This is epicenter episode 472 with guest Frederick Agha.
Welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the
Technologies project and people driving decentralization and the
blockchain revolution. I'm Felix.
And I'm here with free tarika errands today.
Today, we're speaking with Frederick haga.
Who is the co-founder of Dune analytics?
Doing is an analytics platform focused on blockchain Data.
Before we talked with Frederick about genetics, we'd like to
tell you about our sponsors this week.
Omni is your new favorite multi-chain, Mobile Wallet only
supports more than 25 protocols, so you can manage all of your
assets in one place, across all major EVMS, layer 2, is ZK sink,
and starting it coming soon and non EVMS.
But what's really special about obvious that you can do.
All the most important things in web three directly within the
wallet itself, want to get healed.
Omni allows you to get the best apis with zero fees in three
tabs beats taking liquid staking lending or yield vaults.
Need to exchange u.s. DC on EF to add someone Cosmos
on the Aggregates, all major Bridges and X's.
So you can bridge and swap across all supportive networks
in one transaction. Well, then FTS omnes offers the
broadest NFC support of any wallet.
So you can collect and manage your favorite entities across
all chains. In one place on the truly is the
best and easiest way to use web, three, and most importantly,
it's fully self custodial. Meaning, you never have to trust
anyone with your assets. Other than yourself.
If you want to use, you can even use on this Ledger Integrations,
are all your funds, stay on. Your Hardware voltage join tens
of thousands of this next generation.
Will it by downloading it today on iOS or Android at Omni dot
app. So welcome, Frederick to
epicenter. Thank you so much, very excited
to be here. Epicenter was one of my first
name means forces 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 of meet up in Def con
for in Prague. So, Really awesome to have you
on today and obviously you come a long way.
And I think that's also where we wanted to start, right?
Like basically how did you come up with the idea for doing kind
of like can explain a little bit?
What is you? And how did you get into crypto
and to build, Dune for sure. Yeah.
So me and my co-founder we were working at the big company back
in 2017 when the sort of hype happened.
For the I co-creation all that and we I was working full-time
on blockchain. I was already interested and
managed to sort of work on it because of all the interest and
then I met my co-founder. He was also interested and we
ended up forming a small team, doing a lot of prototypes and
playing around with blockchain and and building on the theorem
first and foremost and build prototypes and did hackathons
and all that. And then over time, we realized
that Third 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.
So but we were nevertheless just as excited about the technology
and the potential for open finance and programmable assets
on the internet and whatnot. So we started thinking about
problems to be solved. Really?
Space. And we had since we had built
and deployed some smart contract, we knew that getting
the data was was pretty clunky and hard and so that kind of
what seed the idea for starting June and then over time, we also
understood that the fact that this data is inherently open.
It's like a total game changer for how you can build data
product in this space and you know it's a huge Paradigm Shift
worse, previously all day. And all data tools is like in
closed environments like inside the and, you know, engineering
or product organization building web to product or inside of a
financial institution and the name of the game is really close
to the building tools around proprietary data sets and
whatnot. 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, a Aggregate
all of this knowledge and building that people do in the
space as opposed to defaulting to to private and we sort of
flipped it on its head and set its default public, right?
So that's kind of how we got started in.
And in the beginning, it was like really hard impossible to
raise any funds. We didn't have a salary for many
months and yeah, we traveled to a few of these, like, if a
ketones and I've come and whatnot on like, very tiny
budget, sharing Hotel bedrooms Watson me and just Try to find
anyone that wouldn't was interested.
It was hard because not that many products were actually live
with the usable products at the time, right?
So, the sort of Market was small, but they were dedicated
group of people that kept building and we're excited.
And those were the ones we tried to serve and think that has
turned out to be a good idea to bet on the people also betting
on this future. So in a way what you've done
this kind of you've aggregated a an enormous database that people
can easily carry right? And basically your products kind
of fall into two divisions. So the dashboards and the API,
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 a database, we do some
transformations to make it easier to work with.
So you have Smart contract events, you have other
abstractions on top of that as well, so you can see how this is
a unit of trade. But you can also say, oh, here's
a table with all the trades from all the decks has 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. 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 doing, you do something, someone else can see
it, they can see the sequel. They can Fork it, they can make
their own version and whatnot. So, it's all kind of remixable
open for anyone to, to On top of each other and then also we're
about to launch an API product, which has been highly demanded
for a long time. And essentially, you know, take
any of these endpoints, that underpin, these dashboards and
query results and turn it into programmatic programmatically
accessible API endpoints, which I think is going to be a massive
enabler for a lot of people to not have to do all of this,
tedious data infrastructure and Maintain so pipelines and
whatnot to, to query this data. Yeah, we're going to 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 doin. Do you have a favorite dashboard
yourself and then which one is it?
So, I've had a favorite for a while and I think it's maybe
even more fashionable right now, which is maker dolls, balance
sheet built on Dune and I think this was a particularly exciting
example, I think they built it out a couple years ago, really,
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 scrutinized ssible and the fact
that it's real time and you can see which assets, which
liability is all these things and the revenue right block for
block, you can see the revenue coming in and so you can do like
all the way from like 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 met. Break that analysts in the
traditional Equity world would figure out once four times a
year. Whenever the PDF drops, you
could say, oh, now that it's priced this relative to their
last quarter earnings, right? But like, literally you can do
that every 12 seconds only to block chain with with a 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 dude.
But this displayed, you know, the old world, kind of, but in
this new world of Our cellular on blockchains.
I think that was a very Illuminating example and then of
course with the FDX pole out recently and they're cooking a
books and whatnot or lack of books, all together, maybe
illustrates how insane it is that make your dough and
whatever other Financial product built on.
On the blockchain is there for people to all it to monitor
real-time. And there's no hiding, you know,
it's like completely illuminated and the theorem has been Call
this like Dark Forest but I think like doing this 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 go. There, you can look at what
other people are 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 dock pool Legree is usually used to, to refer to the member
though, right? It's not, I mean, so basically
everything that happens on blockchain is by default open.
I'm not going to say transparent because I totally hear you that
basically getting the data is not always easy.
It is possible though but maybe let's talk about the
difficulties that you guys have navigated the challenges that,
Do you have grown to with you and so basically why is actually
getting this data together? Why is it difficult?
Yeah, no it's a great question. 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 right
to the blockchain. Right.
But it's not necessarily optimized for getting data out
of it in large quantities, right?
So so already building a blockchain is a hard engineering
problem and the constraints that you would focus on is the
verify. Caishen how many can easily
verify it and then you can actually make transactions and
interact with it. So the whole sort of this called
Big Data, aspect of it is not really what that system is
designed for. And so that means that it's
actually a surprisingly complicated to get the data out.
And you need to go block for block and ask for all the
different things that happens in the chain.
And since like a, no, this is a piece of straw 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 it will the data just arrives.
Like things happen. There's where transactions that
stole the system. And I think the most extreme
example or clear, example of these things, are these sort of
get Forks, so something like, Finance.
Our chain or polygons that have tweaked the parameters of the
get node with essentially lower block time and higher
throughput. Right?
And so what happens then is that some of these nodes Have a
really hard time. Sort of, reproducing, something
that happened, I say, you know, a million blocks ago.
And so, it means that they're if they're blocked time is three
seconds, but they might spend. So, I spent like a minute
producing a trace of something that happened and I mean, it's
when your back feeling that chain like you, diverge from
head, if it takes one minute to get a In this produced, you
know, 30 or 20 blocks in that time, you've gotten one more
block and then you you 20 bucks behind right further behind than
what you were before. So since these are systems that
are not really built for taking the data out, you do have the
issue of like all these kinds of bottlenecks and quirks.
And so it requires a lot of hand-holding to just get the
data out and then of course, just like having a performance.
Infrastructure and system in place to efficiently query.
What's becoming a lot of data? And, you know, there's etherium.
But there's also these each other evm chains that typically
have more throughput and produces more data and then you
have things like Solana, which kind of thinking in less than a
week produced more data than the whole of the theories pastry.
So there are non trivial amounts of data as well to query.
Yeah, I totally get that. Maybe maybe let's dig down a
little bit deeper, though. Just I mean, maybe let's say
only Theory mm exclusively because I totally understand
that basically other chains with, you know, different
broadcast limits and so on have have higher mountains.
Let's say I have an archiver node running and that basically
gives me the state of each variable at each block, right?
So why why would it be Code for me to kind of run a query on
that archiver note. I mean, I don't, I mean running
an archiver. Note itself is a non-trivial
thing, right? But I mean if, if you're going
to do that, what exactly is the butter and egg?
For me, if I want to grab, like, say the uni swap volume for
specific token power over the last two years.
Yeah. So, you know you I think you
need to know then exactly what you exactly what you want to
look at. Which is also not trivial,
right? So you say, Okay, I want to look
at units per volume for last few years, okay?
That's, I don't know the exact number but it's probably at
least in the tens of thousands may be in the hundreds of
thousands of contracts. So we first need to figure out,
like, which contracts do I care about, which are definitely a
lot, because they deploy new contract for every Market that
That they create or every pair, right?
So so you need to somehow know what data you're looking for
from the node. And then of course you get that
then that in and of itself. Want, give it the answer because
you also for instance will need a USD price.
Like, if you wanted to aggregate all this volume, you need to
know, okay? If like you cat coin and do coin
or traded, what are those actually worked 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 to USD volumes.
You need to fetch that somewhere and and and join it and multiply
the amount. It's so you have that type of
problem and then you have all their sort of higher level
circulation problems where there is a lot of spam for instance.
So some will create some sense 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
1 billion dollars worth of volume, but it turns out it's
like, you know, just some folks training with each other on some
worthless token, right? So, There's also like that
element to it so I think it's like both technically
non-trivial. There's also a lot of context
that you need to to do this. So basically it's the
integration of different sorts of information into one database
together with kind of the categorisation and curation of
different contracts and feeds. Is that is that high-level
correct? Yeah I'd say so you know also
Sort of the benefit of what we do is that we fetch absolutely
all the data, right? And so, you can sort of have
that as a starting point, but if you interact with node, 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 handle 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 just like, oh, but actually, you
know, I want a question related to balancer pools, you know,
then you have like, a whole process going.
And so yeah, yeah, I think it's essentially just in theory,
doable, but in practice, like a lot of hard work and a lot of
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 do into V2.
Can you talk a little bit about what what you've changed there
and how it improves The Human Experience are also like what
was the problems with the dude experience so far?
Yeah, for sure. So we had a post request based
system for you. You'll be one which was a great
start for a noon. Great piece of technology, but
with a lot of data, it became a problem.
So basically a lot of queries would time out and like a
podcast type of system is good at for being fast on relatively
small amounts of data, but not great, when it comes to a lot of
data. And so there were a couple of
limitations in addition to like performance over large data set,
like you couldn't, you couldn't look.
Say like median gas price over the history of the earth, whom
the blockchain, we just time out, we run for like 30 plus
minutes and then you know, you wouldn't get a result.
There's also there was also the problem that like, each chain,
we added was a different database and you couldn't work
on across them. So you couldn't Benchmark data
on polygon and etherium, they had to be like separate queries
and then, furthermore, like all the data pipelines of creating
these tables that we have like that.
X trades and nft trades. And these abstractions I talked
about was like, very messy because this were like scripts
that pulled some data and sort of referencing each other.
Like very, very complicated to maintain and understand which
data relies on which data on what tables and and whatnot.
So essentially we've now launched do an engine V2 which
is based on like a data Lake. And more like a modern cloud
data warehouse architecture, where we have all the data for
all the different blockchains in like data Lake.
And then we have a gray engine on top of it, currently spark
base but we're also doing some exciting new things there and
essentially, allowing you to Traverse all the different
sources so you can Benchmark Solana and etherium, and
polygons and all these things in one.
Simple query, it allows Us to have way better pipelines and
checks and balances on how the tables are created.
And also we can now have committed Community
contributions on the data layer. So not only can people write
queries. They can also create new tables
with something with a product recalled spell book.
So people can then create all kinds of derive data sets that
are easy to query. They can write their own tests
and ensure that the data is of high quality.
And so, It's a system that's way easier to maintain.
We can have invite the community into contributing more and sort
of self-serving or two more use cases and then yeah, there's
some amazing performance benefits and sort of what the
typical modern data stack. Looks like, we're kind of
creating that. And enabling that for for the
community where you can do meeting gas price in, you know,
a couple of seconds or a few minutes.
At least, yeah. You just alluded to the fact
that you now also supports Alana, which is a new
development. So previously it was only a VM
chains. I and despite the fact that kind
of the block gas limits and block times kind of vary between
different evm chains and I assume the basic infrastructure
is fairly similar between all of these, how are things different
for Solana. And how did you make the
decision to support Solana over a number of other non evm?
They are one project that also have traction like Cosmos or
substrate, or Avalanche or similar?
Yeah, great question so. So first of all like we we want
to support all blockchains and everything that that's
interesting so it's not the goal in and of itself to limit it.
I think what we have cared a lot about is the user experience of
Using the data on you. And I think that's frankly, one
of the things we got right. Were, you know, 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 are
raised a ton of money. We didn't do that like we stuck
to the theorem where essentially no one would pay us to do this
but we figured, you know, this is where people are building, so
let's serve done and so for us The important thing is that
there's an ecosystem of developers of applications of
users and a communities that actually want to wear this data.
And, you know, do interesting things with it and then sort of
we do the work of the Integrations.
And as you alluded to, it's been waiting for us with evm chains
because all the infrastructure, all the processes are the same.
So when we add something like polygons like it is There's
definitely challenges whatever system one learns, but but, you
know, in Broad Strokes, a lot of the architecture and processes
are the same. So with something like sadhana,
you know, this was actually the first also blockchain.
We put on our new Unity to engine so we figured this was a
nice stress test to the system because it they produce a lot of
data. But we saw that there was a lot
of people building on it. There were actual products being
Built users using in them and then we decided to integrate it
and we honestly also have built out this new platform which has
been also a learning experience and something with had to work a
lot on and therefore have been painfully slow honestly
integrating some of these new blockchains but now the new
platform is getting into a more stable State and then we can go
more aggressively on integrating new.
Chains. So it's not something we
deliberately sort of try to avoid, but we try to make sure
that the ux, when we do integrate this good and that
there's an interested Community to work on top of it and of
course like the technical complexity place in if it's a
totally new system, then it is more work to do to get it right.
Cool. Yeah we wanted to talk a little
bit about its kind of tunes business model and also I guess
the user base. You mentioned already like the
community and everything. I think 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 three 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 Not surprising how much people of revenues are
there. Whatever.
You can you can tell us about kind of how this this all works.
We'd be happy to learn. Yeah.
Where do I start? I think we have built a very
strong community on June. I think we've actually and
without the token, which I think actually has been a good thing
for us, frankly, because there is like, a kind of proof of work
on getting into doing. You do have to, you know, make
some sacrifice, put in some work, and that has made our
community, very sticky and healthy.
I think, because people actually put in work to get there, Learn.
I think we we Empower a lot of people so as I alluded to
earlier like it's not only developers that use doing 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 to work on you and they
pick up bounties. They get a job like a lot of
people 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 getting like top jobs, right?
So I think that, that's very important part of it that I
often think of our community and sort of the UN team building the
product in terms of this Spider-Man meme where they're
like, oh so you know, you built a great tool, you help me do
this and we're like no you did like a lot of cool queries and
you helped us. So I think there's a lot of
mutual appreciation between the people building noon and our
community, which I think is a fantastic thing.
So in terms of Like how big it is, we have like a few thousand
people creating queries a month. We don't have like a huge user
base on the Creator side, but since doing is kind of like a
Marketplace all the way almost were, you know, people can come
in and see anything that's built is like your creator side and a
consumer side. And so we believe that if we
Empower creators Yes, they can make amazing things and a lot of
people can benefit from that. So we don't necessarily need
100,000 query craters, 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 and then some of those convert to
Craters, learn the craft and, you know, get into it.
So that's kind of the the dynamic we have about 50,000
dashboards on June underpinned by like 300,000, Aries.
So it's quite substantial. Yet.
So, I think the heart of the question goes to this.
So currently you operate under this, you know, subscription
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. And then this kind of, when you
compare this with your recent razors, Congratulations, by the
way. So you I raised repeatedly over
the last couple of years, so at first, it was two million than 8
million and recently, 70 million at a valuation of 1 billion.
So my question goes to this the and so the investment that's
been made was that an equity investment or was it a soft or?
I mean, basically it's kind of reframe this question since is
there a plan to introduce the token?
So, because basically it kind of, I struggled, who 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
whom that works like, the sale sales forces of the world.
But obviously your, your, your addressable Market is so much
smaller. So how does this, how does this
all fit together? Yeah, sure.
So let's start with like the business model, which I wish I
didn't intend to, to skip over from, from the previous
question. So essentially, you know what we
do is, we allow anyone to use this tool for free, we swallow
all the infrastructure costs, all the work in terms of making
this product, super useful, 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. It'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?
So these are kind of the three main Dimensions that we think
makes sense to to monetize alone.
And Think to back up a bit, there are different ways to
build the system and sort of say, you know, what do we kind
of giveaway and what do we maintain to make a business or
whatever? 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 this, 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 is our apoptosis 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. You know, we have almost 50
Engineers working full-time on this.
It's not a trivial problem and so that's the model we've taken
where we think the community can get a lot from this and we can
monetize the people that have extra needs in different.
Is but also have more of a business use case typically
rather than you know, just contributing.
So that's kind of the philosophy, we raise Equity.
If 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 will taking long-term Solutions and want to, you know,
the if we wanted to get rich as quickly as possible like Like we
would have done dude in a different way I have, but we
care about building something that is long term.
That is sensible. Even though prices are up a
hundred percent or down 90%, like, I don't really care.
And so 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 These two are creators as much
as possible, Wizards building on their own and so it will always
be mindful of the toolkit and when we can do, but I think it's
also from our side like ensuring that we don't get ourselves into
weak spot where we fall prey to some high and then suddenly like
no six months later, you're in a really bad spot because you did
something that actually doesn't make that much sense.
And also like just pragmatically solving problems every single
day and ensuring that were massively building something
useful for For the community and you are.
So very, I've used your dashboards and I've bet my own
dashboards and Doin is such a fantastic to it.
And I don't, I mean, this in the least At first I know this
sounds a little bit adversary, but basically, so I'm a little
bit struggling to understand where your moat comes from.
Right. So basically, even if, I mean,
you have 50 engineers and maybe we'll talk about what they do on
a day-to-day basis, in just a little bit.
But say, your Paying your engineers really good salaries,
a 200k here, that's 10 million a year for 450 Engineers, right?
And then maybe add 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 two to recreate
something like like June, but you still have this enormous
valuation. So basically, Where's this
expectation of profit from the VC's coming from?
Yeah, don't get great question. I'm not going to comment
particularly on your estimates of how much it cost you to run
doing. But fair enough, 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 or a VC or you know, other type of players like
we have big, you know, big brand names and what not playing in
the space now you care about this data like it's important
for your investing, for your running, all of your business
and what not? And I think, you know, the
things I mentioned like having more performance on working with
this data, having a private environment.
But we're your team can collaborate with this data
exporting, this data, through API, and these type of things.
I think it's like massively useful and people will pay for
that convenience. 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 kind of Made is
like we say, OK, we will swallow all these bills will make the
system run. We will ensure that like
everything is up and running and correct, which is a massive
effort. And then I think there's, you
know, a lot of demand for built getting more out of that tool
and I don't think that is you know, necessarily like we care
deeply about the free experience some June 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.
It's like we will make you more powerful over time and let
people pay for extra features and I think it's important sort
of context are as well. I'd 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 these five people is going to become
like thousand and thousands and tens of thousands and whatnot
you know over get over the years and and that's still the play.
We're doing. Yeah.
Don't don't get me wrong. I think you and is a basically
useful to it. Totally.
How do you feel about the comparison that sometimes made
with Bloomberg terminal? I think that's an understatement
of what junice and can be, so I think, As I alluded to earlier,
like the fact that this data is open is like it total talking
game changer. And Bloomberg is a fantastic
product for a niche. In the finance world that you
know care, deeply about having a 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. I think the That you can have
open-ended interaction with this data as like together with the
rest of the world is just enormous.
And so I don't think I'm like, I really don't think there's Any
product out there that is comparable to what we're doing
because it it has some of the aspects of like a GitHub where a
lot of people come together and build on each other and, you
know, it's a tool for a for developers and then you have the
product of that which gets up doesn't have.
But which kind of, you know, it's more of the bluebird thing
with like, oh there's like a bunch of charts and a lot of
people can just look at which is incredibly useful.
But then you also have Have you know the fact that this is
public and which I think is a huge deal and I think big kind
of Technology, paradigms typically, what you see succeed
is like someone 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.
We're not trying to recreate Bloomberg, recreate some tool
that people had for their Product analytics and they would
like pipe there, whatever. Sort of usage data from their
website into to like that. Like, we're trying to build
something that is uniquely enabled by and driving open data
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 p.m. 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 audience.
Here and and of course, not every single person in the world
will go there, but it's an opportunity and and I think that
is 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 I can also see how what traction that smart
contract. God, 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 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 real good ones. And I think what we're enabling
in that is that you can actually dissect.
What worked not just with the thing.
You built yourself, but with everything that anyone ever
built, and then you have this amazing through a feedback loop
and evolutionary Force. That's just So much faster and
so much. 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 want to dive a little bit
deeper into that. So we had mentioned a little
bit, right? The maker towel, balance sheet.
We have also mentioned kind of other dashboards that have been
built will 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 that hasn't
happened yet, what what you would like to see build on June?
I guess there's kind of like two different things.
One is or two different worlds. One is when we launched API,
which is going on, but end of the Air Force officer, we have
kind of like a waitlist private bitter right now, you know,
that's going to be an explosion of opportunity.
But inside of the do nap, I think frankly I didn't think
that that, in many cases the The crypto Community should learn a
little bit more from the sort of old world.
I think a lot about, you know, what our features and what are
bugs of the old world. And I think still too many
crypto people think there's only bugs, you know, in the old
world, and everything needs to be reinvented.
And I think maybe, you know, they're sure they are some bugs
that I think we have an interesting new design space.
But there might be some features after, you know, the industries
that have been around for a while and I thought still think
kind of Startup 101 metrics are underrated, what what's the
attraction of your product? What's the user base?
What's the retention of that user base?
You know what's the distribution of activity across different
users? And I still think what like a
typical startup p.m. would want to look at is actually not that
far from what people should look at in crypto as well.
And like, do the boring stuff just like figure out.
Are we retaining users? It's like, well, this person
come back or not and if they don't come back like why, right?
So I think that is still a bit under appreciated and and people
like to look at sort of tvl and some high-level, like, trading
volume, which is probably better metric than TBL at least.
But, you know, I think that some of those kind of more sobering
metrics is something. I'll be nice to look at.
There was also a, like, a very cool.
Longer for research piece by a Community member last week on,
just like the Unis Unis are drop.
And you know what did that turn into?
You know, those are some pretty sobering metrics in there where
it's like okay I can't remember the exact metrics but it's
something like 90% Soul more or less instantly it's like seven
percent of all the airdrop holders, still hold the token.
And like a tiny fraction of that, sort of increase their
exposure and an even smaller, smaller portion participating
governance. Right?
Only want your time to shine bit and is the units of volume
driven by people that Got the Arab know like that also fell
from like 60% a year ago or something to like 5% now.
Right. So so it didn't retain users.
Most people just saw it does 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 do 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 be honest with himself, and I think, obviously,
like these times when prices are down the sentiment this down,
like, you kind of have to do these things and they matter, I
guess less when everything is up anyway.
So I feel like, you know, in general like like being a bit
hard on yourself and thinking about About the the stickiness
of your product Roi of your activities and in that post,
maybe we can link to it. You know, there are other
airdrops as well that you can look at the metrics and just see
for yourself. Like, you know, did they
actually engage the community by doing this?
Or did they not them? If they didn't?
Like, it's an incredibly expensive one of marketing gate
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.
So yeah, I think it's good timing for just like reading up
on some sort of bone and warm and start to think about Roi of
your initiatives. So user experience and a good
hard look in the mirror. I mean clearly that's super
advantageous for projects. Do you think there's something
for the ecosystem that the ecosystem can use to its
Advantage? Because obviously, I mean,
volatility in crypto is large, despite the fact that in
principle not of the data is public.
So I mean obviously there's some data that That's not looked at
all that that that kind of subject to externalities.
Do you think we can kind of Leverage Yoon to that end as
well? Yes, you can definitely learn a
lot from from history, right? And I think it's probably a good
now. We've had a lot of lessons there
and the pace has been incredibly High.
You have had prices going up and prices crashing down, and you
have all these systems that have been built and all these things
that happened in drops and vampire attacks and whatnot.
So I think it's probably a good time to be a ghost.
Student of the unchain activity, right?
And, and maybe you don't even have to be an engineer to do
that, right? But if you're looking for
products to build, I think it's like an amazing time for
learning some lessons and there's been a lot of stress
tests and I think now instead of just the end, you know, the fire
and ft project being drawn together in the week and then
racing ten million dollars in two weeks.
You know, people you can actually sit down and say, okay,
you know, did any of this actually work order?
Interesting pieces are so I don't know exactly what to look
at or not, frankly, you know, but but I would be mindful of,
especially this like, you know what, I think one thing that's
on the rated it, but 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 done bhushan. There's no way ever that money
just like, appears out of thin air.
And so, I think that is, at least something to be very
mindful that, you know, the way they designed this things,
someone's going to pay a price. If other people are receiving
money. So, you know, think about that.
Yeah. Absolutely.
You have been extraordinarily successful and 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.
How did he do that? It's do it.
And what are your learnings Well, thank you for that.
So so for the first two years doing was just matzo me like the
only we hire no one and as I mentioned, you know, have had no
salary and then very little salary and we didn't hire anyone
after our first fundraiser or anything like that.
So we're very lean. But I think we had a very, very
deep passion for helping people on do and making them succeed
like our telegrams and Twitter. DM sand.
Like we, there were the word that Like, they were pretty few
users but we were extremely committed to making them
succeed. And we did very handsome support
for helping people succeed and this includes several people
that didn't know sequel, but we like help them learn sequels so
that they could use their view right.
And and for instance, t0 from them researcher at the Block.
And then now at Uni sloppy, 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 Sequel.
And we had like a biweekly call where I would like give him
lessons in how to use steel. So that was the level of
commitment and I think that has been you know kind of snowballed
into what is to do in community because you know, our first
Community manager for Brock sir, he had that similar passion and
I think every single person that has come into the doing
community and felt this Court and people say, yeah, let's get
on the call. You know, let DM into to the
late hours on like trying to make this query run.
I think that has really, you know, compounded to a culture
where people say oh yeah you know let me help you out.
And I think one of the things I'm most proud of with
everything we built is really did you in 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 queries and getting answer to those queries.
It's not a ton of crap and, you know, I think it's still very
much active even though prices are down.
It is 90% And I think that comes from A passion for really
helping people. And being as you know, there was
this funny thing where like knots my co-founder, he recently
realized he had like all his telegram notifications turned
off. But he had like an exception for
one of our early users. So that would like get straight
to the home screen. Obvious phone, like, if they DM
the him on telegram, like it would pop up on his phone on the
Friday night and he would like get in there and Make that query
run. So I think that passion that we
put into it. This is something that has
actually escaped into what your community.
Yeah. Super interesting.
So you're saying, you didn't have to give thousand dollars to
every Dune wizard, to, to use the product.
It's like, you're not right. Awesome.
Yeah, I think maybe I guess I working on like, specific
things. We know there was also, did you
income, maybe. You can also talk a little bit
about that give first conference, but I think from
what I hear is a lot in on the feel like helping and discard.
But do you also have certain I don't know, learning material,
like documentation, is that something you working on or how
do you improve that even even? Further.
Yeah, no, definitely. We're working on a lot of
educational efforts. We have a big Community team.
Now we're doing meetups and yeah, with the tune calm, which
was a massive success in Berlin couple months ago.
So we really try to get people engaged and help them out both
sort of handsome but definitely also more self-serve with the
educational series and whatnot. So, Are working on several sort
of bigger initiatives. It is one thing that's, you
know, honestly a challenges like we were doing this like system,
me migrations. And like we had the Viva man,
the mayor V2 and like, there's a different dialect of SQL and
like, you know, these are kind of some of 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, there are different versions and which one
you know can only support. And what features do we have
today than what What do we have tomorrow and whatnot?
But yeah, we're certainly keep investing in education and
letting people become powerful Wizards 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 and
to just doing this which is fantastic.
And then yeah there are some we touched upon it but the do napi
I think is huge, huge game changer like the what you can do
with data and the space is going to be forever changed.
When you can just click a button and turn any query salt on the
internet and point that you can leverage for building or trading
or researching or, you know, whatever you see fit.
So I'm pretty pumped for that. So, as SQL is 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
code, right? And in principle, it should be
relatively easier. Comparatively easy when compared
with other. Many instances to kind of open
this to natural language processing.
Kind of like what from alpha has done for Mathematica, right.
Have you looked into that because it would immediately
balloon your target audience, you know, from a couple of
thousand people to literally millions Yeah, great.
Great question. Think the the Big Challenge
there is kind of going from, I think it's like relatively easy
to build a cool prototype that you take some of the like most
obvious things and and turns it into like a resultant and like,
creates a SQL query for you and the underneath the hood.
So I think that is very cool. I guess what I'm wondering is
you know, to what extent That extent you like all kinds of
weird messy things that humans, you know, with actually put into
like a search box and 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.
So I think for us like we're very mindful of just trying to
do like, you know, the most obvious thing first, and we feel
like still, there's a lot of work to just, like, make the
query experience on dude, better have clear tables, have it run
faster, some of these type of things that just gonna make
writing SQL on you 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 notebooks or You
know, some natural language sort of experience, but I think it's
still, we still think that we have some more basic things to
get to. 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 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 fan of. Anyway 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 in Korea.
Right? So in a way you kind of get a
front row seat to developments in the ecosystem.
So what's your take on where we are at?
And what should we collectively? Pay more attention to?
Yeah. No.
I definitely have a hope that that people can be a bit less on
Twitter and be a bit more on on trending dashboards on doing.
And we can get even better at surfacing like what you should
actually look at. And that hack can just as well
be, you know, discovered by looking at trending dashboards
on doing us as on Twitter per se but yeah, I think a good thing
to think about now is, is kind of risks.
You know, there's all these pullouts.
Obviously, a lot of this was actually not on chain products,
but through things just like in the industry, that, that was of
chain, but I think understanding the risks, I think it's a good
idea. And I guess people are now
second-guessing, so everything and all their exposure and all
kinds of different products. And what may The isms kind of
actually make sense. So I feel like, you know again
this is one of the powerful things of doing.
It's like instead of sticking your money into 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 I feel like it all some of these sort of dissecting.
I as I mentioned maker, Dow have I actually don't like really
good job but exposing their balance sheet, but that type of
exercise for more products, I think make sense.
What's in there? If you're getting some interest
rate, you know what what's the reason for that?
You can actually see what kind of exposures sits on the other
end. Right, I guess.
One thing that we also shortly mentioned at the start, was
basically FTX and, and that Fallout as you mentioned.
So I guess one question is obviously Dune focused on on
chain data. Do you think do and 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
that? Yeah, I think we can, we can
definitely help. We have Relatively new like
labels datasets that anyone can contribute to.
And I'd say you know we have some work to do to maybe
streamline this and make it easier for the exchanges to do
actually show. You know, what their addresses
are but my sense is that, you know, the the actually
legitimate exchanges now, see him.
You know, they care a lot about confidence that people have in
their business so they are quite The king to, to show, you know
what their exposures are and what their own chain activity.
Looks like and definitely. I think, you know, we have
helped surface some of that and you community.
One thing I find amazing is like, whenever something
happens, there is instantly dashboard, you know, right away
that track, what's happening on chain related to whatever event
including FDX, in Alameda. But I think we have a job to do
too. Make it easier to sort of have
the exchanges, actually, you know, verify this or say you
know, these are or addresses and easier.
Instead of just like sort of submitting a blog post or
whatever would like a list, you know, actually make it into an
experience where a user can say. Oh, this is what they said,
their addresses are on. Here'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, Jane
depends. I mean, obviously some
liabilities you could but, you know, no, no, that's true,
that's true. Of course, like, you know, and I
think there will always be off chain lending and leverage, and
agreements, and whatnot. So we can, of course, only track
for some chain but of course, the one chain products there,
you can actually see the exposure.
So I guess the solution is both more info from from the Of chain
businesses, but also hopefully a bit more on chain usage as well.
So it's kind of like what's next for June?
You have 50 people working on stuff, so what can we expect?
Yes, you can expect the June API, which is a very powerful
thing I think. And you can expect, we are
launching more team functionality.
So people can more easily collaborate both in the private
and public setting. So you can get, you know, into
it with your team or working on more ways for people to create
data sets and contribute, make it easier to cast spells as well
as Say in the Spellbook product create more of their own data
tables. We're working on some very, very
exciting sort of ways to make this interacting with this
state. I'm more performant and sort of
we are investing very deeply in the quarian querying experience
on doing helping both in sort of the interface layer but also in
the data inquiry, engine layer, to make it the most performance
experience out there. That's one of the benefits of Of
the scale we have is that we you know, you asked earlier like
what do people do and part of the answer is like we're really
something that's not announced yet even but like your 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 with other data
products are built for some arbitrary data, set being
plugged into it because the nature of datasets has been very
heterogeneous. So in general, we just trying to
make it easier to do more experiments, do more building
and learning 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 do
not get help building. Their first carries, is the
Discord where everything where everyone is at?
Yeah, there is doing.com where you can see all the dashboard,
see what's trending, all that, good stuff.
We have a community tab on top, right next, to the new query
button, where you can no see all the learning material, find the
Discord and connect with the community.
T. We're at June analytics on
Twitter where you can see a lot of what's being built.
We have a Weekly Newsletter with a lot of great breakdowns and
Analysis Based on data. For instance, the new units walk
research post on the like what happened with the uni token
airdrop and what that turned into on chain.
So, yeah, we're pretty accessible.
It's if you're curious and interested in data, I think
we're pretty easy to find and hopefully we'll make Our life
easy and exciting. 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 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?
We're at that's very impressive consistency.
I think it's 172 is almost 10 years.
Now we've missed one week. This is still a sore spot for
us. But yeah, we missed one.
That's so impressive. It's not to be underestimated.
How hard it is to do something for a long time.
So well done. Congrats to you guys.
Thank you, Frederick. Thank you for joining us on this
week's episode. We release new episodes every
week. You can find And subscribe to
the show on iTunes Spotify, YouTube SoundCloud or wherever
you listen to podcast. And if you have a Google home or
Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of
the epicenter podcast, go to epicenter, .t V /, subscribe for
a full list of places where you can watch and listen, while
you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get
new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to
interact with us guests or other podcast listeners, you can On
Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes helps people
find the show and we're always happy to read them.
Well thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week.
On Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes helps people
find the show and we're always happy to read them.
Well thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week.