The DCo Podcast EP 41 — Inside Dune with Mats Olsen
May 27, 2025
Mats Olsen, Co-founder and CTO of Dune, shares insights on making blockchain data accessible. He discusses the challenges of retrieving data from blockchains and how Dune's community-driven approach thrives without incentives. Mats introduces Sim APIs for real-time cross-chain data and emphasizes the need for user-friendly infrastructure. He contrasts retail and institutional users, explains why some projects succeed while others falter in data strategy, and touches on the role of AI in enhancing data analytics.
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Blockchains Are Write-Optimized — Readability Is The Hard Part
- Blockchains are write-optimized databases that make aggregated reads hard without off-chain indexing.
- Dune solved this by decoding on-chain data and exposing it in queryable databases for builders.
Pivot To Open, Community-Driven Dashboards
- In 2019 Dune pivoted to open, user-generated dashboards built on public blockchain data.
- That shift turned Dune into a collaborative platform where anyone inspects queries and datasets.
Always Inspect The Query, Not Just The Chart
- Verify dashboards by inspecting their SQL and source data rather than trusting black-box metrics.
- Use the open queries on Dune or social channels to validate results before relying on them.