This post goes over some basic examples of 

 as well as visualize them with graphs on Dune Analytics. No prior knowledge needed and the opportunities for exploration are limitless.

. It was first published on Medium and has been slightly updated before publishing here. 

Dune Analytics is a powerful tool for blockchain research. It can be used to query, extract, and visualize vast amounts of data on the Ethereum blockchain. 

In public blockchains such as Ethereum, all the information is inherently public. All you need is to look for it. So far, answering questions such as how many users does a project has, or what is the daily volume of a DEX, would most likely require writing a specialised script. Running the script would involve iterating over blocks, parsing the information, properly sorting it, and extracting the data.
This can be both time-consuming as well as extremely specialised. Scripts like that would likely be able to extract information about one specific project but would require extensive modifications to generalise for anything else. Besides, running on all blocks is a long process in itself, that requires either a full node or many individual queries to an external service.

 is a tool that greatly simplifies the process. It is a web-based platform for querying Ethereum data by using simple SQL queries, from pre-populated databases. Instead of writing a specialized script, one can simply query the database to extract almost any information that resides on the blockchain. This guide covers the basics of how to search, write, and visualize basic queries on Dune, so you can go from zero to blockchain analyst in no time. Even if you have never used SQL before, only a few basic examples can go a long way.

At its core, Dune analytics aggregates the raw data from the blockchain into SQL databases that can be easily queried. For example, there is a table to query all Ethereum transaction, nicely separated into columns. Columns cover the sender, the receiver, the amount, etc.

Example query of 5 Ethereum transactions (

. The free tier (requires opening an account) covers:

All free tier queries are available for everyone to see and search. Making queries private requires a pro tier account. The pro tier offers some additional benefits, such as exporting data and hiding the watermark from graphs.

Information from blocks is parsed and populated into the database of Dune with a few minutes of delay. Besides raw blocks and transactions, Dune also has information on asset prices, and specialized tables such as all the eligible addresses for the UNI token.

Now, let’s get familiar with how to use Dune without writing a single line of code, and later take a look at some SQL basics.

After opening an account, the home page will look something like this:

The first screen you see is a list of popular dashboards. Dashboards are aggregations of queries and plotted graphs that other users have created, usually around specific topics.

There are a plethora of dashboards to investigate, covering popular DeFi projects, DEX volumes, Ethereum transactions gas usage, and much much more.

You can search for dashboards on a specific project in the search bar on the right. Be sure to select 

 if you do not find a relevant dashboard in the popular dashboards section. The search only searches through the selected list.

Each dashboard is comprised of individual queries. Each plot can be selected, viewed, and edited.

Graphs can be easily manipulated from the dashboard view itself. Zooming in, selecting a part of the graphs, etc. Double-clicking the title of the graph selects the specific query creating the graphs.

Example of a selected graph from a dashboard

 to view the query or make minor manipulations, in place, or choose 

 to copy the query to your own workspace, where you can make manipulations, save the changes, and create new graphs. We will cover editing and creating queries in the next sections.

Just like searching for dashboards, you can select queries from the top bar to search through queries.

Not all queries are added to a dashboard, so there are many more queries to sift through. Successfully finding a query of interest of course depends on the author labeling and writing it correctly. Once you find a query of interest, you can select, edit, or fork it, just like any query in a dashboard.

Dashboards are usually a more curated subset of queries, which the authors chose to highlight. When looking for information on a specific project, it is better to start with the dashboards and move on to searching queries if you can’t find what you are looking for.

What if you just can’t find what you are looking for? Time to get your hands dirty with some SQL.

Dashboards and queries by other Dune users are a great place to start when looking for information on a specific project, but sometimes the queries in existence are not enough to answer whatever question you are researching.

Luckily, Dune works with a standard PostgreSQL query language. It is easy enough to use to make some basic queries, even if you have never written SQL before.

First, the most useful place to get started is dashboards and queries written by others. As mentioned, all public queries can be forked, or you can simply copy the code from others. This is great to either make slight alterations to a query that answers most of your needs or simply to learn a new capability and tricks from others. For this short tutorial, will write some basic queries for scratch, but it is always useful to look at related work for inspiration.

To create a new query, select the option from the upper left corner. You’ll see the following screen

The tables list on the left contains all the existing SQL tables you can use to create your query. Many popular projects have specialized tables, with information parsed specifically for them. These can be very helpful when looking at a specific project. Although it is always possible to directly parse the data field of all transactions, however, this could be cumbersome and not always accurate.

: Logs of Ethreum events emitted by contracts (such as Transfer)

: All the transfer events emitted when sending tokens

 : A price table for ETH and many other popular tokens, on a per-minute resolution

Every query starts with a research question. The first step is to always clearly define what would we like to know. For a simple example, let’s look at the 5 most recent transactions.

Naturally, we would find the answer in a table that has all Ethereum transactions, so we start by searching for the table in the search field. In this case, searching for “transaction” will bring up the list of relevant tables, out of which we can choose

Clicking on the table in the table list will show all the columns available in that table. In this case, we use the 

Click the double arrow to copy the name into the query field

Clicking the double arrows next to the tables or column names will paste the name in the query section. This helps to avoid manual copy-pasting and typos.

In this simple example, we select “*”, meaning selecting all columns, from the table 

Before running this query, it is important to note that some queries can take a very long time to complete, and return too much data. Especially when starting to work on a query, it is useful to limit the number of returned entries to speed up the process. This can be done by adding the “limit” clause. This limits the number of returned rows to the specified number.

select * from ethereum.”transactions” limit 5

The results of running a simple query are displayed in the results section

Great, we have some results in the results section, but these are the 

 Ethereum transactions. To get the last ones, we can first sort the query by a descending order in one of the columns. In this case, the block time or block number can be a good choice

select * from ethereum.”transactions”
order by block_time desc limit 5

Sorted results from Ethereum transactions

Now we have 5 transactions from the latest block. Tables are not showing live data, there is some delay between when a block is created and added to the tables.

As with every work, saving a query occasionally is very much recommended, especially when making a complicated one (Ctrl+S / Cmd+S works).

In addition to simply storing the data, Dune Analytics has a powerful way to visualize it. For this example, let’s look at a slightly more complicated query. We’d like to know the total value of ETH sent per day, in the past 10 days. This will also help to demonstrate filtering, and grouping data by time.

The query to get this data is the following

select date_trunc(‘day’, block_time) as “Date”, sum(value/1e18) as “Value”
from ethereum.”transactions”
where block_time > now() — interval ’10 days’
group by 1 order by 1

: We do not need to select all the columns in the table, but only the ones we need. In this case, the block time and the value of ETH sent. 

 is in Unix timestamp format, but we are only interested in getting the “day” portion of it, so we truncate the rest of the data

: Gives the column an alias. This is not necessary but makes results easier to read, and graphs automatically have better labels.

: Since we are summarizing all the ETH sent, we use the SUM function to aggregate the data. Since ETH has 18 decimals of precision, we divide the number by 1e18, got get values in ETH and not in Wei

where block_time > now() — interval ’10 days’

: Only look at block times of the past 10 days. This will also make the query run much faster

: 1 here is the first column we chose (date_trunc). We group the results by date and order them by date. Since we are grouping data per day, we must use an aggregating function for all other columns we select. In this case, we use 

 but we could have also used MAX, MIN, AVG, or any other aggerating function, depending on our needs.

Executing the query will result in something like this. A list of dates and the sum of ETH transferred during these days.

Now we would like to plot this data. Select the 

How to get started with querying on Dune Analytics

Ever since our inception in 2018 we’ve been a two man operation, building out Dune Analytics on a shoestring budget. 

Today we are excited to announce that we have raised a $2 million seed round led by Dragonfly Capital

 to scale up the Dune Analytics team and product. We also have top industry names like Multicoin Capital, Hashed, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group and more onboard (see the full list below).

Dune Analytics allows anyone to create, share and explore Ethereum analytics for free.

Over the last few months we’ve seen explosive growth and there are now thousands of community members creating and exploring awesome queries and dashboards with Dune. 18 000 analyses have been created and that number is growing rapidly. We are truly grateful and excited to see all the wonderful things the community builds with Dune every day, and this is just the beginning!


We’re in the fortunate position where all our investors are also active users. These are some of the smartest minds in the space and we are incredibly excited to have world class investors, Dune users and community members onboard:


Shoutout to yearn that participated in the round but insisted to do it as a no strings grant!

Expect even more and better free data tooling

With the funding we will be able to scale and greatly improve the Dune product, for both query creators and non-technical community members exploring dashboards. We’ve seen the magic that is created when you couple easy to use, powerful and free data tooling with this community and that magic is exactly what we will continue to facilitate in a bigger and better way. Expect a lot of exciting new features and product experiences from Dune going forward!

With small team comes great opportunity for impact

Today we are grateful and excited to serve top teams, researchers, funds and community members across the globe as both customers and users, but there is so much more to do! While we’ve been working hard there are limits to what a two person team can build and operate. With the seed funding we can now scale up the team to realise the full potential of Dune Analytics.

We are now making our very first hires remotely across Europe to help us elevate the Dune Analytics experience. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to build something incredibly useful with a small team in this decade’s most exciting industry!

If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the thousands of community created queries and dashboards on Dune Analytics by clicking "

Dune Analytics raises $2M seed round led by Dragonfly Capital

Hello World! Today we are incredibly excited to officially announce and open up Dune Analytics to everyone. We've already had prominent customers such as Dharma, Argent, Gnosis, Binance, and others using Dune for a while. Today we are vastly expanding our impact as we are opening up the Dune Analytics toolbox for anyone to use free of charge.

Query human-readable Ethereum smart contract data with SQL.

Visualize your results and instantly share them with the world.

Browse, share and fork community created analyses.

Turn any query result into an always up to date dashboard that you and others can reference back to at any time. You can also explore, share and fork analysis created by other community members. We hereby invite the whole Ethereum community to create, share, explore and discuss analysis of smart contract adoption and activity.

To kick things off we've created this DEX dashboard: 

. Notice how every metric is enabled by a query that anyone can see and fork!

 where you can get some tips on how to get started.

End-user adoption of dApps and smart contracts have long been a hot topic in the Ethereum space. Cool tech is cool, but actual adoption is even cooler. Anyone building on, investing in or caring about Ethereum should be concerned with the end-user adoption of these products. It even matters for end-users themselves!

Most dApps both handle assets and are marketplaces. Users can be more confident that their values are handled by trustable code if they can see that that code has handled a lot of value safely already. In addition, all marketplaces need liquidity which practically means that the user experience is better if there's a lot of activity.

Up until now, access to high-quality insights is limited to the few that can afford both engineering hours and infrastructure costs. Useful analyses often end up in siloed private settings, or have a limited shelf life in a static report.

There’s currently no easy way to answer any arbitrary question about Ethereum activity with data. Much less reference back to see how that data moves over time. There are a few sites that report some specific metrics, but it's hard to keep track of these sites, their methods are often non-transparent and there's no flexibility to interact with the metrics and data they provide.

This, in turn, means that it's hard to benchmark metrics across different dApps in a meaningful way. It also means that community discussions and product decisions are often based on no data or apples and oranges comparisons.

With Dune Analytics the Ethereum community can now query human-readable Ethereum data with SQL, then visualize the results and share it with the world in a matter of minutes. In other words, you can create your own dashboard full of nice visual graphs within a plug and play experience. We provide you with all the smart contract events, contract calls, Ethereum transactions and more in real-time. We also have token/USD prices you can easily join with to get USD volumes of on-chain activity.

Beyond the data and tooling, you can explore all the other great analysis' that fellow community members have created with Dune. If you think the method can be improved or you get inspired you can simply fork the query with a click to make it your own. Wondering what is actually going on is now a thing for the past. In the same way that you can send an Etherscan link for a transaction, you can now send a Dune-link that points directly to the real-time updated analysis of any high or low-level metric(s) you are curious about.

Now, let's have a look at what you can create with Dune:

Find our full dashboard with more DEX metrics at 

DEX aggregator 1inch put together a full dashboard for their smart contracts in a couple of days.

 from MyCrypto used Dune to research activity on the FairWin ponzi scheme and created 

Ameen used Dune to see how many people rage quit from Moloch DAO.

This powerful insight is found with 5 lines of SQL. October saw the highest number of new contracts deployed since December 2018. 

This is just the tip of the ice berg, now it's your turn! Sign up for free, browse these and other queries, fork them and create your own. When you have something useful or want to get community opinion simply share the results with a public link.

We can decode any smart contract data to our human-readable format, simply reach out here if you have a request for decoding.

Dune Analytics was founded by the two Norwegians Fredrik and Mats in the summer of 2018. After having built and experimented with smart contracts together in our previous jobs, we learned first hand how hard it was to both get and utilise data from the blockchain. Only 3 months after we started we landed our first customer, Dharma. Throughout this year several top projects in the Ethereum space have decided to use Dune as their go-to analytics tool for on-chain data.

In the spring of 2019, we got accepted into the Binance Labs accelerator. We spent a few intense and fun months in Berlin and San Francisco together with other talented projects and the experienced Binance Labs team.

We're proud of what we have achieved and shipped so far, but we are just getting started! If blockchains, data, and relentlessly building and shipping useful products to users sounds like fun to you we encourage you to join us and become employee number one at Dune Analytics! 

The Dune Blog

How to get started with querying on Dune Analytics

Dune Analytics raises $2M seed round led by Dragonfly Capital

Hello world!