Web3 Analytics is Broken

The next generation of the Web deserves the next generation of Analytics. But what we’ve gotten for Web3 is — at best — recycled Web2 with MacGyvered usability. Read on to understand why, and how HyperArc fixes this.

Web3 delivered on decentralized and permissionless innovation, democratizing the creation of data that is censorship resistant. Anyone can deploy any contract on any chain, composing any other, as the barriers to execution and data creation have been torn down. Web3 also promised trust and transparency of this permissionless execution, allowing for the creation and control of your own data. All of this data is technically available for anyone to verify and analyze, but is actually gated by technical complexity and broken UX, making trust and transparency for all but the most sophisticated users more dream than reality.
If the average Web3 user doesn’t have easy and practical access to data on chain, how can they trust and verify, let alone control their own data? To fulfill Web3’s unmet promises, a new generation of analytics needs to be built from the ground up prioritizing its unique usability challenges and technical considerations. HyperArc is next-generation web3 analytics.

Recycling Web2

The blockchain is the ultimate decentralized transactional execution engine. It’s prioritization of immutability, transparency, and consensus of execution trades off on search and aggregation of the ledger itself. The blockchain allows anyone to quickly verify a single transaction if they know its hash. However, it’s not feasible to search for transactions that fit a specific criteria or to aggregate across transactions (sometimes at massive scale) to spot outliers and signals.
Now we get a bit technical. Products like The Graph and earlier versions of Dune balance these trade offs by recycling SQL databases like Postgres for their mature search and aggregation capabilities. However, these OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) databases are similarly optimized for their namesake — transactions. And, specifically, the more rigorous ACID transaction makes many of the same guarantees as a blockchain, from atomicity to durability. So recycling the Web2 analogy of a blockchain to address its own tradeoffs is only going to go so far.

The better counterpart to OLTP is OLAP (Online Analytical Processing). OLAP relaxes ACID as it’s no longer the source of truth (the blockchain is), and can instead optimize for speed and scale for search and analytics. To move and index data from the blockchain to OLAP requires ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) with many incumbents relying on Databricks, Spark, or DBT.
These are powerful, but generic and dev-centric tools, all sharing a lowest common denominator in UX — SQL.

SQL is a hammer designed to perform any data manipulation, but being a hammer makes everything, including Web3, look like just another nail. SQL (and similarly GraphQL) sacrifices usability for flexibility. Recycling Web2 is a good first step in bringing transparency as it makes many things technically possible, but the ubiquitous recycling of SQL based UX betrays the ethos of Web3 by only empowering the few with the data.

HyperArc

HyperArc is the first analytical platform that prioritizes usability to make it possible for all users, not just the most technical, to have transparent access to the blockchain. This fixes the analytics experience that is broken today.
With our query builder you can quickly explore, compose, and iterate in real time to search and discover new insights across multiple chains. Without SQL, your growing queries never lock you into their own complexity as filters, metrics, groupings, and expressions are all modular and can be added or removed independently anytime.

Since our queries are declarative and not code, you can simply compose them in our app builder, into interactive dashboard-like experiences we call DataApps. And your users can then go deeper and answer their own questions using the DataApps you’ve created.

HyperArc is built for analytics on the blockchain’s immutable ledger and its strictly additive data. Capitalizing on this, we’re able to serve 10s of billions of searchable and aggregatable rows, streaming near real-time from finalization with sub-second queries. Data is stored at the lowest grain to support real time aggregations and filtering — gone are the days of even having to think about “re-indexing” as data needs change.

Learn more about HyperArc and what it means to be next-generation analytics built for the blockchain. And try out some of our DataApps here and here.