Building the future of open data x finance
...and why I joined Dune to help turn that vision into a reality.
Six months ago, I wrote this.
Dune Analytics has announced a Grants Program for its Wizards ($10,000 for a 3 month residency), while Polygon is looking for Mages to run their Guilds. As Vitalik reminded us with his recent article, the kids that once spent countless of hours playing WoW, Lineage and Dota are now setting in motion the new era of digital economic reality, borrowing heavily from the terminology of their favourite adolescent video-games. There are many good reasons as to why these games were so successful back in their day — some still are! — and drawing inspiration from them is no mere accident: they were fun, enthralling, imaginative and empowering, letting players escape into a crafted fiction from their daily problems and their busy, often dull lives. Blockchain communities today are taking the best elements of these immersive experiences and turning their purpose upside down, now making them part of real-life economic and social activities (on-chain or in DAOs).
This is why I keep a close eye on Dune. Their recently-claimed unicorn status is nowhere near the full potential of its platform. Much like the Bloomberg Terminal helped ‘unlock’ immense value for the modern financial world since its creation, so will Dune's Dashboards become the go-to tool for anyone observing, analyzing, building or investing in the era of web3, blockchain and open finance. The time when expertise in “Dunealytics” will become a common requirement in job postings and every VC, PE and mutual fund will have a "resident Wizard” in-house is not that far away.
And four months ago, I wrote this:
The emancipatory potential of open finance. Open financial structures leveraging blockchain technology allow us to reshape the historic model of middlemen (i.e. banks) in the global financial system with one of middleware (i.e. on-chain infrastructure and tools). A significant portion of the world's human population, especially in lower socioeconomic strata and across emerging markets, is denied fair and easy access to global financial instruments and pools of capital. Insurmountable credit checks, unreasonable transaction fees, extremely low interest rates on deposits (which are ridiculously high on loans), unclear framework and hidden costs on remittances — these are all typical problems still faced by billions of people on earth. Transparency, accessibility, affordability and speed — all fundamental precepts of open finance that can be empowered by blockchain — are key to unlocking a greater but also more equitable share of the wealth created in this planet across the entire world.
Today - guess what? - I am ecstatic to reveal that I have joined Dune to help turn that vision into a reality. More specifically, I am joining hands with my fellow Mediterranean brother in arms wands, Hugo Sanchez, as part of Dune's Growth Team.
Dune is building a product that has gradually and organically given birth to virtuous cycles and positive externalities for the entire universe of on-chain data. At the same time, it is fostering an amazingly talented, cross-collaborative and enthusiastic community of Wizards — a new generation of data analysts in the new-new world of open finance. Leveraging the openness of blockchain data, Dune is re-imagining and re-defining the future of our financial system, one query at a time.
I've talked before about what I believe are the four fundamental precepts of open finance: transparency, accessibility, affordability and speed. What Dune is building towards hits across all four categories:
Transparency: With on-chain data openly accessible, financial actors cannot hide that easily behind densely created webs of closely protected financial statements typically seen only by insiders or consumers able to pay a high price. Dune queries and dashboards allow for both a bird's-eye view of entire blockchain ecosystems as well as investigations of super specific questions.
Accessibility: When data is public and financials are freely available, the playing field becomes level for everyone. There are no restrictions to accessing information (and if restrictions exist, they are very limited). With Dune's dashboards, anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time — as long as they have a computer and a running internet connection — has access to on-chain data. And with a little effort of learning basic SQL and how on-chain data work, anyone can also quickly step up from viewing appealing visualisations made by others to building amazing dashboards themselves.
Affordability: One of the biggest problems with financial data today is that they remain hidden behind expensive paywalls. These paywalls limit critical financial knowledge to a narrow segment at the very top of the socioeconomic spectrum. This is not the case with Dune. Viewing data on Dune is free and does not even require signing up, while building queries and designing dashboards is super easy thanks to the powerful Community version of Dune's product that is (and will always remain) absolutely free too.
Speed: The Revolution will not be quarterly reported. Consumers of financial data should not have to wait for the next quarter (or year) to get the latest information about the health of a specific project, company or ecosystem. They should have access to as close to real-time data as possible, in order to make informed decisions, track their assets and check the status of financial activities.
These precepts can help build trust in financial systems, allow for new avenues of financial activity, create more equitable pathways towards wealth-sharing and unlock a tremendous amount of latent financial potential currently dormant across the world. This is a future I am very excited about and believe Dune is setting strong foundations towards.
Fredrik and Mats have gradually built a phenomenal and beloved product, but more importantly, they have attracted a tremendous group of people to work on making the world a more equitable and open place. I very much look forward to working closely with this team to build the future of open data and finance together.
So… here's to a new chapter full of magic (data) wands 🪄, Wizards 🧙 and spells 📖 .
Want to become part of this exciting journey too? We are hiring!
If you are interested in learning more about what we are doing at Dune, sign up to Dune Digest (our weekly newsletter), check out our Twitter for updates or come mingle around in our Discord server. If you are already a Dune Wizard, we would love to see you at Dunecon, our annual conference in Berlin on Sep 15.