Dune

Dune is a blockchain analytics platform that lets anyone query on-chain data with SQL and turn the results into charts and dashboards. It indexes and decodes data from many blockchains into structured tables, so analysts can answer questions about protocols, tokens, wallets and markets without running their own data pipelines. Its community model made it the default home for crypto analytics. Users write queries and build dashboards that are public by default, and others can view, fork and build on them. As a result, Dune hosts a vast library of community-created dashboards tracking decentralised exchange volumes, lending markets, NFT trading, token holders, stablecoin flows, layer-2 activity and countless individual protocols. Researchers, journalists, investors and the protocols themselves rely on these dashboards, and skilled Dune analysts have built careers on them. The heavy lifting is in the data. Raw blockchain data is difficult to work with: transactions and event logs are encoded and spread across many chains. Dune decodes smart contract events into readable tables, maintains curated datasets known as spellbook tables that standardise common concepts such as trades and token transfers across protocols, and supports cross-chain queries. Its query engine handles large datasets, and visualisation tools make it easy to publish findings. Beyond the free community tier, Dune offers paid plans with more query capacity, private queries and dashboards, and data exports, as well as a Data API and data products for teams that want to use Dune's datasets in their own applications or warehouses. The trade-offs are the SQL learning curve for non-technical users and the need to understand blockchain data structures to write correct queries; community dashboards also vary in accuracy, so it is worth checking methodology. Alternatives include Nansen for wallet labelling and smart-money insights; Flipside for SQL-based analytics; Token Terminal for protocol financial metrics; DefiLlama for free DeFi metrics; Allium and Goldsky for blockchain data infrastructure; and Etherscan for transaction-level exploration. Choose Dune when you want to explore and share on-chain data with SQL and a large community of analysts.