Better Cardano Blockchain Insights

[IMPACT] 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. 

This proposal comprises both the current state of the project, already visible on the site and bringing value to the community over the last months, as well as future short / medium term developments that will help improve the overall user experience.

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. 

As already presented, besides current content, we planned 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 describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

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.

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. In that context, exploring different analytical data storages for our views over Cardano DB Sync (such as ClickHouse or Bigquery), and investigating the usage of other data sources such as Carp (https://github.com/dcSpark/carp), will be an important step of the work done on this proposal.

In the context of having a more scalable way to expose complex data from the Cardano blockchain, we plan to enrich our dashboard with content dedicated to DEXes which are becoming more numerous as the time this proposal is being drafted. We also plan to add more content related to NFTs and other Native Tokens, which were never properly illustrated in our dashboard.

At least, we plan to devise better solutions to get a faster feedback loop from the community towards the data we are now exposing. The goal is to provide a way for different contributors to challenge our data and propose fixes and improvements.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

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.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

Future developments (1-6 months), we’ll be planned as follows:

Month 1

- Improving accuracy and validity of data by checking data against multiple sources of data, e.g. APIs but, also DB sync SQL queries

Month 2

- Fixing stability of ingestion of data and performance issues by reviewing the code and fixing places where ingestion often fails, analyse root causes

- 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.

Month 3 to 6

- Providing documentation of how we calculate metrics as our commitment to provide educational content to the community

- 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

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Asking for $58’000 (39 USD 1104 hours) + (40 USD 378) = ca. 58.000

$58.000 funds for development and content creation: 1482 hours of work with $ 39 / hour

1104 hours represent the content already created and which is currently visible on the site, while 378 hours represent future tasks that are mentioned in the proposal timeline.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

We have strong experience in functional programming and Data Engineering. 

Mateusz 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 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 January 2021, they started the Cardano Fans Stake Pool (CRFA) and shortly afterward, the Cardano Blockchain Insights project. This project unites some of their skills as a way to provide value to the Cardano Community by deriving useful information from the sea of raw metrics which exists around this blockchain.

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

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.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Cardano Blockchain Insights is attracting and will continue to attract new users interested in getting involved in the ecosystem. So, the increase in adoption and awareness of Cardano, we consider being the most important indicator of success.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

Becoming the first source of information about Cardano for regular Ada holders, Dapp developers and people from outside the ecosystem who are considering Cardano a potential entry opportunity.

In order to measure the success of the project, we will monitor the daily site visits by setting a target of 450 visits/day.

Use of Cardano Blockchain Insights as a reference-able resource, for example, the data provided to be used by other parties in marketing Cardano’s current level of development and high potential.

A monthly evaluation of the number of times Cardano Insights data is referenced in the media will be put in place.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

New proposal