New paradigms enable new product categories. The internet enabled social media, the smartphone enabled ride-sharing and the cloud enabled enterprise data platforms.

Blockchains represent the world’s first open and publicly accessible, always updating dataset. At Dune we’re building the world’s first community data platform. An integrated and collaborative data platform experience uniquely tailored for a world of open blockchain data.

A data platform lets users ingest, transform, quality assure, govern, query, visualize, export and most importantly; take action with data. Enterprise data platforms are built to accommodate a highly modular set of data inputs, pipelines and use cases. With open blockchain data and community as the starting point, we can now reinvent the data platform experience. Let’s look at some examples.  

We are building our very own query engine, Dune SQL, tailored for the optimal experience when working with blockchain data. Because we work with a very specific dataset, the blockchain, we can enable focused and unparalleled performance, scaling and custom-built functions.

It’s not only the query engine we’re rethinking. We’re baking collaboration into every layer.

Many community members explore the same product categories, like decentralized exchanges, NFTs, layer 2’s and beyond. Instead of putting all the complexity in the actual SQL query, we can empower the community to use shared datasets.

This is where our product Spellbook comes in. It’s the world’s first community data pipeline. Any community member can cast a spell to the spellbook to create a curated dataset. Take a look at our easy to use ‘nft.trades’ table for instance. This is created from almost 200,000 lines of SQL transformations, 100,000 lines of data quality tests, 225 input tables, 55 contributors and counting; you can take a look at this beautiful beast of a table for yourself here. Data cleaning is done once for the whole community and collectively saves everybody thousands of hours. 

Underneath the hood for all of these features Dune runs and abstracts away all the complexity of hosting, running, maintaining and scaling the data flow. Work that typically would require heavy data engineering efforts from every single entity that wanted to query data. 

But, that is only the beginning of what can be unlocked within this new product category.  Building a community data platform wasn’t possible before crypto because data supply was mostly proprietary. Now it’s not just employees, but rather full communities who are looking at the data. The fact that millions of people are interested in, can access, and can collaborate on top of the same dataset opens a world of possibilities. Think about the compound growth we’ll see for the global financial system with access to building on data opened up in such a foundational way.

Let’s compare a Community Data Platform with traditional Enterprise Data Platforms.

Inside a single company in the enterprise world you will find a myriad of different databases each with different data structures. Across companies, there are then thousands of different technologies and setups. All of these efforts to integrate and transform the data are born by each individual customer. It’s both hard and expensive. Beyond that you have the ongoing maintenance, data transformations, quality assurance and scaling of it all.

If you want to analyze and use interesting data all of the above is required. You also need the right privileged job at a company with interesting data and a good data infrastructure. All of this means that there’s only a very small set of people that get to work with interesting data. In fact, there's a catch-22 of becoming a data professional; you need good data skills to get a cool data job, but you need a cool data job to learn good data skills. It’s like training to become a professional football player without having access to a ball.

In web2 the interactions between a user and an application were only accessible to the team operating that application. In web3, that interaction is accessible to anyone. Meaning any data point now sees an explosion of stakeholders. Web3 is a paradigm shift, not only for storing and sending digital assets, but for data and the opportunity for curious data Wizards as well. Any aspiring footballer now has a ball to play with, and a global team to train with.