Dune & Nansen: Query-First Analytics

What you'll learn

• From Receipts to Queries
• Dune: The Public SQL Workbench for Crypto
• Nansen: The Smart Money Lens
• Arkham: Entity Graphs and On-Chain Forensics
• DefiLlama: The Universal TVL and Revenue Tracker
• Token Terminal: Treating Protocols Like Companies
• Putting the Stack Together: An Analyst Workflow

Key terms

Dune

A SQL-queryable analytics platform indexing every major chain. Used for custom queries, public dashboards, and the Spellbook abstraction (dex.trades, etc.). Free tier with paid Plus / Premium upgrades.

Spellbook

Dune's community-maintained set of curated, normalized tables (dex.trades, ethereum.transactions, etc.) that abstract over fragmentation across protocols and chains.

Nansen

A wallet-labeling analytics platform exposing Smart Money cohorts, Wallet Profiler, Hot Contracts, and Token God Mode. Subscription-based, $100-200/mo standard tier.

Smart Money

A Nansen label assigned to wallets with historical profitability and behavior consistent with sophisticated trading. Used as a signal cohort but suffers from survivorship bias and reflexivity.

Arkham

An entity-graph forensics platform clustering wallets under labeled entities (companies, individuals, foundations). Strong cross-chain visualization; controversial dox-style bounty mechanics.

DefiLlama

A free, community-run aggregator of TVL, fees, revenue, yields, and stablecoin supply across 4,000+ protocols and 250+ chains. The canonical TVL source.

Token Terminal

An analytics platform treating protocols and chains as financial entities — revenue, expenses, P/S, P/E. Free tier with Pro upgrade.

TVL (Total Value Locked)

The dollar value of assets deposited in a protocol. The most-cited DeFi metric but highly gameable through recursion, points farming, and emission incentives.

P/S ratio (price-to-sales)

A protocol's fully-diluted market cap divided by annualized protocol revenue. Standard valuation multiple imported from equity analysis.