economics at the Norges Handelshøyskole (NHH) in Oslo in 2016. Haga also participated in two exchange programs at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016 and the University of Sydney, Australia, in 2013.

Dune’s co-founders worked at the same company in Norway, and they both decided to quit their jobs to create the data analytics platform.

Although the company was initially founded to work on Ethereum data, for months it was just a small business with a few paying customers. They struggled to get financing for months before Binance came forward.

In August 2020, the team received $2 million during the seed round. The platform became popular among those who were able to achieve insane percentage returns in 2020 with experimental financing protocols.

In November 2021, Dune Analytics raised more than $69 million during the Series B round. The team intends to use these funds to continue to grow and help educate and empower blockchain analysts.

What makes Dune Analytics unique?

Dune Analytics is a community-driven initiative. The data can be reused and is available to anyone. What makes Dune Analytics unique is that the platform does not offer datasets for specific projects like other companies. Instead, Dune Analytics allows anyone to question complex data, and it provides the tools to do so.

Dune’s vibrant community includes traders, analysts, enthusiasts and others who share their data analysis with everyone. The data is reusable and mixed to meet any user’s needs, which is why it is sometimes referred to as the GitHub for blockchain data analysis.

Dune replaced its closed, standard and expensive counterparts with open dashboards. The dashboards provided by Dune Analytics make it easy to understand and visualize complex data with easy-to-understand graphs and charts.

The dashboards you generate with Dune Analytics are posted all over the web, including on your personal website. And most importantly, anyone can use the Dune platform for free. Anyone can also use the dashboards posted on the platform for their own datasets.

You can use search queries to find information about something as diverse and popular as the NFT collections bought by top traders on OpenSea. You can also use it to find data about niches, such as Ethereum Name Service domains. There are many queries that can retrieve multiple datasets. If you don’t see one, you can create one.

How do you use Dune Analytics?

Anyone can use Dune Analytics by creating an account and using any of the popular Dashboards on the Discover tab. You see these dashboards under the “Discover” tab, and you can search for data using the search bar. You can search for the name of the protocol, token, or even the username that created the dashboard.

Data is displayed in lists or visualized in graphs and bar graphs. If you can’t find a query you want, you can create one. However, there are some limitations to what you can find.

Dashboards on Dune Analytics

To view any of the listed dashboards, you must click on the dashboard to view it. Dune does not store any blockchain state data. It only shows the Structured Query Language query results that were requested the last time Dune was accessed.

You can get more information by hovering over the cards. All queries are automatically updated when you view them. Note that refreshing may take some time, and you will be added to a queue. Your data can be out of date in as little as a few minutes to hours.

Although most of the features offered by Dune Analytics are free, it also offers a paid subscription.

The Dune Pro subscription costs $390 per month, per user. Premium users can skip the query queue to run parallel queries. Dashboards and queries are kept private, and data is exported to CSV files.

Write new queries and create dashboards

If you want, you can create your own SQL queries on the Dune Analytics platform.

To create a new query, you can do so by clicking on “New Query”. Note that you will need to create a free account on the Dune Analytics platform to create new queries.

First, you need to select the database for your query (Ethereum, Gnosis Chain, Polygon, Optimism OBM 1.0, Optimism OVM 2.0, BNB Smart Chain, and Dune Engine V2).

Use Dune Analytics for NFTs

Dune Analytics is a great platform that can be very useful for crypto businesses and anyone looking for blockchain data because it allows anyone to query, extract and visualize tons of data from the blockchain. It is a powerful tool that anyone who likes to work with data should do analytics for DeFi projects and NFTs. You will find many OpenSea dashboards on the platform.

Here are some examples of the most popular dashboards for NFTs:

OpenSea Top Trader Stats by @mtitus6 (Top Traders – Recent Purchases, OpenSea – Top 50 Traders)NFT Sales Data OpenSea by @cryptuschrist (Volume, Sales and Median Price, Top NFT Collections by Volume)OpenSea Data @pancakephd (active users, NFTs sell, volume, OpenSea volume per use) NFT market overview by @sealaunch (OpenSea volume and transactions, trending NFT projects, NFT market volume per day on Ethereum)

Dune Analytics provides a clear view of the market

The world of blockchain and everything in it is expanding rapidly. This is why we now need tools to help us better understand why and how DeFi protocols are evolving as they are. While on-chain data may not help with trading or spotting short-term trends, a tool like Dune Analytics can be very powerful in uncovering macro trends.

This will quickly give you a sense of whether the market has entered a bear or bull market, or give you answers about volumes and big shifts in trends. It can also help you identify when things are overheating.

With so much information available, you need to focus on making the most of it. The fact that you can create SQL queries on multiple networks adds to the power. Learn to do this, and soon you will have a much greater understanding of the market.

Dune Analytics can be intimidating for a new user, which is why the BeInCrypto Telegram group might be the place to go. Join the friendly community and learn, among other things, how to use Dune Analytics.

Frequently Asked Questions