Making On-Chain Data Readable 🤝
Structuring blocks and hashes
Hello
When I was relatively new to the crypto world, a cousin who had just started dabbling with crypto reached out for help to find one simple answer. “What just happened to my money?” I first went to Etherscan to look smart amid those transaction hash, wallet addresses and blocks and clicked through Transactions. Then Internal Txns. Then Token Transfers. Then Logs. Five tabs later, I still didn’t have a neat sentence I could show my cousin: “$X moved from here to there for this reason.”
I had raw receipts. No passbook. I had to quickly find another way to not embarrass myself.
Every Saturday, I dive into a podcast from our partners at Decentralised.co and share what stayed with me.
This week I reflect on the conversation between Saurabh Deshapande and Mats Olsen, CTO and co-founder, Dune Analytics, hosted by Decentralised.co.
Craving the full back-and-forth with Dune’s co-founder Mats Olsen? The bit I’m skipping — how Dune’s Sim API enables DeFi apps to show user transaction history — is in the episode. Worth a watch (or listen).
Blockchains are brilliant at writing everything down; they’re poor at reading it back to humans, Mats had captured best what I felt while helping my cousin using Etherscan. We all feel that gap in small ways: apps asking us to switch chains, dashboards that disagree, wallets that miss airdrops or count a bridge twice. None of that feels like “the future of money”. No wonder we talk about crawling mainstream adoption.
I then moved to the app my cousin had used to transact. There it was, the trail. Most centralised apps and the better DEX wallets do that translation for you. They sit on top of indexers and their own caches, stitching router hops and internal transfers into one line you can read: “Paid 0.12 ETH for 400 USDC on Uniswap.” They merge duplicates, tag bridges, and clearly mention failed transactions and then link back to the raw transaction on chain for anyone who wants the receipt.
Think of the chain as a shoebox of receipts. Every swap, mint, bridge, burn stuffed in there. Indexers such as Dune turn that shoebox into a passbook. They label events, group them, total them. They also make choices. That’s why the same wallet can show three different “histories” across three apps. Different choices about what counts and how to merge contracts.
They solve the problem that often arises with apps.
When an app shows a chain selector in the header, it’s handing you the shoebox. “Pick the right pile.” Most people will be lost in figuring that out. It took me a while before I learnt that I had to add the new chain on my wallet so that I could see its balance.
Imagine Netflix asking you to pick a data centre before streaming. Imagine your food app showing a warehouse list and asking you to pick which one has onions in stock. That’s how chain menus feel. We don’t accept this in everyday apps. Why should you accept it in crypto either?
In my cousin’s case, there was a swap that touched a router, emitted odd events, and bounced through an internal transfer. Etherscan showed every crumb, which is great. Still, I had to stitch the crumbs into a sentence. A friend would have given up by tab two. That’s not their fault. A bank app writes the sentence for you. Crypto leaves you to assemble it.
This is why many crypto users care about source-linked charts and human context. If a dashboard claims “TVL up”, I want a tiny note below it: “Excludes bridge inflows after March.” If a wallet shows a neat timeline, I am happy but I also want a “see data source” link.
Mats spoke about how Dune doesn’t directly incentivise contributors on its platform to clean and structure on-chain data. A question popped right up in my mind. Something Saurabh asked right after Mats completed his sentence: if no one is paid to clean data, why then would anyone do it well?
Mats spoke about how it has become prevalent in crypto where people post and share good data and dashboards, and eventually build up a following and become influencers.
At first, I wasn’t convinced.
Is getting fame and followers on a platform enough incentive to not produce inaccurate data or of substandard quality? Then I found my answer.
Sometimes reputation is indeed enough. Think Wikipedia. I remember how just a few years ago I contributed to the platform when it made an appeal for a donation by sharing its story. Comments and community notes can raise the floor fast.
Mats also spoke about how Dune works with some of the top contributors.
Watch the full episode here
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Perhaps that’s the incentive. Quality dashboards become part of the portfolio. The best dashboards get bookmarked, shared, and commissioned.
All this still cannot guarantee 100% accuracy. That’s where a direction helps. Show the query behind the data, state what’s in it or not. Let the curious trace the dashboard back to the raw data on the chain and that way the platform would have ensured transparency.
That’s all most people need. Retail sees “bridges excluded” and knows why the number changed. A click opens the source if they’re curious. On the other side, desks and fund houses can replay it for audits and freeze the definition. Not a perfect passbook, but a traceable one.
It also gives you a lens to judge teams. Do they publish public dashboards with definitions you can read? Do they link to queries? If yes, they respect your time. And that says a lot.
But beyond all this, what is needed is teams willing to hide the plumbing and write the simple sentence we all want to read: what happened to my money.
Off to brew some chai and tidy a few wallet tags from last year. If you spot a wallet that hides chains well, send it across. I’ll be on CT arguing about Etherscan tabs and passbooks.
Happy weekend,
Prathik
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