#DappCon22 : Day 1 - The Revolution Will Not Be Reported Quarterly, Fredrik Haga

Transcript

oh blouse hello this is working cool good day everyone um I'm Frederick I run a company called Dune and I'm going to talk a little bit about how the revolution will not be reported quarterly so um if we zoom out from our cool crypto industry a little bit and think about data in in the world and and in the world of technology and in the world of business um what what does that look like well typically data has been locked within different businesses all kinds of data that happens in the digital realm but also in general mostly sort of is created and and stored

and analyzed and utilized inside of businesses um so it's actually been quite a closed environment for for data in general and if you do want to access data that you don't already have from your own business or activity typically you have to pay for Access so most data is inherently closed and if you do want to gain access you have to pay for it which makes it even less accessible um and then if you think about the world of Finance um the case is that basically the only data you have is um trading data when it comes to real

time so if you want to look at real-time data you only have this kind of metadata around trading like you know order books and transactions happening but that is actually quite a different world from sort of the underlying assets that's being traded so financial data is is sort of a meta thing in the world of Finance itself um and and so basically that's how data Works um generally and if you actually want to understand how a product is doing um you typically first of all need a listed uh entity a listed company um and then secondly you will get

information about the actual product traction the actual revenues the actual operations in the quarterly PDF that is essentially how you get data in the business world and in the finance world that is not simply um metadata around trading um so if you want to understand how some business is doing you have to wait for these once a quarter PDF files um and get some data out of it um and then in our world um in crypto on the other hand things are of course quite different so a way to think about the blockchain is

essentially that it's a shared public back end everybody deploys some code to the common same back end all across the world whereas in this previous world we were talking about most of that you know go some close servers and our closed systems and all the data is contained there and so when you have a shared public back end um for the whole world that also means whoops anyone can analyze it so you have a bunch of data out there that anyone can look into and this is quite a profound change from you know what what we've anything we've ever seen before so what you have here then is a real-time flexible and collaborative

environment for data which truly truly hasn't existed before and all of these frogs on the internet can come together and and look at this data um so just take a you know an example of a bank so this is the quarterly earnings report of JPMorgan one of the biggest banks in the world and you get you know interesting data like active mobile customers up 11 that's the level of granularity you know information you get on a quarterly basis you get these highly highly aggregated numbers um every now and then four times a year that that's the level of understanding you have in the operation of one of

these Banks um and if you contrast that to something like maker Dao which is also kind of a bank things look quite different so you have here for instance you can see real-time financial statements you can take the same thing that will typically go in these PDFs and follow it real time and and look at the here's for instance the the revenues The Lending income of maker down you can look at the breakdown of their balance sheet in different assets how that's moving over time and all of this is obviously accessible to the public at all times so

one can then wonder who has the best access to data about their system is it this guy running one of the world's biggest banks or is it actually this guy a frog on the internet anyone with an internet connection um who can really know the best you know the risk exposure all the things happening in in these systems and I would argue that actually you know if you do um really care and want to figure this out it's probably easier for this guy to figure out what's happening in maker than it is for this guy to figure out um all of his balance sheets and risks of course we don't really know uh what he's

looking at because that's not public but what I do know is that this guy has a pretty powerful set of tools to to figure out what's what's going on in in maker for instance so and and beyond that you know you can um look at a whole sector at once which is also a completely new thing um and for instance the decentralized exchange space you can look at all the different players and who's having what traction which is totally unique and it's quite brutal I would say you know you you put all this uh make it out there for anyone to look at

but it's also very very useful and Powerful um and stuff like this is five lines of SQL and then anyone on the internet can can see what's happening in these systems and that is um let me just yeah so I think that is very profound because you don't only have a open foundation for building things but you can also understand what those things yield in terms of attraction in terms of actual usage and then you can adjust accordingly which means that you're not only you know how have all of these building blocks you have all this knowledge around what those building blocks led to which I think is uh

massively underrated aspect of this space still that you have that Dynamic which means that people can learn faster don't have to do the same mistakes that someone else did and really you have a sort of building and knowledge Loop that spins way faster than any other industry and there are many many interesting examples so brilliant Tech analyst Benedict Evans earlier this year in January wrote in this newsletter that you know open C did around that 13 billion valuation um would be interesting to see that fundraising deck and the funny thing is you know essentially the fundraising deck is on chain

the attraction is on chain and you can see here that through around the time when they did this round they did almost 5 billion in monthly trading volume of nfts on ethereum that was a 625 x from the year before I think this is January to January um so you don't really have to wonder you know what what these Dynamics are you can just look at it and furthermore you can now see that you know the volumes of openc have dropped 90 from January to uh August here from almost 5 billion to 500 million

um and similarly you can also then see since you know what they're taking in fees um that it went from um 400 million in Revenue to 12 million in Revenue um in the same amount of time um so this is um you know all out there and anyone can can inspect it uh furthermore it's not only you know the the sort of crypto native companies per se that's exposed here and anyone can see recently this dashboard went quite viral uh where This brilliant guy King James 23.

um put together a dashboard for revenues from nft projects for the top um Brands uh you know Nike Dolce Gabbana Tiffany Gucci all these and you can see here that Nike is on the throne with 183 million dollars in nft Revenue that's pretty significant um and so probably you know this will incentivize more Brands to to do this when they see exactly how much can be made for you know doing these type of projects um so so it's quite fascinating that this doesn't only apply to sort of radical crypto projects it reply when you have a public open back end it

applies to anyone building on it including the biggest brands in the world and it also allows us to build better systems um so it's not about only through each product but you can also hear for instance see um you know Mev minor extractable revenue and you can see that that has yielded you know these um extractors 660 million dollars um in in Gross profits and that means that you can build products that are more resilient to to these things you can see it you can look at it you can analyze it you can see how your system is exposed to it

and so it really tightens The evolutionary Loop and let more people build better products faster one can of course also look into each system that is built the status of it for instance obviously the merge is hopefully happening this week um and you can see whether it's happened all kinds of details around it um and and it's quite remarkable that this information is out there public to to anyone so essentially what we have around the blockchain is a collective sort of brain uh of to analyze this data all this knowledge that exists is shared is

public um which is a massive massive change from any industry we've ever seen before um and any any day when when something happens someone will analyze it someone will look into it and everybody can build on top of each other you don't have to build in silos so I think all in all this this is a quite quite underrated aspect of the crypto industry is that you have all this open data and what that means for how the space evolves um and and so to sum it up I think you know in in traditional Finance all data is siled it's basically only B2B there's no open Community angle to any of this

um all data is locked down you have hedge funds paying enormous premiums to get the slight information advantage in the world um you know you have to pay a lot to really get to to the juicy stuff and once a quarter you will figure out how these businesses and systems are actually doing but in the crypto world it's radically different everything is collaborative and you can see what other people are doing you can see the data you can see who analyzed it and you can see anything that was ever done um from the code to the traction and this makes it compounding which is extremely powerful so any of you curious

about something can go out and look at thousands of analysis that's already been done it's free which also a radical radical difference from any previous data Paradigm and it's also real time which is quite insane to think about that you can look at a bank-like system like maker Dao and you can see their revenues block by block you can see their profit and loss statement since they also pay people from from their Dow so you can really follow real time what's happening deep down in the system and there are no limits to to what you can analyze and how you can slice and dice it um so I really think still that you know

this this space uh has some amazing advantages um in in how you can build relative to traditional Finance but also some amazing advantages in in how you can understand systems and and work together to understand systems and what that means for building and progressing um so that was all I wanted to say thank you so much [Applause] thank you so questions thank you a quick question on how worried are you about the correctness of the data you're querying because I think a lot of the data I'm doing comes from

the graph right is all of it from on chain directly read from the smart contracts yeah we don't use two graphs so no it's all from the node providers various node providers but yeah it's all on chain so how worried about are you about the correctness of the data because in essence you're becoming an intermediary to reading the data and there was this this little nut exploit but uh situation where the graph data on Ave was actually incorrect because there was some migration problem from V2 to V3 so people relying on that data that we're no longer looking on chain there was a possible exploit so how I'm just wondering uh do you have any mechanisms

in place to guarantee the correctness of data on any yeah mitigation against that we're extremely concerned with with getting the data right and having you know or the the right blockchain data um it's it's not as trivial and as one might assume but we're of course really really care about that um it's not always easy to get it right sort of when the blocks happened where things happen sometimes um and there that could be in the actual node or you know something that happens in the blockchain or or some node provider um doing something and there are changes in these things but for us in general it's absolutely critical that we have

the right data and then of course on top of that people can write arbitrary SQL on Dune so we can't guarantee for sort of every single dashboard out there but the base tables and what comes from the blockchain we care deeply about getting right and and if something happens we don't do everything we can to fix it as soon as possible another question here what are what are some of the things you're kind of most excited about right now when you look at the roadmap and the space um for your team in the next maybe six months um I'm quite excited for analyzing data across chain um so this is something we've worked hard to enable and as the Slayer 2

systems go live and then go on mainnet and and really get into to sort of their V1 States um I think it's going to be extremely exciting to to look across different execution environments and layers and and see where where the usage actually happens um I think we haven't really sort of understood that yet there's a lot of I think uh generally no meaningful hype around uh or sort of credible hype around some of these projects but it's going to be powerful to see exactly how many users sort of stick around on these different systems and stacked up that up against each other

um because I feel like it's it's been a massive narrative the last you know year year or so but uh we still don't exactly know what it means like what how quirky is the ux to actually get in onto these systems and and like how many people will actually go there anyone else or you want to as far just the Curiosity you guys index things like calls events you have like prices table it's a huge amount of data what's the order of magnitude of data that you're dealing with in your uh in your databases and tables if you don't mind

me asking it yeah no um just a rough guess the thing I don't I don't think I have the exact number um like all over uh but I do know that uh we just saw the other day that we do 500 gigabytes of Solana data per day um that that we process so that gives you a feel for it at least anyone else yep I think one of the the cool things that I I've heard with Dune is like teams are starting to use Dune is kind of to understand what's happening in their

protocol um to like give an oversight of what's the health of the protocol what users are doing if it's functioning properly which I think is like a really cool um use case because you know it's really important that companies and protocols understand what their users are doing and how things are going um is that like an area in terms of an application where you're really excited about like building something out for B2B almost and helping these teams really understand in detail like almost like a pro version or or kind of how do you think about that use case currently or is it not in a priority that's definitely something we want to enable and I think one of the core ideas we had when we started doing basically in exactly four years ago um was that we think if people are to

build useful products in this space they need to understand if people are actually adopting it and this is pretty much sort of startup 101 stuff and if you don't look at your actual traction uh it's going to be really hard to to build something useful and iterate in the right direction so we definitely want to sort of enable that a lot uh we feel like that is hugely important and and always been trying to help the teams you know unearth the right insights like that um but uh we think of DNS as a tool that we built for others we try to make it as easy as possible to use but we don't per se sell sort of analysis um the the focus is very much still just

like how can we make it as powerful and easy to use as possible um today yeah first thank you so much for for uh for the presentation really interesting um the example you gave with the financial data is something that yeah you said so quarterly we get it from from a company but now like for mostly for crypto uh Native companies you can see it in real time right um and as we know so that data actually on the the traditional type of companies is heavily regulated and on what three site is not that much are you struggling already with regulation are you

expecting it to expect it to come at some point what's your take on that we haven't really had any problem with that I think yeah if you spend more than five minutes in this space you you realize that this data is pretty much uh public right um but uh not that it couldn't happen but but uh for now I think it's uh pretty clear that this data is public and and sort of any company sort of can expose it uh so yeah okay so I hope it stays like that yeah yeah me too we have time for one more question anyone wants to go

maybe as a follow-up to the amount of data that's all centralized database have you thought or experimented with ipfs are we that kind of thing to really decentralize all the way hold something useful before it makes too much sense to sort of go super deep into decentralizing it um and for us it's still a tremendous challenge to just um serve this data in a performance convenient way as it is um so that's not to say that sort of things could happen over time but but I think our approach this list is is to try to build something as useful as possible in a relatively pragmatic way um and then sort of see where that takes

us and then take it from there so uh yeah it's still still pretty hard to just serve this data in a performant way as it is thank you all right I think we're out of time thank you very much Frederick thank you