Iceberg: Just the tip of Cardano Onchain Analytics

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Miguel Saldana

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

Entity (Not Incorporated)

[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)

Iceberg will be a data analytics platform that will expose Cardano blockchain data to users in SQL, a common and easy-to-use language, and custom-curated tables to make analysis easy to do.

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

No

[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.”

No dependencies

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

Yes

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

The entire project will be licensed with an MIT license.

[METADATA] Horizons

Analytics

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

Why Iceberg?

One important aspect of blockchain technology is that the onchain ledger is completely transparent where all transactions, smart contract interactions, and NFT mints can be seen and analyzed in plain sight. A challenge for Cardano is that this is not easy, be it the infrastructure requirements to do this, understanding data schemas and navigating UTXOs makes it no small feat for the data analyst. Other ecosystems have tools like Dune or Flipside which encourages users, project teams, and investors to build out analytics that they can trust and build insights from. Users can understand onchain trends, project teams can display meaningful analytics to their community from a transparent and confirmable source, community members can understand who is supporting what in governance and investors can understand which projects are gaining traction and shipping.

Iceberg also comes out of the need for continuing to build out a token engineering platform and project (https://thetokenlab.xyz) to support Cardano. Getting onchain data is possible, but currently requires very ad hoc solutions to be put together. Iceberg will help to design a systematic way of getting data that can be applied broadly to various narratives.

We have built relationships with data analysts in the Cardano space and this is a major ask for someone to build. In addition, we would leverage the relationships developed with builders in the Cardano Ecosystem to help guide and steer as the project kicks off.

Why Now?

Cardano is at a unique crossroads where DeFi projects are starting to attract liquidity, DePIN is taking off, and generally, the builders are putting in the time to make Cardano a stronger ecosystem. As the ecosystem grows, we need people to help highlight the successes, understand trends, and explain why things are happening the way they are. This opens lots of opportunities for data analysts to support projects and help create awareness with easy-to-access data. Currently, the only onchain analytics that can be done is through explorers (which are cumbersome) or something like TapTools which only has fixed views and doesn't allow a user to establish and create their ways of connecting the dots.

How to Build Iceberg?

The underpinnings of many data analytic platforms in the blockchain space are supporting a node and indexing solution and exposing the data through an SQL engine. This has proven to be one of the most accessible ways to get and connect onchain data for users for building out dashboards and visualizations. SQL is a very low-level language with a very low bar to learn, and allowing queries to be performed online and supported by visualizations will make the entry to draw out insights much easier than before.

What's the Impact?

Dune and Flipside crypto have helped to level the playing field and give power to people to understand what's going onchain. Be it successful projects gaining traction, tracking whales and replicating their strategies, highlighting dReps action (or inaction), uncovering shady business, or simply helping airdrop hunters chase the next bag. The multitude of use cases for a data analytics platform is endless. Right now we trust projects to display real metrics, but with Iceberg users can self verify that themselves. Iceberg is the public good that we all need to make Cardano a more transparent and insightful platform for everyone.

This project is aimed to help serve the community and we already maintain contact with a wide variety of members from various projects and data analysts that we will actively work to seek feedback from to help ensure that Iceberg can meet the expectations of the users. Feedback is crucial to making any project successful and we will be looking at taking in as much as we can throughout the building, testing, and demoing phase of the project.

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

Iceberg will enable the larger Cardano community easier access to onchain data to understand what is happening in the ecosystem. The end game is that people will not need to bother with spinning up nodes, worry about managing an indexer, and/or need to understand how to parse through smart contracts to be able to see what is happening. The parity and data asymmetry between the technically savvy Cardano builders and users will be lessened now that people can access, build, and develop insights from curated tables of exposed blockchain data.

Dune and Flipside Crypto initiated growth within Ethereum and Solana ecosystems by allowing users to market analytic skills for their gain (ie traders, airdrop farmers, and data analysts) to taking on full-time roles working with dApp teams and investors to support data-driven decisions and understand trends in the ecosystem.

Lowering the bar and providing easier access to data is the ultimate goal of helping the broader Cardano community.

[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?

I (Miguel Saldana) have been involved in Crytpo since 2020 and Cardano was the first network that I've followed. I've seen the Cardano ecosystem grow through all the various eras and hard forks and have been learning and wanting to contribute more to the ecosystem. Professionally, I've been working as an Engineer in the energy industry and working in a variety of roles both functional and digital in nature, managing projects and deploying digital solutions across a large global enterprise. My most relevant project was deploying a cloud-based self-service solution for my function to enable all engineers a way to get easy and accessible data every day. I have built data analytics and machine learning solutions professionally and will apply this knowledge to the Cardano blockchain. I've been slowly building out the Cardano Token Engineering project and realized early on that boutique or one-off solutions were not a sustainable way to analyze incentives and mechanisms that promote growth. I've decided that this is an inevitable part of helping support token engineering since getting access to data for modeling and simulation is admittedly tough right now. In addition, Miguel has been a member of blockchain projects Sarcophagus (https://sarcophagus.io) and Token Dynamics (https://tokendynamics.xyz) both doing onchain analytics and economic security analysis as well as dApp development and community growth and management in the EVM.

I've also realized my limitations in the space and onboarded a colleague from work, Travis Clark who is interested in contributing to open-source projects in the blockchain space. He has a similar background as me and currently works on an enterprise GenAI team developing AI-based solutions for various functions. Travis brings solid programming skills and knowledge of how AI models such as RAG models can be integrated into the solution to improve user experience.

Together we bring over 20+ years of engineering practice, project management, and digital skills to tackle head-on the challenges of making data more accessible for Cardano. We have substantial backgrounds in data analytics leveraging cloud computing and developing data solutions in SQL.

To help overcome potential risks, we have connections with technical experts who we will lean on for extremely challenging problems that may arise. This involves cloud and data management experts from our professional network as well as systems architects that we know who have extensive knowledge of the Cardano ecosystem and the eUTXO model that Cardano employs. We understand that the major challenges exists in managing the eUTXO model as well as data synchronization issues which is why there is a focus on working on an indexing solution that fits the scope of this project for data analysis.

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

Milestone #1: Onchain Data Curation

• Milestone Outputs:
• A curated tables to be developed for Iceberg prototype
• Feedback on desired tables from notable analyst in the space
• Acceptance Criteria:
• In a GitHub repo the requirements will be clearly documented by data, data type, data source, and notes about challenges associated with the particular tables
• Additionally, documented a list of desired features based on the feedback from data analysts in Cardano to be captured and stored in GitHub
• Evidence of Milestone Completion:
• GitHub will be published and made public and visible
• All listed documents will be made available

Milestone #2: Tech Stack Requirements and levels of scaling

• Milestone Outputs:
• Defining the required system requirements to build a prototype for the project and the associated tech stack necessary to build the technical project
• Acceptance Criteria:
• Systems architecture design showing the process and data flows for Iceberg to work
• Define technical requirements and what scaling the solution looks like haha
• Evidence of Milestone Completion:
• Within a GitHub repo, documentation of technical requirements and system architecture to be defined

Milestone #3: Indexing Solution for Iceberg

• Milestone Outputs:
• Build out the initial indexer to the system requirements listed earlier from both a technical and data perspective
• Acceptance Criteria:
• Indexing solution that is documented and stored in a GitHub Repo for the project
• Evidence of Milestone Completion:
• GitHub Repo made publicly available with the required documentation listed above.

Milestone #4: Initial MVP/PoC of Iceberg

• Milestone Outputs:
• Data Feeds that output the initial data table requirements defined earlier in the project
• QAQC/Validation of data feeds from internal testing
• Framework for visualizations to be populated
• Acceptance Criteria:
• Outputs generated by MVP and highlighted as examples in GitHub
• Basic testing and validation modules are made available in a GitHub repo
• Examples of graphics that will be made available from outputs that will scale
• Evidence of Milestone Completion:
• Data Feeds and outputs from example scripts shared publicly
• Testing/Validation Modules made available
• Documentation of initial graphics in repo

Final Milestone:

• Milestone Outputs:
• Collect list of beta testers from data analysts across the Cardano ecosystem for testing
• Feedback from beta testers with actionable work items for scaling the MVP
• Develop forward plan to move from MVP to productionalizing the solution
• Acceptance Criteria:
• List of beta testers and projects that they work on
• Documented feedback from the beta testers to capture for next steps of the project
• Plan in place for growing the project, including but not limited to seeking venture funding, future catalyst proposal, and/or partnering with project teams
• Evidence of Milestone Completion:
• Documentation of feedback and future plans in GitHub

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

Miguel Saldana - Project lead (https://www.linkedin.com/in/msaldana1000/)

• Analyze Cardano data schemes to understand requirements to curate data in an accessible tabular format through SQL
• System Design for the tech stack required to power the solution (Iceberg)

Travis Clark - Technical Design And Engineering (https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-clark-4130b898/)

• Provide data engineering and development needs for the project
• AI and modeling development for the project

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

Projected Infrastructure Costs to support MVP: Using the current exchange rate of 0.35 USD/ADA

Total Projected Costs = 75,000 ADA or $26,250 USD

• ~$5000 USD (15,000 ADA)
• Web App hosting
• Database and cloud computing support
• Administrative costs

Projected Time Commitments for engineering solution and development of codebase for project: (Based on Software Engineering costs of $75/hr based on a query from ziprecruiter.com)

• M#1: Data Curation - 100 hrs
• ~$7,500 USD (20,000 ADA)
• M#2: Tech stack Requirements - 20 hrs
• ~$1,500 USD (4,500 ADA)
• M#3: Indexing Solution - 100 hrs
• ~$7,500 USD (20,000 ADA)
• M#4: Initial MVP/Poc of Iceberg - 45 hrs
• ~$3,500 USD (10,000 ADA)
• Final Milestone - 25 hrs
• ~$1,750 USD (5,000 ADA)

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

Iceberg's mission is to allow users to dig beneath the surface of onchain data and develop insights in a way that is open, transparent, and has relatively low barriers to use. We're creating a solution that is simple and intuitive, requiring no technical expertise around Cardano infrastructure or complex setup, so users can focus on developing insights from onchain data without needing to understand the underlying technology. Our goal is to create the MVP for the product and slowly grow a community of data analysts to help support and steer the next steps for the project. In a true open-source fashion, Iceberg aims to be like Dune and Flipside Crypto, who have developed strong communities of data analysts that create more opportunities for people to contribute and be a part of the Cardano ecosystem.

The costs for this proposal are the base amount to help spin up something that will be technically proficient to utilize as an onchain data analytics solution. Future considerations will be conducted to help scale and productionalize the project for more users to use.

Built by the community, for the community!