In the previous episode with James Ross, we talked about tools that can help users think and analyse before transacting on-chain. If you are working on helping users analyse blockchain data and building agents that make it easier, we can help. Please drop us a line at venture@decentralised.co.
Hello!
I spoke to Mats Olsen, co-founder and CTO at Dune, last week. I didn’t really know that apps getting real-time data is a problem that remains only partially solved. Many teams build custom indexing solutions for themselves, resulting in replicated effort across the industry. What if there were an infrastructure layer that did most of the work for apps, ensuring they didn’t have to build the data pipeline from scratch? That’s what Dune strives to do.
Dune started in 2018 with two founders trying to read data from blockchains. With 60 employees and a $70 million Series B, Dune is now one of the go-to analytics platforms in crypto.
To me, one of Dune’s biggest wins is creating a community of analysts that produce high-quality dashboards without having to incentivise them with anything. The industry itself incentivises Dune content creators with jobs and recognition on X, which goes a long way in building their personal brand. Every query behind every dashboard is open for scrutiny, ensuring accuracy through collective vigilance.
Dune stores massive amounts of data from blockchains in structured tables. It allows anybody who can write SQL queries to fetch this data, perform various operations, and show this data visually through dashboards. But what else can you do with it? Turns out, you can build plumbing that takes this data to crypto apps in real-time. So if you are a DeFi app that wants to show user transaction history, Dune’s Sim APIs can help you with that.
The shift in crypto's user base drove this evolution. Early adopters were technoanarchists who cared about decentralisation and immutability. Today's users just want apps that work. They'll authenticate with Face ID and click buttons without thinking about private keys. This isn't necessarily bad; it's how technology reaches mainstream adoption.
But there's tension between serving builders who care about decentralisation and meeting users where they are. Dune chose the pragmatic path to focus on solving real product problems. While other data companies experimented with complex token economics, Dune built the infrastructure that teams actually needed.
We have been talking about M&A recently and how teams with cash are using acquisitions as a shortcut to build moats. The acquisition of smlXL is yet another example of that. Instead of building real-time indexing from scratch, Dune found a team that had already solved the technical challenges and integrated their technology. The result is an indexing product that enables developers to go from zero to a full application backend in just minutes. The alternative is for applications to fetch the data from your own nodes and maintain that infrastructure.
Dune's bet is that the teams who solve these fundamental infrastructure problems today will power the applications that bring crypto to a billion users.
Signing out,
Saurabh Deshpande
Share this post