Boxer  0:00  

Welcome to a new episode of the Weekly Wizards. Today, I'm joined by Trevor or Dr. Ethereum. Many of you might know him from rebuttal. Yeah. Welcome to the show.

Trevor  0:12  

Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Boxer  0:15  

Yeah, so first of all, the first question I always like to ask is how the fuck did you get into this weird space? Which is crypto in 2022? So, when was your first touch point with crypto?

Trevor  0:30  

Yeah, it's always the first question. And it's funny, like you almost feel obligated to talk about your first experience in crypto right when you meet someone or introduce yourself. 

So yeah, my sort of origin story here is…I would say 2017 was the first time I really started to be interested in crypto. I think the Ethereum ecosystem and just this idea of sort of an open blockchain, you know, like many other people was sort of what drew my interest in. 

At first, I had just graduated college. I was working in the entertainment industry at the time, and it was a good job. But you know, I had a lot of free time in between tasks. And so I found myself constantly researching, listening to podcasts, and chatting with a few buddies about it. 

And yeah, that was my first foray into it. Of course, I knew about Bitcoin before that. But really, I only paid attention when like the prices would spike, and there'd be like no was this… 

And a few years went by.I stayed really close to the space. I was working as both an analyst as well as doing product and strategy and business development for a film distributor, actually. 

So, it was a bit of a startup culture, you could say. I wear a lot of hats and did a lot of different things. But that's really where I first started to explore being interested in data. I used to follow the Reddit channel. 

Data is beautiful, which just has really cool visualizations. Yeah. And I just wouldn't geek out on that on my own. I really didn't know much of what went into it or where I'd be today when I was looking at data at the time. But, you know, it was fun stuff to look at. 

And so from there, I actually decided to double down on finance. So, my line to crypto was not a very straight path. I went to work in the ski industry actually as a financial analyst for a couple of years, and it was a pretty serious corporate culture. I would say very bureaucratic. 

You know, your thoughts and opinions were buried amongst a lot of noise. And so you're doing a lot of accounting…not a lot of creative analysis, I would say. And I think part of me was lacking that filament and being creative. 

At my previous job, I had built a lot of dashboards. And so, if you combine all these experiences with following along and crypto and what was exploding there at the time, that's sort of how I got into on-chain analytics. 

A buddy of mine, who was actually a friend that got me into crypto in the first place, he showed me what dowing was. And I was like, Oh, this is pretty cool. Like, you know, sort of a free service that I can just look at all the blockchain data and create dashboards. This is what I thought I wanted to do. I didn't really know much about SQL. 

I'd used it a couple times in the past, but I think you and I chatted a lot when I first got into it, and I was asking you the stupidest questions. But you know, important ones to ask for me and my understanding. 

So yeah, it is what it is. I sort of picked up SQL over the next couple of months. And started…I would say…looking for ways to make some sort of income off of it. I was still in this gaming industry at the time. 

And so I just…after work was when I was really able to dive in, but I remember, you and I had a lot of conversations about how there were some serious financial opportunities as well as ways that you can…if you're really…to make this a full-time gig. 

So, I started to explore the freelance side of it. Just as a side hustle. And yeah, I ended up entering some grant competitions for uniswap and compound and just doing a sort of ad hoc freelance…building dashboards for those guys. 

That was sort of my first taste into making crypto as an income. You know, actually earning tokens, which I thought was pretty cool at the time. It was a lot better than me losing money trying to trade.

And so, from there, I started to get really hungry and really wanted to get away from the corporate lifestyle. I started to look for more grant programs, and I found Synthetix, applied for grant with them, and ended up being a Dune monkey on that side building some dashboards for them, which has actually turned into a pretty great ongoing relationship. 

I actually worked for chain link as a research consultant. I was mainly researching a single project with their business intelligence team, doing things that had never really been done before, which I didn't understand fully at the time. You know, but I remember asking my boss at the time, how should we go about this? Is this the right approach?

And he was like, dude, nobody's ever done this before. Go ahead and be scrappy. And that's when the light bulb went off in my head that I am a pretty scrappy analyst. I would say, and Google is my best friend when it comes to learning new things. 

And he was like, just use it to your full extent, you know, do whatever it takes to get to the end result. And yeah, that was a lot of fun. So, at that time, I was working three jobs just really hustling and trying to get out of my corporate job in a smoother fashion. 

I didn't want to be unemployed, especially here in the US with healthcare, you know. It can get a little rocky and expensive at times. So, let's try to just do everything I could. Working that many hours really takes a toll on your personal well being, so you can only do it for a short period of time. 

That's when I met Brian Flynn at RabbitHole who's our founder and actually applied through traditional means (through a job application). I had some good chats with him, you know, and talked on Twitter a couple of times. 

Then yeah, I found myself as data lead for RabbitHole, so that's been my whole journey from start to finish there. It’s definitely been a wild ride and hasn't been a straight line, but it's been a lot of fun because everything we're doing here is totally brand new. 

And so every day you just feel like a pioneer. Not every day is successful, but I find success and just learning new things. So, that's been sort of motivating for me.

Boxer  11:04  

I guess you were only working in Excel and and BI tools? Is that the case?

Trevor  11:35  

Yeah, exactly. I think I was primarily working in like Power BI Tableau and a lot of Excel building, like and a ton of raw financial models from scratch. And so yeah, you start to learn a lot about Excel. 

But at the same time, without macros, you really can't take that too far. You can't do too much automation without also breaking your hardware. Because a lot of the machines that we're working on are not very powerful, too. 

So, it was definitely trying to look for new ways to expand those tools. And I think that's where Dune really struck a chord with me. It was a browser-based application. 

But you guys have, of course, your own servers that you're constantly upgrading in the background. So, it helps. You don't have to run that off of your own hardware.

Boxer  12:28  

Yeah. Some of the analysis that people are doing. It gives me the average block gas price over the last six months. It's like…yeah, whatever they were giving your Lenovo power book, or whatever they're called, it would just explode.

Trevor  12:44  

Yeah, select off from traces. I have a few of those running measure.

Boxer  12:50  

Yeah. And the thing was excellent macros is also…you build all these beautiful macros. And then you're like all that work is pretty much down the drain because nobody can even maintain those macros. 

But yeah, interesting. What do you think? Were the transferable skills that you could take from that role to then working with like SQL and Web3 data since that is different, right?

Trevor  13:22  

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the way that you pull the data is, of course, different working with SQL. But I think there were a lot of transferable skills and the financial analytics I was doing were the way you pull the different data, but the way you're looking at it is more or less the same. 

And it's really just expanding your scope into what these protocols mean. And so you take different margin calculations than you may have been doing in the past and grow formulas and things like that. And you start to just apply that to this new way of looking at data. 

And of course, pulling in data through SQL is not something that's new. And so, yeah, I mean, it's really database management at that point. And I think that's what's so cool about blockchains. 

And what drew me in was that a lot of the companies I was working at our data was a total mess. Some of the decoded contracts we have here are incredibly clean, right? And we were pretty much trading back different Excel files. And you would build this beautiful model, only to find out that your inputs were totally wrong, but you don't actually know where the issue was. 

After a couple of years of doing that, you start to get a little frustrated because you can't really make as much of an impact. Put your name and work on the line only to find out after the fact that it's slightly off, which can totally change your business direction. 

And yeah, working with Blockchain data, your outputs may be wrong. The way you calculate things may be incorrect based off your understanding that needs to evolve. But you almost always know that the data you're working with is at least accurate. Yeah, you can check back to the chain and verify.

Boxer  15:15  

Yep, you can always go to Etherscan and CES…actually what happened in that transaction? And very rarely does Dune report anything wrong, I think. Yeah, there were some very isolated incidents, but in general, that shouldn't happen. 

Yeah, we’re just analyzing the outputs of a computer. And thankfully, their computer is like very reliable, and just putting out the same data all the time. So yeah, it makes it very easy. 

And really, a blessing coming from a background like yours, I would guess, to work with that data. I've had to deal with a lot of user input before, and it was just horrible. Oh my gosh, the amount of excellent macros I wrote to input and recognize mistakes and user inputs. It was insanity.

Trevor  16:05  

Yeah, you end up having these really massive cells in Excel that are basically just cleaning data. And you ended up spending over 80% of your time just cleaning data. By the end of the day, I'm too exhausted to even do proper analysis. Like, here's a chart, I'm going home. That kind of thing.

Boxer  16:27  

Yeah, so let's be grateful for the blockchain. What was harder to pick up? The understanding DVM and trying to understand what you're looking at? Or more the secret part?

Trevor  16:47  

Yeah, I think that probably in the first month, the SQL part was fairly complex for me because it was more or less a new concept. I had taken one of those SQL bootcamps years prior. But, of course, I wasn't using it every day. So, I forgot it. 

The good part about Tico is once you learn the basic structure, it really becomes Googling different ways to build. It’s kind of like a puzzle. And so I think it was slow at first, and then I really just picked it up. And I started to see it a lot more clearly. I think one day it just clicked for me. 

The EVM aspect was also pretty confusing. Still to this day, I think I spend countless hours on Etherscan, comparing things back and forth and really just exploring that way. 

But yeah, I mean, understanding all the relationships, it can be pretty complex. I think really early on, I had asked you if Dune had Yardies…like entity relationship diagrams to basically explore the schemas because I didn't understand how these tables connected and how they were supposed to work. 

But without Etherscan, I think my SQL and my Dune skills would be far behind because you really are able to take a trial and error approach. And I think that's also how I learned best — very hands on very much let me fail. First, learn from my mistakes, and then just keep going. 

And it's great to be able to just run a query. You know, maybe be 90% confident in it. Take the transaction hash, go to Etherscan, look at the logs, and then compare back and forth. And all of a sudden you realize, oh, yeah, I made this mistake, or no, it's spot on. That's exactly what I was trying to pull. Yeah.

Boxer  18:46  

Yeah, very much. Kind of test for a driven approach…that seems to work best in Dune. I always do the same as well where I'm just like…I know nothing. Then I started writing queries. 

And it's like, oh, yeah, this is something and then you iterate on that approach. And eventually you get to a data set, where it’s actually like, oh, now I can make my analysis. And then you're going to this other specter of once SQL clicks, it makes total sense. 

And then you're Googling, how do I calculate the median over the last, 50 whatever entries in a row or in a column or something? And yeah, combining things, it's really iterative and a very test-driven approach where you can fail.

Dune doesn't try to manage your career or anything and the run in a reasonable amount of time, if you know how to properly limit your queries. And yeah, it becomes very easy.

Trevor  19:47  

Right, exactly. I would say the ability to fork or to view other queries is so incredibly helpful, too. I mean, a lot of these protocols are truly copies of each other or iterations on each other, right? Where someone builds a building block. 

And then all of a sudden, they're a few versions later. Those pieces still kind of exist in another protocol. And so being able to….Yeah, if you wanted to calculate the median revenue for an exchange, you can find someone else that had actually written that query and extract it, break it down bit-by-bit, and rewrite it in your own words. 

And then all of a sudden, you realize, like, oh, I actually do understand what's going on here. So, that's been a pretty great growth hack, I would say for myself. Yeah.

Boxer  20:36  

Yeah, social learning is up. I always say we can just look at other people's stuff and learn. Yeah, cool. Um, so what does your day-to-day life at RabbitHole look like today?

Trevor  20:51  

Yeah, so, of course, it’s another small startup, and we have a great team. So, I would say that my day-to-day lately has been much more focused on data. I think for a while I was doing a lot of product and some business development. Things like that. Really just trying to help out wherever I could. 

But in the last three or four months, I have really been able to dive into user research, which has definitely opened my mind to different trends that are going on today in crypto. 

So yeah, my identity at RabbitHole. It involves both working toward strategic priorities that push the whole business forward as well as doing ad hoc analytics, answering product questions, and building tools that the community can use. 

We build tools that we can use internally to track data. It’s a lot of zero to one foundational stuff so far at this point. But yeah, doing this made that incredibly easy. 

You know, the export feature is…well…it's been great. We actually have, at RabbitHole, an off-chain database because we aren't yet a protocol. Just quiet. So, we don't have rapaho contracts, you know, writing to the blockchain. 

And so for that, we have to actually combine on-chain and off-chain data in order to paint a full picture of who users may be, what activities are going on with our product, and things like that. 

So, I still do use Excel from time to time, but I'm slowly migrating away to more database management. And using tools like read ash or mode, which I know how to do, and actually, I think was a fork of read ash initially. Or maybe fork is not the right word but…

Boxer  22:43  

We use the so redish is just a library. And we were using this library initially in our first version of the product to have the visualization aspect. Right. Ready, man, it's so strange that I'm here as Thomas. I don't know how to change it.

Trevor  23:05  

There's got to be an edit name somewhere.

Boxer  23:08  

Yeah, well…

Trevor  23:11  

It's your new handle. 

Boxer  23:14  

On awning again today. New pseudonym. Right. Yeah, well, it is what it is. No, I lost my trick. So, um, yeah. You'll be happy about the Dune API. I think if you're already using other online services. And yeah, do an API where you can just pluck the results or plug certain tables into your actual product suit. It will change your life.

Trevor  23:47  

Yeah, I'm very excited for that. I'm also taking that hard path and trying to learn some Python right now for data science and just starting to work with APIs as well. So, once one student has it, I think they'll sort of spark a new pathway to go down.

Boxer  24:05  

Yeah. I'd also have to learn quite a bit. Once we get there, it's gonna be an interesting journey. We can have endless discord conversations again. Right, exactly. Yeah, cool. Um, so we haven't really talked about what RabbitHole does at all yet. So, if you can give us your elevator pitch or the short introduction to RabbitHole.

Trevor  24:35  

Yeah, absolutely. So, I would say RabbitHole’s primary goal right now is really to become the best place to progress through Web3. 

And that's really talking about the entire user journey. Starting from the first time that you purchase crypto to when you first engage on-chain all the way down to when you find work and become a real contributor to a Dow or to a company in any sort, which really is intended to leverage your on-chain resume of sorts. 

And, of course, there are a number of protocols that are currently exploring verified credentials and things like that. I think what RabbitHole really wants is to solidify themselves as a place for for finding signal in the noise. I would say, you know, really using curation to do so? 

Because yeah, there's so many different actions you take on-chain that it's hard to sum those up into value and then take those credentials, or assets, and do something with them. 

And that's what we're exploring right now. So, we recently launched three new skills, Intro to Dow and FTS DeFi, which is really where the market’s at right now. I would say, from an education standpoint, really just starting to hit on those core pillars of crypto, on Web3… eventually, we will add on more skills to allow users to progress in some way. 

And yeah, I mean, the next iteration of this is really verified credentials as well. So, you'll be able to meet your skills as NFTs and use those to find work in crypto, hopefully, you know. 

So yeah, we still do quests, I think RabbitHole has been known for inspiring and inciting a lot of on-chain actions in other protocols through what we call quests, which are basically a series of different tasks that users get rewarded for participating in. 

And we do those as sort of as a bootstrapping mechanism to get users involved and engaged in other protocols as well as RabbitHole.

Boxer  27:06  

Do you guys partner with any centralized exchange or something to make that first buying crypto thing? Or how does that work?

Trevor  27:20  

Yeah, we haven't yet. Right now, we're pretty hyper focused, I would say, on exploring credentials themselves. But we do want to take a step back and really focus on the top of funnel, which is helping users onboard into crypto. 

And so I think there's a lot of opportunity there for the entire industry. Actually, we tend to take a perspective that people know what you're talking about when you first show them a crypto application, or when you say, oh, go trade on a Dex. You know, a decentralized exchange rather than Coinbase. 

And in my experience, at least, I've found that there's a lot of very obvious questions that we just sort of pass over. UI and user experience is part of the problem. But I think even more so it really is about education. 

Because if you think about it, the first time that any of us got into crypto, we really didn't know what was what, and a lot of this didn't exist. So for us, it's been a smoother journey because we learn about a new feature or new protocol, and we try it out. 

And it starts to make sense. If you're just jumping in today, April of 2022, there's a lot of noise out there. And yeah, to decipher between what are centralized exchanges and why you would use that over some sort of self-custody application, it really doesn't click. It doesn't make any sense. 

I think what we'd like to focus on is really education becoming the go-to place for a friend that wants to get into crypto but doesn't really know what to do. It's like go-to RabbitHole. You can you can get your zero to one sort of education here and then eventually prove out what you've done on-chain in order to take yourself to the next level.

Boxer  29:22  

Yeah, I see. So, you guys have been doing this through what you called quests. And could you give us a short primer on what next? A few examples of caste seven?

Trevor  29:35  

Yeah, absolutely. One of the most recent ones we've done was actually sticking on LIFO. And so the quest is essentially stake ETH through LIFO to earn rewards on your tokens. So yeah, with that quest, you would effectively navigate to RabbitHole. 

You would start the task of staking on light. That would take you to Lighthouse protocol, actually. You connect your wallet as normal and engage in the the app their stake your ETH. And then you would return to RabbitHole, and you'd be able to redeem that task and quest for some sort of reward whether that's an NFT or tokens themselves.

Boxer  30:24  

Yeah, I see. And you guys are probably using the graph or any other data index to check back if that user actually has done that transaction, right?

Trevor  30:36  

Yep, we use a mix of graph of various APIs. And yeah, eventually, we would love to have our own index or be fully deployed. Because there's a lot of data. I would say that needs to be sort of be customized for our purposes, where the graph can be fairly general purpose, depending on who created the the sub graph itself. 

There's also maintenance issues, right? Like if you don't own the underlying sub graph or the API itself, and it goes down, you're just at the mercy of the protocol in order to figure it out?

Boxer  31:18  

Yeah. Yeah, I see. So yeah, your whole mission and approaches make the one Education Center and Web3, where I can just send my grandma, my little brother, or even a colleague, who is not that familiar with Web3 and take them by the hand and walk them through this weird, wild spca of Web3 (hopefully without getting wrecked, losing their money, or spending too much). And I guess, learning something along the way. 

Trevor  31:54  

Exactly. Yeah, totally. And I think, you know, there are always risks along with working on-chain, especially right now and using new protocols. And so I think we really tried to focus on different values. 

As a company, some of those being financial security, as the blockchain is going to be around, I would say we are blockchain network agnostic. You know, we really are open to sort of engaging and incentivizing any new network that comes on any protocol, but we want to also make sure that it's safe, battle-tested, and any money you put toward, it's something that you'll be able to get back one day. 

And of course, there are things other than DeFi to explore too with NFTs and such. So, I think right now, the majority of our activities on Ethereum main net, when you start to boil down the tasks themselves, they just truly makes sense right now.

If we have an intro to NFT skills, of course, there are NFTs on other platforms and other networks. But most of the volume right now is on Ethereum. Right? So, we want users to get the most out of their experience.

Boxer  33:09  

Yeah, I see. So, 111 side of this is pretty much the quests. It's like one workflow. And then you said you’ve also launched education centers? Is that kind of correct? So like how to work inside of a Dow? And how to navigate DeFi? Is that correct? Understanding?

Trevor  33:29  

Yeah, so that's something that we're currently building out right now. We definitely want to start to double down on sort of educational content. Right now, we have guides that are directly associated with every single task you do on RabbitHole. 

So, if the task was to vote on a proposal and snapshot, then you would actually be able to see an associated guide that walks you through the whole process, with pictures, videos, different descriptions of every step that you're taking. 

Yeah, taking someone all the way from opening up snapshot for the first time to voting on a proposal and actually understanding what it means. The three skills that we have right now are focused on NFTs, DeFi, and Dows. 

And there's a few underlying tasks within each of those skills that kind of connect the dots for you. So, our DeFi skill is really a journey through taking E and maximizing your yield on ETH in a safe manner, right. 

So, I believe that that skill takes in…you start with sticking ETH on Wydo. You then take that stick ETH, and you lend it on eBay, you now have collateral on ave to borrow against so you can go and borrow USDC against that Ave or against that staked ETH, and then with that USDC, you can then go on LP that uniswap. 

And so you're taking this initial EA and going through this whole journey to eventually earn through Wydo earned through ABA and earned through.

Boxer  35:15  

Okay, interesting. Yeah, that's for sure. Like for somebody who's new to this, that's a whole scary journey to do all of that. And yeah, having somebody to just grab your hand and be like, hey, let me actually try this out. 

Yeah, it's pretty cool. You guys must have…you're obviously like, how do I say this? It's not that far off from what you've done so far. It's just like stringing a bunch of things together. 

And yeah, I can see how that would be a very nice experience. And then you were also alluding to making unchained credentials and getting people ready to for jobs and Web3. And I guess that's something that they will have more down the line?

Trevor  36:01  

Yeah, I think that credentials themselves are currently being talked about a lot on Twitter, right? Like, you see a lot of mentions of verifiable credentials, not really sure what those are. Maybe non-transferable or soul-bound at FTX. 

So yeah, what we're trying to do is basically take these skills and allow you to wrap them into a credential. And this credential is essentially an asset that you can verify the actions with on through your on-chain transactions. 

And that asset can be used in a number of ways to sort of integrate into other protocols or Dows. For instance, if you were trying to hire someone that had DeFi experience, but you weren't really sure how to prove their DeFi experience, you could say we're requiring the insurer to DeFi skill, credential, in order for you to apply to this job. 

And all of a sudden, you know that they actually have gone through the journey of maximizing yield on their ETH. In order to do that, you have to use three different protocols, you have to have a decent understanding, and you have to at least probably read the guide to understand exactly what you're doing and what the risks are associated are things like that. 

So, it qualifies the user for you. And then, since it's verifiable, you can go back to the chain. You pull their address, check exactly what transactions they've committed, and then just prove that they own that. Or you can check if they own the NFT itself.

Boxer  37:39  

Yeah, I see. So, you guys actually do mean NFTs to people? Kind of?

Trevor  37:44  

Yeah, it's something that we're building out right now. Okay. Okay. 

Boxer  37:47  

Yeah, I see. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, that space is a bit crowded right now, I would say. It's really different people trying to do this. But obviously, you guys have quite a headstart there. 

Whenever I usually send people to RabbitHole. And I'm just like, yeah, go through their guides, go through their quests, even though you can't claim money anymore. It's a great introduction. 

Trevor  38:16  

Yeah, exactly. I think one of the issues that we started to see, especially as I started to dive into user research was that there are just so many people in this space really trying to farm protocols. 

So, I would say that Web3 and crypto really has like this retention dilemma, where unless there's dedicated incentives, users are not sticking around. Now, there are plenty of reasons that may be the case. There may be complexities around it. 

Some of the actions themselves may not be very repeatable. You know, you're not going to go and take a huge loan on Ave every single day of your life. That's really reserved for once or twice a year, if that. 

But also, yeah, people are looking to really just a farm airdrops. They're looking to just gain short-term value, and they're chasing that. And so you see, liquidity mining programs spring up. 

Huge spikes in user activity or wallet activity, you can say, and then all of a sudden, the liquidity mining dries up. And you know, that protocol barely sees more than 100 users a month after that point. Yeah. 

And that's a huge problem, I think, in crypto. And it's definitely one that we're trying to solve for by inspiring improved participation. We're actually finding more mission aligned users. 

Of course, the journey between being sort of a mercenary and speculating and being mission aligned and contributing do your protocol. Those users aren't really…it's not binary, right? You're not really one or the other. 

I think, when everyone gets into crypto, you're first interested because it could potentially be a great way to make money. And as you start to learn about these protocols and the mission that we're all trying to accomplish here, you start to realize that there are other opportunities too. 

And yes, making money is one of the goals, and so you're going to have multiple wallets. You're probably going to test out a bunch of protocols, hope you get that AirDrop, but you're also going to be contributing to a Dow and doing something productive in the space. 

And so while there are very unique cohorts, if someone who's a farmer, a casual user, a power user, or you can also be sort of in multiple categories at once.

Boxer  40:54  

Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying. You guys must have done quite some internal…like you guys must be a hotspot for knowing how like DeFi adoption and user adoption in general is going. 

So again, can you? I think you've built some great dashboards around different quests on Dune. Maybe we can look through a few of those. And yeah, we need to reshare your screen after I got drugged earlier.

Trevor  41:27  

Can you see that?

Boxer  41:29  

Let's go in there.

Trevor  41:33  

Alright, great. Yeah. So since I've been talking about lighthouse, our most recent quests that we did, we'll start with this lotto dashboard. One of the ways I use Dune at RabbitHole is to kind of prove out a thesis. In this case, we had a quest that specifically targeted 2,500 addresses, and require them to stick a minimum of .02 Ether with LIFO. 

So, we wanted to see exactly what the trend was for the protocol as well as the impact the quest had on those trends. Right off the bat here, you can see it's incentivized 98% of the new participants here. 

And so what that essentially means is that 98% of the 2,500 had never used Lidl before. So that's actually, over 2000 new users, essentially, for Wydo. Now, of course, there are gray areas, right. There could be addresses that people spin up to do this to participate in or reward. 

We take anti-civil measures with our quest specifically. One of the ways we do that is with bright ID, right IDs, anti-civil tool, where you actually have to verify yourself as a unique human being and associate that with your address in order to use their platform. 

So, by requiring Brian ID in our quest, we can effectively say that or reduce the amount of bots coming through here. Because yeah, to do Brady, you actually have to get on a video chat. 

Boxer  43:24  

Okay, and do they in-person? Do they require you to show the passports? Or how does that actually work?

Trevor  43:32  

With Brian ID, you just have to sort of show your face, talk to a group, and then you start to verify each other through like social interactions? So yeah, you could do it through video chat. 

Like there's a QR and an app you download with a QR code. You start to scan each other's QR codes. And yeah, through doing that, you build this network of unique users. 

There's also proof of humanity, which we don't currently use right now. However, I think for that one, you do have to sort of KYC by showing your passport and face. Or some sort of identification alongside.

Boxer  44:13  

Yeah, I mean, we like the idea of right ID sign. Sounds pretty good. But I could just like jump on those calls like 20 times. 

Trevor  44:22  

So, yeah, within the app, there's like a unique identifier associated with your application and address. And there are ways, I believe, to simplify that as well. But it greatly reduces the number of people because the friction is really high, right? 

It takes time. It takes energy, and it requires you to dox yourself in order to participate. And of course, I wouldn't say that's necessarily the best long-term solution. 

But all roads really do lead to civil right now. And I think, as long as you're giving away free money, that's always going to be an issue. So, you have to come up with a solution to do it, you know, like optimism comes. 

AirDrop that, you know, they just released. If you actually look at the docs and the data behind how they filtered for users, you can see that led to quite a few marks, and it’s effectively making sure that they weren't being farmed. 

And it's not going to be perfect, but there were certain things like repetitive usage that you had to engage in, and different pillars that may not be financially viable for someone to try to work the system on. So, by extracting those users, you can start to narrow down how many of these users may actually be unique?

Boxer  45:47  

Yeah, yeah. And the combination factors were weighted really heavily. So, if you had like three or four or five tasks, then you would actually get quite a big AirDrop. And all of these tasks alone were quite limited. 

So, even if somebody tried to bot doing things on the Optimus network, by not doing any of these multiplayer caters or combat combinators, you'd still like the bot farmers? Yeah, they haven't. I don't think it was worth it for them pretty much.

Right? Pretty, pretty interesting. Yeah. So yeah, I can see how just the friction of right ID probably…what's your best guess? Like 95% actual real users?

Trevor  46:37  

Yeah, I would say probably a little lower. Maybe like 85%. Okay. Yeah, there's definitely ways to get around it. But they're fairly complex. And I think priority is constantly improving their security in their application as well. 

And yeah, there's always going to be some sort of civil, but for a protocol light or someone else, especially the smaller protocols to be able to receive 90% plus new users that we can with 85 or 90% confidence to verify are actually unique people. 

It really does help create some network effects. And yeah, so on this slide request, you can see that we required a point out to eat to posit, but there's actually a handful of users. Over 70% actually did more than the minimum deposit. Right. 

So, that's another positive for light. Oh, it gets people engaged and interested seeing how they can earn on their ETH. We had over 225 ETH stick during the quest period. And then yeah, as you start to look at trends, you can see this like, massive spike here, right. 

And that's exactly when we that was February 11. So yeah, right smack dab in the middle of when we launched our quest. Interesting. And so you didn't like part of what I was talking about with like retention is that, sure, we can drive this huge spike in usage? 

However, you know, it's tough because after that point, you really have to rely on users like building good habits in order to start actually engaging with the protocol again.

Boxer  48:20  

Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying. Have you done an analysis if some of these people actually came back and stick Maury?

Trevor  48:30  

Yeah, so that's gonna be this query right here, which is how many users deposit a post request. So, once the quest period ends, did they come back again and deposit 65% it here? I would say I usually analyze that number on most quests that we do. 

And it typically is anywhere from 2% to 15%. So, I actually think 5% is a pretty solid number there to have people come back because, like I said, with lending on all day, you're not gonna lend every single day of your life. 

You're probably also not gonna go back and stick ETH every day of your life. You may do that in big chunks or something, right?

Boxer  49:11  

Yeah, I totally see what you're saying. Yeah, interesting. I think this table in the middle where it's like, somebody went through the quest and just casually staked like 150k That's pretty wild. Oh, that'd be like, try to figure this out.

Trevor  49:32  

Yeah, I think you end up pulling in some whales as well. And so they go, oh, you know, this is a reason for me to use Lotto. I've been wanting to use it for a while. I have 200 ETH or something. 

Right. And they're like, let me just take 25% of that. Yeah. You can see what they did for deposit students. So, that means they came back again. Like actually, let me add some more.

Boxer  49:54  

Yeah. It is. Really interesting. Inside actually, I guess it actually…I like seeing that it's this person who only has one deposit, and he has deposited like 86k. That is a bit scary because he basically went on the first try. Just let me YOLO all of this in. 

And the other ones are like yeah, let's test with one Ether or 0.02 Ether. And then yeah, it actually works. So, let's add more. Yeah, very interesting,

Trevor  50:28  

Right? He's only been doing the test transaction.

Boxer  50:32  

Yeah, he's just like white wine. I trust this will be all right.

Trevor  50:37  

Yes, it verified don't trust? Yeah.

Boxer  50:43  

So, how much did people earn for doing this quest? I believe it was.

Trevor  50:52  

Shoot, I don't remember the exact amount off top my head, but it was somewhere between 20 and 40 US dollars. Okay. 

So yeah, I mean, I would say doing quests is not necessarily a sustainable way of earning an income. But it is an incentive to get people to participate and try out new things.

Boxer  51:15  

Yeah, yeah, it's a very gated approach in the end. You basically can't fail. Of course, you can always fail. But yeah, especially for people who are like, not familiar with the space. It seems like a very nice experience. So, does that guide them through?

Trevor  51:33  

Yeah, it's definitely safer, right? Because you're almost being reimbursed for your gas costs. If the question is on Ether, yep. 

And then if we do a class on Polygon, or you know, something like Optimism or something, where the fees are really low, and you still are getting $20. And you know, for some people that can actually can be pretty impactful.

Boxer  51:51  

Yeah. I see that, um, do you have a dashboard where you look at the overall metrics of RabbitHole? Or have you only built dashboards for one quest and the other and the other?

Trevor  52:05  

Yeah, so most of our data at Rabbithole, from an application standpoint is off-chain. So, I have various ways to look at that. But I did also build a couple of these user insight dashboards, which effectively allow me to sample a set of users. 

And then, by cross-referencing that, I can look at all sorts of different on-chain activity associated with these users, whether that's bridging decks usage, NFT usage, as well as general transaction history, seeing exactly what contracts they engage in. 

So, I can take RabbitHole users and see in the last 24 hours that there's been 137 ENS transactions, probably scooping out all those three and four for a ditch.

Boxer  53:00  

Yeah. Yeah, this is really cool. You're basically using Blockchain data to make an analysis, which, in my opinion, is very underutilized. And I will definitely check out the code of this dashboard because that seems like it could very much be just generalized. 

I hope they're not private. But yeah, this is really cool. So, you guys are pretty much making the assumption that an address is actually a static thing. 

So, a lot of the time, I think in the space, we assume that people switch wallets. Every few weeks, a wallet is just like whatever. But from my experience in having like surface data for close to one and a half years now, it actually is that people never change wallets. 

It's just too cumbersome. And you were using that property to do use analysis and then feed that feedback back into your product teams, I guess.

Trevor  54:03  

Yeah, exactly. And I think that was a good point about multiple wallets. I think that there are a number of reasons why people have multiple wallets, but it's less about user switching back and forth and doing the same actions with them. 

And more about them building like a unique identity based off of that wallet, whether it can be a private or public identity, but for the most part, I think everyone has sort of a different use case for their wallets. 

You know, you have your vault wallets. You have your Dijon wall. You may have your NFT walle. You may have one that you connect that you connect to any app, right? Yeah, you never keep more than like a couple hundred bucks for gas on there. Maybe some garbage NFTs or something, right?

But you know, you either have those kinds of users or you have have people that are just spinning up new wallets with code? Essentially botting for various speculation purposes. 

So yeah, taking that as an assumption, you're not going to know exactly who these users are. But you can start to see trends in their usage. 

You can identify which wallets are NFT whales. You know, which wallets are consistent traders, which ones are just sort of casually maybe drifting across the blockchain, trying out new protocols, which ones are farming?

Yeah, and doing this makes it really easy to do all this. So, you know, I think most of these queries right here actually use like the Ethereum contracts table and sort of just cross reference usage with that. 

And so, again, not a perfect picture, but you can already see like, oh can see and 0x and uniswap are some of the top protocols for this set of users.

Boxer  55:57  

Yeah. What do you think? Does zero extraordinaire set people using Match?

Trevor  56:02  

Yeah, that that was my assumption was either Matcha or some other like maybe the contracts being picked up from another underlying protocol?

Boxer  56:12  

Yeah, yeah. Xerox powers a lot of infrastructure. So, you never know, I think. Yeah, the Coinbase NFT marketplace also runs on 0x. 

So, if this is the last 24 hours, this could actually be the Coinbase NFT marketplace, even though I've not heard of anyone posting about it, or I don't know if it's launched a week ago or in beta. And I don't know if it's even…

Trevor  56:39  

Yeah, that was my concern with it, too. Is that they did such a limited launch? I don't know exactly how many users have access to it. But I think it's more some of the larger accounts may. 

And so I think volumes are fairly low. But it's not necessarily reflective of how much of their marketplace will be used. Because it needs to be super widespread, I think, to get usage there.

Boxer  57:03  

Yeah, date, and they need to get all the…Yeah, like those people who are locked on a centralized exchange and who don't want to take self custody and everything. 

And kind of can execute all of that workflow inside of Coinbase using the 0x. That certainly sounds like an interesting idea. Even though I don't even know if they require you to log in with a wallet to trade on, we'll see.

Trevor  57:30  

Have both the custody and self custody option, or at least, start building that out. So, you can either use your KYC Coinbase account, or you can use Metamask or something else.

Boxer  57:41  

That's actually powerful. I'm really looking forward to diving into that data once they actually pick up. It will be interesting to see if they actually shadow move the NFT from one centralized user to another or if they even emit an event on-chain for that. It would be very sad if they wouldn't. Yeah, we'll see. Different conversation.

Trevor  58:07  

Yeah, that is a good point. I don't know how much decentralized activity will be picked up. So, it could be that volumes are understated when you're looking at the on-chain data.

Boxer  58:17  

Yeah, it's gonna be interesting. This is certainly like a new world. If you look at like FTX, or like whoever else like centralized exchanges, they are just like, no, we're just shifting this in our journal database. 

We don't care about altering data, which is pretty sad. Maybe an API one day, we can actually pull that data, but we don't know. We'll have to see. Um, so yeah. 

What are the insights that your team pulled out of this dashboard? If you can share that?

Trevor  58:55  

Yeah, absolutely. I'd say not necessarily from this dashboard, specifically. Just looking at on-chain data associated with our users. That's really where I started to drill into the different cohorts that addresses sort of belonging to at least now with the market. You really have like four or five distinct cohorts all the way from farmers to casual users to something that we've been calling minnows, which are sort of users that are just getting started with their accounts.

Then, you have power users, you know, people who are fully engaged, possibly contributing, definitely participating in your protocol to whales who have the power to drive entire markets based off their volume and usage. 

And so we've done a solid mix of analysis, looking at both like rep RabbitHole application data, seeing what their activity is there as well as looking at how they engage on-chain. That's where we start to identify whether they are a heavy Dex user.

Do they bridge to other chains? Do they only use Ethereum? As you know, maybe for like a couple protocols are only for NFTs, and then most of their engagements on something like optimism, you know, those are all sort of the questions we're asking right now. 

We’re really trying to understand who our users are, what their motivations are, and then how we can build the best protocol for taking users from zero to one. 

And then from that point into actually contributing and getting a job. All with data. So I mean, I think that there is a lot of underlying assumptions that we take here. And so we always run the risk of looking at a user who we may believe fits one persona, but actually they fit another. 

And yeah, I think that's why having sample sets of data, testing your hypothesis over and over with different sets of users is really important to iterate on.

Boxer  1:01:00  

Hmm. Interesting. So you've done this with multiple sets of addresses as well.

Trevor  1:01:07  

Yeah, exactly. And so you start to see, you can start to extrapolate trends, where of course, one sample is going to be entirely different from another. But you do start to see that the majority of users are likely seeking lower gas fees. 

They're engaging in blue chip protocols, rather than a lot of sort of new, non-battle tested ones. And so by doing that, we can start to drill into what users are coming into RabbitHole today. 

And then do we want to continue to target those users? Do we want to incentivize others? At what point in their journey? Is our product matching up with the user persona?

Boxer  1:01:51  

Well, yeah, that's actually…that's magical. If you…so like the first ones where I hear and see of this…actually doing that kind of…usually on Dune…we do a lot of competitive analysis between different projects, but you guys are actually like let me research my users, and how could I design their experience better? 

And if it's like, I don't know, out of a project perspective, what immediately comes to mind is like, if I'm uniswap, or if I'm sushi swap, and I see that somebody, excuse me in the past was no longer using me like…what are they using today? 

Like, what might that product offer? I think that's a very much underutilized category of data analysis and DeFi. In general, what our users are doing, and it's unheard of…you're a pioneer.

Trevor  1:02:44  

It's definitely for us, Arapaho. I think one of the most exciting parts about on-chain data is in the traditional world. Data is so close and gated that you really can't paint a good picture user unless you ask them to complete a survey. 

And even then, you don't know if they're telling the truth or not. And you can't really associate it with like a unique ID. And this unique ID that we can associate with, it's actually an address that works across every single EVM. Blockchain. So yeah, you can take it pretty far.

Boxer  1:03:18  

Yeah, yeah. That's revolutionary stuff right here. I love to see it. I think, like as the Doom community, we could basically make this easier by like having better texts, and basically developing whole algorithms. 

You don't have to do this on your own. And the other guys, I think there's a lot of opportunity there to make really cool things happen. So yeah, it's certainly exciting that you are already embarking on a journey without the proper infrastructure to support it. I guess doing this perfect infrastructure to embark on this journey, but you're kind of pioneering this way of doing user analysis. 

And yeah, in the traditional world, you can only like…I think what people a lot of times do is buy like anonymized datasets, so you get all that data, but it's like I can't really tie it to one person. And then I don't really know. Like, how true my assumptions are. So yeah, this is really cool.

Trevor  1:04:21  

Oh, yeah, that's a good point, too. When you a social media survey or something, for instance, can tell you that like 20% of your users are doing X action? Yeah, but you don't really know how to tie that into like a specific cohort or something. 

Boxer  1:04:37  

Yeah, exactly. Or like credit card data or something like that where you're like these people have bought at my place, and they've also bought at Amazon, but you're like, come on, really? This doesn't really help me with anything. 

Trevor  1:04:49  

Yeah, you don't know if the same guy that bought it. Amazon is now moving on to a different marketplace. Right? And I'm sure Amazon would love to know that data too.

Boxer  1:04:56  

Yeah, wow. This opens up a whole new playing field man. Mind is blown right now. Like I think I've talked to people about this before, but seeing this in action, your dashboard really like does a pretty good job of this. This is pretty cool stuff. I think. Yeah, if there's anyone from a product team listening, they are probably writing queries after this podcast.

Yeah. Yeah, cool. Yeah, I didn't know we've already kind of...So yeah, wrap it all great stuff that you guys are doing. So maybe we can kind of transition into general Web3 data talk, and what we've already pretty much done here. 

Yeah, what do you think makes this data so special? And what are you especially excited about? Maybe we've already talked about this. And also, any additional aspects that you're really excited about?

Trevor  1:05:53  

Yeah, I think right now, it's probably one of the best times to be in data. Certainly in exploring what Web3 and crypto are like. The data is so available. And, you know, providers like Dune, and others are really doing a great job of cleaning that data. 

So, earlier, I think we touched on how, most of your time traditional sense was really just scrubbing data. And it's incredibly exhausting. You know, staring at spreadsheets all day, trying to do so. 

But now we really get to focus on the actual insights and extracting that. So I think it was…it's definitely been a journey for myself to switch that mindset in my head of like, I don't need to spend all this time down in the trenches, scrubbing the data, when I could actually just be extrapolating,real, tangible, sort of call to actions from what I'm seeing on-chain. 

And so yeah, I mean, that's been really fun. I think that learning, honestly, just learning blockchain and new protocols through something like Dune has been really cool too because there's probably no better way to learn them than actually looking at the contracts. And you end up figuring things out that you never would have ever put effort into. 

Right. And if you're curious at all about a certain courier or how something's calculated, you can see the raw inputs. Check those back on either. You can see exactly how they're being written to the blockchain or even go and test out the protocol yourself to find those answers. I actually do a lot of RabbitHole where, if I'm looking for a specific answer to a question, but I'm not really sure how to get the output, I'll go and just do the action myself.

And so yeah, if I want to know what is the proper contract for lending on compound and how does this filter down to the token level or something, right? I'll go and just try out a couple of different transactions, of course, with my test wallet. Then, I'll just take those transactions in Etherscan, or just break them down and then translate them to Seagull and Dune.

Boxer  1:08:06  

Yeah, that's always all. It's insane how well informed you have to be as an analyst, kind of on a contextual level of like…I guess you especially like working with all of these different protocols. You need to know how does this actually work on a smart contract system level

You don't need to know what each…you kind of need to know conceptually like what a smart contract does. But it's how do all of these contracts interact with each other, and what happens when I trigger that transaction and stuff? 

That is certainly a hard part about being a Web3 analyst, but it also gives you very deep insights into how all of this works. And you're like, oh, yeah, this is just a fork of this thing I've seen like three months ago, and that like gives you additional insights into what that team is building. 

So yeah, I can fully subscribe to that. It's certainly a very good way to learn about the space, and it’s also a very exciting space to be in.

Trevor  1:09:10  

Yeah, absolutely.

Boxer  1:09:12  

Yeah. So yeah, I think I covered everything. I hope there were some questions in the chat from our cocoa and five viewers. For the record, it’s not the best time of day I think. It's Thomas here…available for questions. The real Thomas. I'm not the real Thomas. Yes, easier.

Thomas  1:09:43  

Hey, guys. Yeah, so we've got a few good questions. I'll just fire through them. Starting off with this one from Matt. What are some of the most interesting trends you've been seeing in the data recently?

Trevor  1:09:58  

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that gets back to this theme that we've been following. During this conversation of retention and usage and different protocols, I think we see a ton of aligned usage with very direct incentives, whether that's on Ethereum, or, you know, Avalanche or another network. 

As soon as someone releases or tweets an announcement about a liquidity mining program or some NFT that people start to pump, you all of a sudden see very extreme usage directly associated with that. 

So, I think one of the trends we're seeing is that there isn't a lot of sustainable actions right now. And I don't know if that's because protocols are moving too fast and not keeping up with the sort of timing the market and where users are in their journey. 

Or if we just need to focus more on education. I sort of think that is more of the key. Like how do we educate users to where the technology is not going to slow down. And it really shouldn't, right, like we're constantly progressing at a very rapid pace. 

And while a lot of this complexity will be abstracted, I think it is really important for users to understand the individual pieces that go into building a composable financial system or something right? Rather than just maybe chasing that next ROI.

Thomas  1:11:36  

Okay, great. What is your analytical battle station, meaning hardware and software?

Trevor  1:11:45  

Yeah, my battle station hardware wise…I've got a nice ThinkPad laptop. I know most people are on Macs. But I do like the Ice7 here and this ThinkPad. And I've got two pretty large monitors. 

I'm definitely a guy that needs as many monitors as possible, I hope to upgrade soon in the future, I want to have a grid of four, something would be great. And then I've got for software…I would say…our data stack is really a mix of using Navy Cat for database management. 

Get Hub, you know, for various scripts, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, you know, for storing or processing pretty intense queries or scripts. And then, of course, Dune is a huge key there and deciphering a lot of that data as well as read dash, which allows us to cross reference on-chain and off-chain data.

Thomas  1:12:51  

Okay, great. And I guess, this is a question for both of you from Jackie. Is it possible to have real-time data? So far, it's half a day to one day delayed.

Boxer  1:13:06  

Excuse me. I'll let you take our database trails behind a minute or two…behind the head of the chain. That is due to data pipelines, and we have to decode all of that stuff. 

But in general, we're not half a day behind. We're two or three minutes behind. And we are working on bringing that number down even more in our new database architecture.

Trevor  1:13:40  

Yeah, I'd say the answer I always tell people when they're viewing dashboards is that I believe the queries like automatically refresh every two to three hours. And then if you need real-time data, you can just click Run. Yeah. All right. For you.

Boxer  1:13:54  

Yeah, okay. Yeah, coming from a consumer perspective, it looks a bit different. So, the way dashboards work on Dune is we can rerun every query every time somebody opens them. That would literally make our datacenters burn. 

So, what we do is we let the results go stale for I think three hours is the limit. And then if you open up a dashboard, it will automatically refresh. So, the oldest data you should ever see on there is pretty much three hours old. 

And then maybe like two or three minutes more until the dashboard has actually refreshed. You can kind of see that in the bottom right of the widget, so one chart, you can always click on that and if it's currently running or when it has been last updated. 

And yeah, if you want, you need live data at that moment, you can just make a free account and you can actually go into the query and press on run. Wait until it’s finished executing and then you're good to go.

Trevor  1:14:55  

Boxer, can I ask you a question? Yes, sir. In this q&a, I'm curious to learn more about the Dune engine, the two that you guys recently deploy. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Boxer  1:15:09  

Yeah, sure. In my technical understanding, it’s not too deep, but I can explain the broad picture. So, the current state of the database, basically, we have these Postgres SQL instances. 

They have with one Ethereum instance and with one machine incident, one polygon. It's just like Postgres does not need to even take a decent amount of data. Postgres is absolutely at its edge. It's actually quite a wonder. It's quite a miracle that it’s doing day-to-day performs as well as it does. 

And our infrastructure engineers are absolute geniuses. Mostly, you can attribute that to them. And basically, we've recognized that Postgres is not like…we can't keep doing this in Postgres. 

So, what we are now doing is switching to a spark solution. So, Spark is like database technology…that whole thing runs on other technology. I don't know how much I can share about that publicly. 

But basically, our whole database architecture will change. And then we will have all the different chains and all the different data sources in one database. So, you can do native cross gen querying. 

So, that's going to be like…it's gonna be freaking amazing. So, you can do those user analysis, which you did per chain. Now, you can just do that across all chains in one query. And that's going to be mental. It's going to be such an unlock for data in the space. 

And yeah, I'm really looking forward to that. And that's…yeah, we'll switch from their Postgres to a spark system. That's one big change. And then the database will pretty much be the same contents of that. 

But there's a few big implications, which basically come from this change, and all the data will be in one place, which means the execution will be faster. SDN community will have to learn how to use this Spark SQL thing because it's a bit different. 

If you look at like Solana curries today, they're all there already. There are a few things which are slightly different. But in the end, like, we're still using SQL, it's just like, you have to rethink a few things and how you do them. 

Trevor  1:17:25  

It's more…yeah…I'll probably require just more googling. Yeah.

Boxer  1:17:31  

Yeah, education from our side is very much needed. And we'll try to move a lot of the queries programmatically because there are the same things.

There's a concept in Postgres SQL, and you can just transfer that to Spark SQL. And so you will you…we're not quite sure yet how we'll move the queries and how that whole transition will go. 

But basically, it will slowly phase out there also some like face in the new system. And we hope that our users will just naturally accept the new system because it's so much better and faster.

Trevor  1:18:09  

So, the goal is to really increase the execution speed as well as handle a lot more traffic coming in. I can imagine that doing this probably…you know…getting a ton more users than you probably…growing exponentially. So, I'm sure you guys need that stronger engine.

Boxer  1:18:28  

We were certainly having a good time.

Trevor  1:18:32  

What can we analyze during data on Dune?

Boxer  1:18:37  

Ah, somebody has actually built a dashboard. Shout out to…fuck, I forgot. I don't know who it was anymore. But there's like a Dune meta kind of dashboard, which analyzes how many contracts we are decoding and how many contracts are decoded in total. 

And it's 280,000. It is crazy. I mean, that includes all the different factory contracts and stuff. But still, we've decoded 28k contracts, it's pretty mind blowing.

Trevor  1:19:10  

That's insane. How many? Wow, yeah, that's insane. How many contracts? Just there are in general, and then how much demand for looking at the data on? Yeah, so right. 

Yeah, if I could have one do in the future, it would be increased organization of the queries themselves. And probably the schemas too. If I could put folders or put all my queries into folders and different collections that would be beautiful. 

Boxer  1:19:38  

Yeah, I can definitely see that being useful, and yeah, there's this tech system, but it's not really. Yeah, it's not working out too. Great. 

Yeah. There's certainly some product design decisions to be made there to improve that experience. Any more questions? Thomas?

Thomas  1:20:03  

Yep, we've got another one. Quite an interesting one. What space in crypto for you is generating the most exciting data at the moment?

Trevor  1:20:17  

That's a really good question. Actually. I think one of the areas I would like to see more data on that I find really exciting is Tao interactions. And it's probably not answering this question too directly, but it's more like…I find that a lot of the NFT data is very much the same. 

You can make one NFT dashboard, change the contract, and if it's ERC 7 to 1, it's pretty much the exact same dashboard for every single project. And the trends are typically the same, too, right? 

You see huge spikes in the beginning. And then it kind of fizzles out for most projects. DeFi data is really super interesting, right? I actually find it really exciting to watch new protocols launch, add more markets, and then see how those markets compete against each other, and where the demand is. 

And so, like a good example of that, is synthetics futures that just launched, they're constantly adding new markets. But you can also analyze market conditions by looking at how many longs are being opened versus shorts or something. Right. So, I find that really exciting. 

And then, yeah, back to the Dow thing. I think there's a ton of data that's sort of sitting in Discord right now or Twitter or Telegram. And I would love to see a lot of that database surface. 

So, I don't know if that ends up happening through something like ceramic or some other means, but it would be really cool to be able to analyze what interactions are happening. Who's contributing to the house? How much value are they creating for those dials?

Boxer  1:22:07  

Kind of combining off and on-chain data? Yeah, that's a really interesting avenue. Maybe, Mr. Elon, you hear this? Please give data.

Trevor  1:22:21  

Purchases all blockchains? Yeah.

Boxer  1:22:24  

I mean, yeah, I don't know if Elon Musk actually open source is the algorithm. Maybe he'll also give more access to the data and not care as much about where that lands? And if we could have that data combined, like how many? 

How many times has this cash tech? I think people call it where it's like…if you do $1 Bitcoin or something? That's a cash tag. Like how many times has this been tweeted in an hour? And like how does the price develop? 

And especially for these smaller coins…like for Bitcoin…will probably not be better. But for smaller coins? The book probably will probably matter a lot where it's like a weird Twitter marketing engagement. 

Farming, I don't know these things will probably be really relevant. So, you could analyze the fuck Ilan token on buying smart chain by Twitter mentions or something like that. I think that's really interesting. I really hope that there is a future where this is possible, but I highly doubt it. So yeah, we'll have to see.

Trevor  1:23:35  

Yeah, that would be awesome. Hopefully, that data can be served. It isn't too crowded by bots as well because I know Twitter right now is just insane with the amount of things that I'm getting tied in that are not purely just scams. Yep.

Thomas  1:23:54  

What is your top Dune hack or tip?

Trevor  1:24:03  

I don't know if it's my top one. But it's essentially the ability to see other people's inputs and their queries. And leverage those whether you're directly forking it, or you're forking it to then break down and write in your own words, in order to understand the query. 

So, if you have a really complex output, you either need to understand for a contract you're under, or you're curious to understand that someone's done something similar. 

You can leverage the mistakes they've made, you can leverage the success that they've had to them like fully understand exactly what goes into every piece. That's probably my number one Dune hack, I'd say, if you're just getting started. 

Start forking people's queries. I think it's the people. They're open. You can make them private, but for the most part, I think everyone's really interested in sharing, learning, and building in public.

Thomas  1:25:07  

Great. I think that pretty much wraps it up for questions. All right.

Boxer  1:25:13  

Thank you, Chet. Maybe one more question from my side? If you knew nothing about doing today and maybe you also don't have an analytical background like you had, how would you start? 

So Web3 data analysis? Quite a hot space for approaching a career at the moment? So, what would you recommend they do? What to like? Where to start? How to find your first job? Or anything like that?

Trevor  1:25:43  

Yeah, that's a good question. I think from my experience, what's worked has been just diving right in and joining the various analytical communities, whether that's doing or something else, I think everyone is so willing to put forth their help. 

Everyone's growing together, and everyone's making mistakes together. And if you have a problem, someone's probably figured it out before or if they haven't, there might have been thought to it. You know, putting two heads together is better than one in this space. And so, yeah, I would say dive right in. 

But do it with a project that you're interested in. Don't worry about getting paid on it and worry about making it perfect. I think your goals are really learning how to manipulate data, Blockchain data using SQL and making sure you're getting the right outputs with your input. 

So, find something you're interested in. It could be like an NFT project, if that's what you want. And just try to build a couple careers off of it and go from there, ask questions along the way. Yeah, that's how I got started. 

Pretty much just pinging Boxer like every two hours on what does this mean? How the hell do I do this? And, yeah, eventually you'll stop needing to ask him any questions, but that’s it.

Boxer  1:27:01  

Yeah, please, for anyone listening, don't do this today anymore. I can't. Back then, it was like 30 people and now it's a 10,000 or something. Banded quite a bit is safe. My safe, my DMs. 

Yeah, yeah. This has been great, Trevor. Thanks so much for coming on. I'm actually Florian or Boxer. Thanks so much for handling the chat questions. And yeah, see you guys around. Bye. Bye. Yeah, thanks, guys. Bye.

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