The Revolution Will Not be Reported Quarterly - Fredrik Haga

all right hey um excited to be here third time at e denver uh so probably an og by now i'm excited to talk about crypto data so the title of this talk is the revolution will not be reported quarterly and i'm going to talk a bit about why crypto data is so different from anything we've ever seen before and how exciting that is and how many opportunities it brings so first let's think about how data used to work um before crypto so basically all kinds of data previously has been a b2b type of thing it's been locked within a business or within a team and it's all very siloed closed um there's never been really much many data sets that actually have like broad accessibility anything in tech is usually closed and it's inherently very limited in its accessibility and i love corporate stock photos so you're going to see a few of those basically also all data previously has been paid for access if it's not produced inside of an organization and you want access to it you need to pay all data providers are paywalled so you have this dynamic where everything is inherently very limited um and just think about the fact that like if you have a login wall that severely limits who can access your thing or like who bothers signing up and if you think about even further um actually you have to pay to get something that even further limits um who will access your thing so when you have this or everything is payable dynamic it inherently becomes a very closed and limited environment furthermore essentially for for like the broader access only trading data is real time so unless you actually build the product and have the stats for that product the only thing you can look at that is basically live is trading data and if you think about how is value created in the world um it's essentially not by trading data trading data is kind of a metadata around what's happening in the world and in the world of finance but at the end of the end of the day what really matters for what driving value in the world is sort of actual usage in actual businesses and and how they they're doing and today all of that goes into essentially a quarterly pdf there's a pdf file that companies put out once a quarter and essentially that's where you see the real interesting stuff that's where you see how many people are actually using this what's the revenue and cost of this business those are the things that really matters for understanding if something is valuable um the trading part gets a lot of attention because it's so real time but it's not actually first and foremost what drives value what drives value is understanding the usage the traction of any given product or business and so this is how the the current world works that's how data works it's very limited um things go into pdf files once a quarter um and beyond that um there's not that much going on now let's look at crypto because this is very very different so first of all crypto is essentially a shared public backend a global computer that anyone can put code to and that in and of itself is of course extremely exciting and the reason why we're all building smart contracts and sort of believe in this space you have this amazing thing where a computer is shared across the world and anyone can put code to it and interact with it but that also means that this computer creates data which is extremely open and accessible and i think this is still very underutilized anyone absolutely anyone can go in and analyze what's going on on that computer and since it's open since it's composable that that means like there's a lot of stuff to to unearth and to dissect and to figure out so it's all a real time flexible and collaborative environment where you don't have to be pay for access you don't have to work at a specific company you can just show up you can see what other people are doing it's real time which is absurdly interesting relative to like getting a pdf file once a quarter um and it's totally flexible you can slice and dice this data any way you want so just take this example like this is a quarterly report from one of the world's biggest banks jp morgan um and as you can see i've highlighted a couple of numbers here and you get things like active mobile customers up ten percent like that that's not that's not super granular or useful um and and this is how this is done it's highly uh like abstracted away arbitrary metrics that some person that that company decides to to display and that's what you get and that's how the whole system works and it's still pdf files that's that's how the thing works um and now contrast that to for instance a system like makerdao that has a dune dashboard that shows real time their financials you can see real time the revenues and costs and expenses of maker dao the bank and this is all feeding live directly from the blockchain so this is such a massive contrast to what you had in a pdf you can actually see anyone in the world can access this go to a dune dashboard and look at this um you can see the balance sheet what asset does the maker bank hold what what's the percentage of this like basically you can look into the risks and liquidity all these things of a system like this in real time um and i think it's kind of ironic when some sort of uh people that don't understand crypto criticize it for being like obscure and risky and non-transparent all this it is so much radically more transparent than anything we've ever seen before like anyone in the world literally can with an internet connection can look at these stats and i think not even that essentially i think basically in crypto anyone has actually more granular and better understanding of these systems than probably the ceos of the biggest banks have in their own systems internally even those even though those stats are not publicly accessible folks like this guy probably understands less about his own bank than what you can as an on the internet looking into crypto financial systems so this is hugely exciting and obviously there's like since this is open and composable and flexible there are so many ways to look into all this data so take one example as the decentralized exchange trading sector on ethereum here's the dashboard that i built where you can see the trading volumes of all the products in that category and you can stack it up against each other and you can see the market shares here like units will pad as much as 80 percent share of trading volume i think this is the last week and this is also like extremely useful for investors like understanding how these products stack up against each other and i think this is still very underutilized like as a space um people still look at like relatively let's call it vanity metrics but if you actually want to understand which products are going to prevail in the long term this is the stuff you want to look into if you want to invest into a decentralized exchange you probably won't understand if they're winning out in the marketplace in their sector and how hard is this to get not really hard like this chart right here that i made is five lines of sql and all of that is public on dude's website anyone can go click fork change it make their own version of it so you have this insane flexibility around all of this so you can slice and dice it any way you want since it's a database with all this data it is not highly abstracted away like in other typical data systems so or things that you can as a public person have access to so so this is like ridiculously easy and can show you so so much what's actually going on in these products and i think furthermore this is important for building as well if you think about the properties of um crypto one of the beautiful things is that it's all composable you can plug into other smart contracts utilize what's already been built but you can also see what's actually working you can look at the data and see these folks built this product in that way and that worked out like this this is the traction they're getting on that product and it's of course hyper competitive but it's also i think extremely exciting for for crypto as an ecosystem because it allows sort of the evolutionary forces to move way way faster where you previously could only sort of semi guess or see what's working for other players now you can see it real time their own internal statistics essentially from the backend that is the blockchain so another interesting thing is so so this is uh from benedict evans newsletter um a couple of months ago one of the best tech analysts in the world and he commented on openc's recent race at 13 billion dollar valuation and he wondered be amazing to see that fundraising deck well essentially it's a dune dashboard um and richard i don't know if he's here right now but he's he's in the on the conference um has built this amazing open c dashboard that shows the revenues interaction of openc and you can see for instance that their monthly volume went from i think about 8 million dollars in january 2021 to almost 5 billion in january 2022 so they did a 625x year-over-year in terms of their actual product traction in volumes and you can even see how that translates into revenue for them via fees and you can see that they did almost 400 million dollars in revenue in january so there's really no need to wonder um why sort of how the what the dex deck look like fundraising deck looks like for a crypto project because you can just look at the actual stats um and and this is actually happening so element finance um raised the 32 million dollar series a simply of a dune dashboard with product metrics and traction metrics so and another interesting thing about this is that the public can make the same assessments as a professional vc or investor because you can actually see the same statistics as they look at when assessing these things and when the token is publicly traded you can actually you know get get the same information access and get access to the same assets another obviously like big thing recently has been looks rare and open c and again back to this sort of building very in a very competitive environment um and you can hear for instance see their trading volumes against each other and you can see that yes looks rare volume was higher it's been falling a lot you can see here that while openc has about 60 000 users a week i think it is daily 60 000 users daily um looks rare has only a thousand um and there's also like hill dobby a great dune user he's been looking into like the watch trading volume as well there's a lot of things happening here and anyone can like look into this and see the merits of these products and their approaches um real time so basically on june for instance there's over 100 000 pieces of analysis we have 10 000 people analyzing this data it's growing every day and if you want to understand what's happening on chain you have all that wealth of knowledge accessible to you and you can fork it you can remix it you can make your own version um so there's this insane amount of knowledge about these systems that's gathered in dashboards and it's happening in real time and it's all building on top of each other instead of building in silos next to each other or in close environments so basically to sum it up traditionally in financial data everything was b2b everything was in within organizations basically all data products were paid for access and if you actually wanted to understand something about the traction the business and how it's faring you got it in a quarterly pdf file in crypto on the other hand things are community first it's open it's composable it's shareable people are building together and on top of each other um it's free for anyone to access and you have real-time insights into what is happening which is a total total game changer and that was all i had so thank you very much