The on-chain and off-chain data of a blockchain is the most important basic and essential information to understand the operation and evolution of a network.
Cardano Blockchain Insights provides great value to the Cardano community by bringing to a graphical platform information from the raw set of metrics that exist on this blockchain.
This information is useful for developers when programming their protocols, and also for users and investors, in making usage and investment decisions. But let’s not forget the great value for the creation of educational content for the community, being the metrics platform I consult the most myself, to write and support my articles.
The content provided by this development can also be frequently seen in various articles about Cardano on cryptocurrency sites, for example, on Cointelegraph.com, on U°Today, or on Finbold.com.
This information platform, online since February 2021, is a dashboard of data, collected from multiple public sources (Messari, Adapools, Adatstats.net, Twitter, etc.) and private APIs that expose views made on Cardano DB sync and also other data off-chain.
The development team, with frequent external collaborations, added more information, and improved the presentation, in successive versions over the course of the last year.
The information is organized into 10 items, Delegation, Transactions, Stake Pools, Smart Contracts, Social, Price/Volume, Catalyst, Wealth Distribution, Treasury/Development and Tokens, which each group several metrics.
It is not the idea of this article to explain all the included metrics, but I will mention a few.
Decentralization metrics have their important use case, as a compass for decision making regarding governance policies, where in the “Stake Pools” item, the level of decentralization of the blockchain can be monitored, or the Nakamoto coefficient, an indicator that measures the degree of decentralization.
The platform also monitors the use of smart contracts on the blockchain, displaying the number of Plutus scripts, indicating the growth in the number of DApp or NFT marketplaces running on Cardano.
The number of daily transactions provides an overview of the evolution in the use of the network.
Due to the challenge presented by the increasing complexity of queries, and the growth of the blockchain itself, it will be crucial to improve how we scale, to continue exposing the full history of metrics collected so far.
In that context, exploring different analytic data stores on Cardano DB Sync (such as ClickHouse or Bigquery), and investigating the use of other data sources such as Carp, will be an important step for this proposal.
The team plans to enrich the board with ever-growing dedicated DEX content. They also plan to add more content related to NFTs and other native tokens, improving the charts on the dashboard.
The Roadmap
Future development is planned as follows:
Month 1
- Improving accuracy and validity of data by checking data against multiple sources of data, eg 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, analyze root causes.
- Analyze 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.
Months 3 to 6
- Providing documentation of how we calculate metrics as our commitment to provide educational content to the community.
- Adding new metrics (eg 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.
Increased visits is the most important indicator of success, considering that the adoption and knowledge of Cardano are basic for evolution. The goal is 450 visits per day.
Also, a monthly evaluation of the number of times Cardano Blockchain Insights data is referenced in the media will be implemented.
The aspiration of its developers is to make Cardano Blockchain Insights the first source of information for Ada holders, DApp developers on Cardano and people outside the ecosystem, who are considering Cardano as a possible entry opportunity.
The Budget
The requested funds are USD 58,000, which is made up of 1,104 hours at USD 39/hour, plus 378 hours at USD 40/hour.
Where 1,104 hours represent the content already created, and that is currently visible on the site, while 378 hours represent future tasks that are mentioned in the Roadmap of this proposal.
The Team
The developers claim to have a strong background in functional programming and data engineering, and their platform attests to this, being involved in the daily “life” of Cardano.
Mateusz Czeladka has more than 17 years of experience in full-stack development and data engineering, and also in back-end development and data engineering, with a Master’s degree in Computer Science and is also an expert in different languages and paradigms of programming, mainly functional programming.
Andre, also said that he has a master’s degree in Computer Science, with experience in large-scale data storage, processing and retrieval, as well as in different programming languages such as Scala, Java, Python and Clojure.
Over the years, they have 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, the Cardano Fans Stake Pool (CRFA) began, and soon after, the Cardano Blockchain Insights project.
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GitHub: https://github.com/Cardano-Fans
Website: https://cardano.fans/cardano-blockchain-insight
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You can see the proposal on Catalyst: Better Cardano Blockchain Insights.
