Reflections on the past year

This year, we are recovering from the FTX scandal, navigating persistent macro headwinds, and coming down from the massive hype of 2021. Simultaneously, the cryptocurrency industry is still searching for its killer use cases. To borrow lingo from the world of wine: 2023 has been a challenging vintage. In fact, we founded Dune over 5 years ago, and 2023 has been the hardest year to date - for the industry, for me as a founder, and for Dune as a company. 

After the 2017 ICO mania, we started Dune in 2018, when crypto was mostly disregarded and uninteresting. In many ways the sentiment was similar to these days, but with some major differences.

Working in crypto in 2018 and 2023 is similar because, during both periods, it was “not cool”. While some risk-hungry ICO gamblers lost some money post-2017, working in crypto in 2018 felt like working on an under-hyped movement with a lot of potential and little money. 2021 took the scale of capital, hype, promises, and reach of crypto to crazy heights. Coming crashing down from that at the end of 2022 with the poster child of the industry revealed as a massive fraud was undoubtedly more painful. In many ways, it felt like our industry over-promised the world. In 2018 we were playing pure offense, in 2023, we were playing catch up to the expectations.

I’m not gonna lie (as opposed to SBF). Personally, this is the year I’ve had to dig the deepest to find motivation to keep going. The amount of noise, short-term thinking, and bad actors in crypto has been really discouraging. Especially since these are the folks and events that dominate headlines and engagement - so one is over-exposed to all the bad apples, and for your mind, as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out: what you see is all there is.

The pain notwithstanding, I'm a big believer in tough times serving as a useful forcing function to make difficult decisions. At Dune, we’ve made several painful but important transitions this year. 

While we fortunately haven’t had to do any big layoff, we've gone from 60 to 45 people throughout the year. These types of changes are never easy or fun. We changed our pricing plans from seats and product-based to usage-based with unlimited collaboration and flexible access to all our products. We’ve migrated to our very own query engine DuneSQL - an absurdly ambitious undertaking including a complex migration of 10s of thousands of queries. All in pursuit of giving you the world's best crypto data querying experience. 

While the year has been a rollercoaster on many fronts, one of our company values is: Embrace The Rollercoaster. I’m proud that our team has done just that. We’ve kept shipping at a high pace and have made countless improvements across the product, including faster querying, team functionality, new blockchains, data uploads, materialized views, private query views, query scheduling, DuneAI, and folders. Just this week, we wrapped up the year with unwrapping slack/email/webhook alerts, up to 25x cheaper data exports, and more. 

2023 has been a challenging vintage, but some pruning is healthy for the ecosystem. These days I feel an incredible momentum, in the industry, inside Dune, and within the Dune community broadly. I can’t wait to keep making crypto data accessible together with you all in 2024. 

Happy holidays to the whole Dune community, it’s a privilege to be working with you all! 

Fredrik

Dune Co-Founder and CEO