Recently, I've been paying attention to a pretty interesting phenomenon—the crypto ecosystem is evolving rapidly every day, but many people actually don’t know what the projects they’re investing in or researching are really doing. When trying to check a DEX’s trading volume, the number of users on a certain protocol, or the overall trend of the NFT market, I find that either there’s no publicly available data or the data is scattered across different sources, making it extremely difficult to get a clear picture.

Dune Analytics exists precisely to solve this problem. Essentially, it transforms the massive raw data scattered across the blockchain into understandable charts and dashboards through an intuitive platform. You don’t need to write scripts, parse nodes, or compile code—just simple queries to extract and visualize smart contract data on Ethereum. This truly liberates productivity for researchers and analysts.

But I think the most impressive aspect of Dune isn’t just its features, but its community-driven model. The analyst community on the platform is constantly developing various solutions—want to know how gas costs are changing? Want to track the migration of trading volume from Uniswap v2 to v3? Curious about how much ETH has been burned by EIP-1599? All of these are being done on Dune, and anyone can create, improve, or remix these dashboards. This is where the composability and collaborative spirit of the crypto ecosystem come into play.

Compared to traditional finance, where companies disclose information through quarterly reports stored in proprietary databases, in the crypto world, real-time data like MakerDAO’s profit and loss or the entire NFT market’s dynamics can be monitored live on Dune Analytics. This level of transparency and immediacy is one of Web3’s fundamental advantages over Web2.

In terms of development, Dune Analytics has expanded from supporting only Ethereum to multiple chains, including Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and others. After completing Series B funding in 2022, it became a unicorn, and the team grew from 20 to 200 people. Looking ahead, as layer 1 and layer 2 protocols further integrate, this platform could reshape the entire way financial reporting is done—from quarterly disclosures to 24/7 real-time monitoring.

Honestly, what makes Dune able to achieve this is that it doesn’t adopt the kind of ecosystem closed-off approach some competitors do. Its openness creates network effects—more and more analysts contribute, making the platform increasingly powerful. For anyone wanting to gain deeper insights into how crypto projects operate, Dune Analytics has already become an essential tool.