GM
Welcome to issue #61 of Dune Digest!
We’ve got some serious data and dashboards for you this week, but first we’d like to share a message with you from our CEO Fredrik Haga on the past, present and future of Dune at the end of a turbulent year.
Keep on keeping on
A message from Dune’s CEO Fredrik Haga
2022 is coming to an end, and what a year it has been.
Inflation is growing, stocks are down, and the crypto bear market has returned. Frauds have been exposed, hype has washed away and easy mode is over.
Nevertheless, I’m proud to say that we’re entering our fifth year of operations, and Dune keeps on keeping on.
Hype, crypto prices and macro conditions always come and go, but at Dune there’s something that never changes:
Our focus on relentlessly building something useful for the long term.
The important thing is to keep on keeping on, no matter what.
Here’s a quick recap of Dune’s 2022……
We started 2022 by announcing our Series B, which turned out to be well timed.
A year later I’m proud to say that I’m the owner of a real estate empire in the Bahamas we still have more money than we raised left in the bank.
We started from the bottom and have not forgotten the bear market we were born and raised in.
For our first 3 years of operation we burned through a grand total of $660k, and we’ve stayed lean and humble.
This means that we now have a great foundation to stay alive, thrive, build and keep serving the community for many years to come - independent of the market.
What did we get done in 2022?
2022 was a year in which we built out important foundations that will allow our platform to go from strength to strength in 2023.
Here are a few product highlights:
Kicked off the year by integrating the most challenging blockchain a crypto data product can take on, Solana
Launched our new data platform, Dune Engine v2, the foundation of a faster and more scalable future
Built out Spellbook to let the community contribute to and manage datasets
Ramped up the integration pace, we’re now at 10 different blockchains on Dune with millions of smart contract decoded tables and hundreds of easy to use spells
Taken the first steps toward enabling the community to bring their own datasets with Flashbots MEV data and Reservoir NFT data
Launched Teams, the foundation for enhanced Wizard collaboration
We also overhauled our paid plans for the first time. With 3 new tiers, you can now get much more computational juice from Dune according to your performance needs and means.
It’s important to note that the core experience on Dune will always remain free, and see constant improvement.
You can read more about how we think about paid products here.
In other news, this year the Dune team has gone from 18 to almost 60 people.
Headcount, along with funding, is a common vanity metric for startups.
I’m not per se proud of growing our headcount, but rather proud of how much we've achieved relative to our headcount while scaling quickly!
The Wizard Community
We’ve also kept busy beyond product and engineering.
Educational efforts have been taken to a whole new level, making it easier than ever for anybody to become a top tier Wizard, and we’ve been doubling down on quality content through this newsletter and our blog.
We also met more Wizards IRL than ever before during the highlight of the year - DuneCon!
600 Wizards showed up at Funkhaus in Berlin to vibe and geek out over data, dashboards and the crypto industry. The talks and energy were amazing, and resulted in a mind-blowing NPS score of 82.
Not only did the Dune team keep on keeping on, the community did as well.
While crypto markets and products were down 70-90% we kept seeing all time high levels of query and dashboard creation as recently as November.......
I’m so inspired by your persistence!
In 2022, several Wizard rockstar success stories also emerged.
Merely a year after creating his Dune profile, Hildobby landed a top job at Dragonfly.
New Wizard on the block Kingjames23 made headlines across practically every single mainstream media outlet with his Big Brand NFT revenues dashboard. Not long after he joined RTFKT.
There are many more examples of Wizards who are building not only dashboards, but amazing careers off the back of their hard work on Dune.
Struggles of 2022
Of course, it hasn’t all been roses.
At the peak this Autumn, we were executing over 10 million SQL queries a month and this year we’ve swallowed 7 figures worth of infrastructure bills for the community.
Some of our old systems faltered, and needed upgrades.
Regretfully not all of them went smoothly. It has occasionally been rocky, and the Dune team have spent many sleepless nights putting out fires to get our service back in action.
We sincerely apologize to anyone affected and are very glad we now have a much stronger foundation for the future.
November saw the launch of our new paid plans and there’s a lot of work for us to do on these. We’ve spent the last month gathering and structuring feedback from the community.
We’re already looking into improving the plans by making them easier to understand, packing more value and new features into each tier!
Bring it on 2023
After months in beta we’ve decided that Spark SQL is not the right long term solution for Dune.
In a matter of months we’ve built out and launched the alpha version of a brand new query engine we run end to end: Dune SQL.
Alpha testers are already mind blown by how fast their queries run, and it’s hard to overstate how excited we are about what this will empower our community to do.
While we’ve built out many important foundations this year, we think 2023 will be the year when the Community really experiences the true power of them. As our engineer Håkon put it:
We’re now in a place where you see the first few towers from the Atlantis city emerge from the sea, and soon the whole city will emerge in all its glory.
Expect major new parts of the city to break the surface already in January - you won’t be disappointed!
Challenge accepted
Dune was born and raised in the bear market of 2018. We went all-in on making crypto data accessible amid a bleak market sentiment.
In 2020-2022 it was a roaring bull market and everything was up and to the right. The good times are over and we’re back on hard mode - challenge accepted yet again.
We’re excited to keep on keeping on, even through a multi-year bear market. Prices go up and down, but regardless… the data must flow!
Merry Christmas!
Fredrik
Dune Co-Founder and CEO
Now, onto the week’s data……
TwitFi
There have been many attempts to link web3 apps to the giants of web2, and one such attempt is the recently launched Twitfi.
TwitFi describe themselves as:
“A web 3 social networking service with the GameFi feature”
Users mint bird themed NFTs, then connect their wallets with both TwitFi and their Twitter accounts. When they’re all set up, they can Tweet with the #TwitFi hashtag and earn $TWT game tokens.
A dashboard by @ahkek shows us some key stats so far, let’s take a look……
Firstly, users can either mint a “common” egg free, or pay to mint a “rare” egg which has a higher earning potential. So far over twice as many rare eggs have been minted:
With a minimum price of 0.1 $ETH, this generated a significant amount of mint volume - over $1.8 million’s worth:
So once users have the egg and “hatch” it into a certain bird, they can deposit it into the game and start earning.
Although over 16k eggs have been minted, only <5% of them have been deposited into the actual game…..
So where are they going? Many seem to be less interested in tweeting to earn than selling on the secondary market - with volume peaking yesterday at over 43 $ETH
At the same time a lot of users have been claiming their earned $TWT while the price has dropped by over 75% over the past 3 days:
Overall this seems like a mixed bag so far.
It is quite an interesting model though, with a fairly seamless integration with Twitter’s platform and a novel mechanism for incentivising usage.
For much more, check out the full dashboard by @ahkek……
NFT Marketplaces
We regularly cover NFT marketplaces, especially when an amazing new dashboard comes out.
This new dashboard by @jhackworth is one of the most comprehensive yet, let’s take a quick look at some key figures…..
A little over 2m addresses have bought an NFT on Ethereum. Of those 96.4% have used OpenSea at some point:
OpenSea has been challenged this year like never before though.
From the beginning of 2022 through to the middle of Q2, OpenSea reliably accounted for 90%+ of total volume.
Through Q2 & Q3, X2Y2 started to gain market share, and in Q4 Blur exploded onto the scene.
From November onwards OpenSea saw <50% of total volume for the first time, and over the past 2 weeks that has dropped as low as 30%:
OpenSea still sees a large majority of trades and unique users, and seems to still have the most mass appeal by far.
An interesting part of the dashboard looks at the “power law” of different marketplaces, measured by the % of total volume & trades driven by the top 250 addresses.
On Blur - over 50% of volume & almost 10% of trades are thanks to the top 250 users.
On OpenSea it’s 13% & 2% respectively.
On others like LooksRare, CryptoPunks and Zora - volume is almost entirely driven by the top power users:
The dashboard also uses @hildobby’s wash trade filtering method.
In case you hadn’t heard yet, wash trading accounts for a massive slice of total NFT volume:
OpenSea again scores points here, with only 1% of total volume attributable to wash trades over the past year.
The NFT marketplace space became far more diverse and competitive through 2022 as new platforms launched to capture a slice of that sweet trading fees pie.
While legitimate competitors to OpenSea have emerged, with some doing particularly well when it comes to trading volume - OpenSea is still the clear market leader.
They have the largest, most organic, most diverse userbase and are in the strongest position for 2023 and beyond.
That said, they’d better not take their foot off the gas.
Check out the full dashboard for much, much more.
NFT Aggregators
NFT aggregators had a pretty wild 2022.
According to a great new dashboard by @hildobby, aggregators as a whole steadily gained a greater share of overall NFT volume.
They started the year with <5%, but by Q3 were regularly routing 10-20% of total weekly volume:
The trend is stronger when it comes to traders.
Last January only a small ~3% slice of traders were using the platforms, but in Q3 & Q4 it was more like ~20%!
Gem was the biggest player by volume, accounting for 2/3 of overall aggregator volume throughout the year that exceeded $1.28 Billion.
Gem also had by far the most users at 135.82k while Genie and Blur trailed in the distance:
Gem’s success came from being the dominant platform when overall volume was sky high.
Back in March and April NFTs were selling like hotcakes at high prices, and Gem quickly captured Genie’s market share soon after launch:
Things are changing in the aggregator space though. Gem enjoyed market dominance until October, but a new challenger arose and started beating them at their own game.
Since mid October, Blur came out of nowhere and started taking over 50% of aggregator volume:
Over the past month Blur has totally eclipsed all other aggregators with ~74% of total volume and 60% of all users!
It seems like there’s a certain “winner takes all” dynamic when it comes to aggregators. Genie was displaced by Gem, which in turn has been knocked off the pedestal by Blur.
If the trend of aggregator growth continues, the dominant player will have a very lucrative position when the NFT bull market returns.
Check out the full dashboard for much more!
Uniswap NFTs
It has been almost one month since Uniswap launched their NFT aggregator platform.
How have they done so far? A great new dashboard by @BiffBuster investigates……
In one month, almost $2.8m of volume has been generated by the platform:
This was driven by 3776 total sales and 2887 users.
Although daily volume has been at a consistent $100k+, sales have been trending down through December, and have never since reached the high of launch day:
Things certainly seem to be slowing down into the Christmas period, with barely 10 $ETH in volume over the past 24 hours……
The platform was made possible by Uniswap’s acquisition & integration of the Genie NFT aggregator.
Almost $5m was airdropped to around 15k historic Genie users as part of the launch. According to the dashboard <10% of airdrop recipients have used the new aggregator, but have been responsible for almost quarter of a million in volume…..
Overall Uniswap has managed to corner almost 2.5% of the aggregator market in its first month:
Not a bad start, but nothing breath-taking either. This was a long term play and bet on the future for them, and launching in the depths of NFT winter was never going to cause too many fireworks.
It remains to be seen how far the top DEX can push into the NFT market, check out the full dashboard for more……
More Dashboards
GN
Thanks for reading, and as ever a special thanks to all the contributing Wizards for their hard work this week.
We’ll see you for one more Dune Digest in 2022 next week. In the meantime enjoy the holidays and happy Christmas.