Summary
- Dune Analytics, or DUNE, is a blockchain data aggregator and querying engine. It provides analytics for Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Gnosis, and Solana crypto projects.
- Each query on Dune is visualized in a dune-like format with graphs and listings. These graphs produce a unique link that can be shared with other people. They are called “Dashboards”.
- Users can browse the most popular dashboards on Dune for NFT collections or DeFi protocols that are actually growing to support investment decision-making.
Blockchain is a trillion-dollar industry and traders need access to data to know when they should invest in.
Here’s an example: John wants to invest in NFTs but he’s unsure if we’re in the bear market and prices are low. How would John know that we’re in a bear market? He would look for volume data for NFT trading volume based on cumulative data.
The problem is that blockchain data is hard to obtain and we’d have to individually analyze each NFT platform to find out if their volume dropped compared to previous months. One tool that makes this easier is “Dune Analytics”.
What Is Dune Analytics?
Dune Analytics is a query aggregator, or a GitHub-like search engine for blockchain, that allows traders/ investors to query (search) data about any crypto project/coin on the Ethereum, Polygon, BSC, Optimism, Gnosis, and Solana blockchains that they’re interested in.
(For those unfamiliar with GitHub, it is an online software development platform where programmers can store and collaborate on software projects from anywhere in the world, much like how Google Docs enables writers from anywhere to collaborate on a writing assignment.)
Launched in November 2019 with the vision to make blockchain data more accessible to crypto enthusiasts, Dune is completely powered by its community who create the dashboards for easy data visualization. For example, think crypto is dead and DeFi is a ghost town? This dashboard on the total number of DeFi users over time shows otherwise.
A Dune Analytics dashboard created to show total DeFi users over time (Source: Dune Analytics)
The data derived from Dune Analytics is open-source and free to use, and users can share this data across the web and use it for their own personal trading activity.
Why Does Dune Analytics Exist?
Novice investors often buy Bitcoin (BTC) or other safe bets like Ethereum (ETH). These investors don’t need access to advanced data, but with the growing influence of crypto, there is a surge of professional traders who need access to trend data and analytics.
Until tools like Dune Analytics came on the scene, traders have had to manually research projects or run their own smart contracts. Now, not only does Dune aggregate this data in an SQL database format, it makes it easy to search for pre-existing queries, without users needing experience coding or querying SQL databases.
Here are some ideas of what Dune xyz can be used for:
- Finding NFT volume for different marketplaces.
- Discovering the highest-selling coins on DEXs such as Uniswap or Sushiswap.
- Tracking the biggest whale wallets on Ethereum and finding which coins they’re investing in.
- Querying the highest-traded NFT collections for the week, month, or year.
- Discovering new trends in smart contract creation.
How to Use Dune Analytics to Find Data Without Knowing Queries?
Finding data on Dune Analytics is super easy, and akin to a Google search.
If we try to run queries, we need to know the SQL programming language to write scripts for the smart contracts we’re interacting with. However, as mentioned, we can use the search engine to bypass that and find the data we need.
Many programmers have already run queries for all the popular DeFi coins, DEXs, NFTs, and other crypto-related projects, making it easy to use targeted keywords to discover those queries.
Here’s an example.
Dune Analytics NFT Queries
Let’s say we wanted to derive data from queries about DeGods, the largest Solana NFT collection by market cap that recently surpassed 1 million SOL volume.
If we input “DeGods” at the top-left in the search engine, we’ll see query suggestions that can produce different results:
The search engine makes it easy to locate crypto Dune data without writing code.
If we click on “DeGods – $Dust Transactions”, a query related to the Dust token native to the collection, we will find one query that takes note of the number of transactions for Dust:
Performing a simple query on the Dune Analytics platform.
We can safely ignore the script at the top and focus on the results below. The query states that there were a total of 5,610 transactions for the day, and that the script was last run 5 hours ago.
By the same logic, we can discover queries for all other blockchain projects. Simply use the search engine to generate the searches you need and in 99% of cases you will find the data you need.
Professionals who want to hide their queries can use a premium option. Dune Analytics pricing starts at $390/month and that includes hidden queries.
But Dune has another feature where you don’t even have to think about what to search for.
Trending Queries
Dune has a “Discover” section which is a Reddit-like part of the website where users can look at the most popular (trending) queries others have searched for, and see what they were able to pull out.
The trending queries on the Dune Analytics platform.
We can also select “New” queries and search through all the popular queries made by other users. If we locate something interesting in the trending category – such as “Ethereum Transaction Categories”, we’ll be presented with a large list of data & graphs:
Dune Analytics OpenSea and Dune crypto transaction data in one place.
The graphs above show data about NFT transactions, stablecoin transactions, ERC-20 transfers, and other useful data on the Ethereum blockchain.
The downside is that Dune Analytics does not provide real-time updates for these queries. If we open a query from 2 months ago, this data is already outdated.
Pro tip: We can get around the timestamp by re-running these queries once we enter them.
Another tip: Another thing to caution users about: some data about DeFi is prone to double-counting, for example tokens locked up in one project being invested into another project for yield farming, thus causing the overall DeFi ecosystem to show a larger number than it really should. Nuances like these should be taken into consideration by users.
Conclusion
Dune Analytics may not sound like the most user-friendly platform as it uses terminology like “queries” which may intimidate the average person. But think of Dune as the Google of blockchain data where we can find everything we need with a simple search.
The Dune Analytics API is publically accessible; just like all queries on the platform. All queries are open-source and sharable. The data we derive from the platform can help us hone our trading skills and discover trends in the crypto market.
