Better Cardano Blockchain Insights

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

André de Amorim Fonseca

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Individual

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

6

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

A tool to help users understand the blockchain by exposing its network effects, feeding investor analysis, and serving educational content.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

Yes

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

IOG analytics dataset is one of the alternatives we will explore as an alternative analytical solution that could scale with the growth of the Cardano blockchain.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

No

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

I'll open source all queries used on the Cardano Blockchain Insights which are being directed to the IOG analytics dataset.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution.

The data produced on the Cardano Blockchain is not easily translatable into consumable information which could be used by the public for, for example, blockchain health monitoring and financial analysis. Better exposing information extracted from the blockchain raw data, in a user-friendly format, is vital for the engagement of different user profiles, such as developers and/or investors, ultimately increasing the growth of the Cardano ecosystem.

In this context, we created Cardano Blockchain Insights as a tool to help different profiles of users to better visualize different dimensions of events inside this blockchain. This tool is materialised as a dashboard exposing data collected from multiple public data sources (Mesari, adapools, adatstats.net, Twitter, etc.) and private APIs exposing views made on top of Cardano DB sync and also other off-chain data. This tool is already created and being used by the Cardano community since February 2021. The CRFA team and other external contributors extended it multiple times within the course of the last year.

However, with the increasing complexity of the queries aiming to simplify its content and the growth of the blockchain itself, enabling a better way to scale will be crucial to continuing exposing the full history of the metrics collected so far. Thus, exploring different analytical data storage for our views over Cardano DB Sync (such as ClickHouse), and investigating the usage of other data sources such as Carp (https://github.com/dcSpark/carp) or IOHK's Cardano Bigquery solution (IOG analytics dataset), will be an important step of the work done on this proposal.

We also plan to devise a better solution to get a faster feedback loop from the community towards the data we are now exposing by open-sourcing all queries used on the Cardano Blockchain Insights. The goal is to provide a way for different contributors to challenge our data and propose fixes and improvements.

At last, besides current content, we plan future short / medium term developments that will help improve the user experience which focuses on improving the quality of current content and adding new metrics of interest.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community.

Based on the feedback received so far, it is clear that Cardano Blockchain Insights brings value to the community with its organised, easy to understand content and at the same time helps the ecosystem by attracting new users and reducing their learning curve. Although this proposal does not fit in the other specific Catalyst Challenges, we choose this broad section because it is a project that has the support of the community and could enrich the Cardano ecosystem even more.

There are 3 main values brought to the Cardano ecosystem by Cardano Blockchain Insights are: to provide decision-making tools for research/investor analysis, the opportunity to monitor the state of the blockchain, and create educational content for the community.

Data for research/investor analysis

Cardano Blockchain Insights content can be used as inputs for monitoring and performing multiple blockchain analysis, such as adoption or decentralisation analyses, amongst many others. It offers a way to visualize network effects in Cardano which can feed research/investor studies and also, creates the possibility to perform valuation projections. Many of the statistics already present on the site like: the number of wallets created, the total Ada staked by users or the social media statistics, are important KPI’s that show Cardano has a vibrant ecosystem and are metrics that an investor looks at when assessing a possible investment. As an example, Grayscale, an important investment fund, mentioned data from Cardano Insights about the rise of active addresses in their report “An introduction to Cardano”.

The content provided by Cardano Blockchain Insights can also be seen frequently on sites about cryptocurrency, in various articles about Cardano. For example, Ada’s increase in total number of transactions was presented by Cointelegraph.com using data from Cardano Blockchain Insights. Additionally, Kraken report about Cardano’s development of smart contracts also mentions Cardano Blockchain Insights data when presenting the network growth. The same can be said about the actual growth of the blockchain mentioned in an article on U.Today, or the fact that Cardano is 47,000x more energy-efficient than Bitcoin cited by Finbold.com. In conclusion, content from Cardano Blockchain Insights was overwhelmingly popular to present Cardano’s growth and increase in adoption.

Monitor the state of the blockchain

An important use case of the data is to check decentralisation metrics and use this as a compass for decision- making regarding governance policies. We can provide 2 examples of the way these stats can be used. The first example is the "Stake Pools" section on the dashboard, used to monitor the blockchain level of decentralisation. This healthy metric was useful, especially after the launch of ISPOs that started after smart contracts were deployed on Cardano. A second example is the tracking of the Nakamoto coefficient, which is an indicator striving to measure the extent of decentralisation. The goal of the community is to mitigate the risk of an attack on the blockchain and monitoring this coefficient and then taking action is critical in keeping the network decentralised.

The platform also provides a way to monitor the usage of smart contracts in the blockchain, by showing the number of Plutus scripts, indicating the growth of the number of Dapps or NFT marketplaces deploying on Cardano. It also tracks which Dapps are running smart contracts and counts how many times their scripts are being executed - this data can be used, together with the TVL (Total Value Locked) evolution, to check their user engagement and adoption.

Creating educational content for the community

As the language in the blockchain industry is quite technical, it is important to provide information that explains how the network is functioning in a way that the whole community understands the capabilities of Cardano.

A good example in this direction is the "Transactions" section, where it is presented what kind of transactions are being performed in the blockchain and their impact on the blockchain load. For example, a smart contract transaction requires much more resources than a simple transaction and by providing this information, the Cardano Blockchain Insight helps the community to understand the current status and the connection with the network scaling plan that is implemented this year.

Another interesting example can be found in the number of transactions per day chart. Cardano is using the eUTXO model (same as Bitcoin) and the way transactions are performed is different from the account model (used by Ethereum). For eg., one transaction can be a payment from either one-to-many addresses or even from many-to-many addresses. In this direction, Cardano Blockchain Insights is providing a way to normalize the transactions to account style blockchains also revealing the particularities of Cardano when compared with other blockchains.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

With the current estimated blockchain size growth, the scalability of the analytical capabilities of Cardano DB Sync can be a problem in the medium/long term. We will explore other storage/retrieval solutions in order to make our queries scale and be more reliable over time.

Among these solutions, we will investigate how the current IOG Bigquery analytics dataset could be a replacement for our current infrastructure, measuring it against our actual costs and precision. We believe that due to the current state of maturity of the IOHK solution and the already existing conversations between our team members and the IOHK Bigquery's responsible team, this choice will fit our needs with high degree of confidence.

[Project Milestones] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

The first milestone consists of evaluating, choosing, and iterating over an alternative solution for information retrieval for the Cardano Blockchain Insights. This choice must allow this platform scale for the next years in terms of storage and costs. The steps in this milestone are:

• Analyse other data storage/retrieval solutions which could provide better scalability for our heaviest queries on Cardano DB Sync. Ideally, propose an analytical environment for Cardano Blockchain Insights that could scale for the next few years to come, without drastic changes on its data ingestion architecture. Iterate with IOHK for adding missing data pieces for potential alternative solution using BigQuery. Check the feasibility of a change to Bigquery against current DB-Sync solution (centralization might be a blocker).

The second milestone consists of achieve a better stability on our ingestion system using the new backend proposed on the milestone 1. We also plan to provide some new insights on Cardano Blockchain Insights, . The steps in this milestone are:

• Improve accuracy and validity of data by checking data against multiple sources of data, e.g. APIs but, also DB sync SQL queries
• Fix stability of ingestion of data and performance issues by reviewing the code and fixing places where ingestion often fails, analyse root causes
• Add metrics and charts related to Catalyst Fund 11 (as we already did for Fund 6).
• Adding new metrics (e.g. effective-k, tokens metrics, pool groups with skin in the game, google trends, building on Cardano metrics, and many more) as part of the improved monitoring of the blockchain goal.

Provide queries and documentation of how we calculate metrics as our commitment to provide educational content to the community. We assume that the feedback from the community on this set of open source queries can help to improve the quality of the existing insights and validate the milestones indicated on this proposed.

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Mateusz Czeladka has over 17 years of experience in Full-stack development and Data Engineering. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Science and is also an expert in different programming languages and paradigms, mainly functional programming. Andre Fonseca also has a master's degree in Computer Science, being experienced in large scale data storage, processing and retrieval as well as different programming languages such as Scala, Java, Python and Clojure. Over the years, both worked on multiple projects/platforms used by millions of users, facing and solving different engineering challenges in their careers in fields such as e-commerce and banking.

In the context of this project Mateusz will act as a product manager, evaluating metrics and proposing charts which would deliver more value to the comunity. André Fonseca will act as a Data Engineer, proposing information retrieval and storage solutions for Cardano Blockchain Insights.

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Asking for $9’000 = ca. 25.000 ADA at the time this is being written.

$9.000 funds for development and content creation: 600 hours of work with $ 15 / hour just to maintain server costs and minimum compensation for both participants (sharing ~4h of work/day).

We believe that this fund will cover most of expenses already incurred on this project and pay for the proposed additional development. This proposal is also not a simple step of a bigger project.

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Cardano Blockchain Insights is already attracting and will continue to attract new users interested in getting involved in the ecosystem. Charts from this project are constantly being refereed in the crypto specialized media (both written articles and Youtube channels). In that sense, we believe we are already providing great value to the Cardano ecosystem and we would like to make this project scale in order to survive the growth of this blockchain and continue being a easy-to-understand and precise reference about the Cardano ecosystem for both newcomers and veterans. Ultimately, we believe that by maintain this project will be an adoption increase factor for Cardano.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agrees to Fund Rules and also that data in the submission form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept