Dune & Nansen: Query-First Analytics

Dune SQL queries and dashboards, Nansen Smart Money labels and Wallet Profiler, Arkham entity graphs, DefiLlama TVL and revenue, Token Terminal financial-statement view.

40 min · advanced · part of On-Chain Analytics: Reading the Tape

From Receipts to Queries

A block explorer answers questions about one transaction at a time. That is enough for forensics but insufficient for analysis. The interesting questions are aggregated: "how many unique addresses bought this token in the last week?", "which wallets accumulated more than $1M of HYPE before the listing?", "what is the median holding period for ETH on Coinbase?", "which DEXs are gaining share against Uniswap V4?". Answering these requires querying the entire history of a chain — billions of transactions, trillions of events — and joining them against labeled entity data. This is the job of a different category of tools: **query-first analytics platforms**. They index every chain into a SQL-queryable database, layer their own entity labels and clustering on top, and expose either a SQL workbench (Dune), a curated dashboard product (Nansen, Token Terminal), or an entity-graph explorer (Arkham). This lesson covers the five platforms a working analyst uses daily — what each is best at, how to read their core products, and where the data limits are. By the end you will know whether a question is best answered with a Dune query, a Nansen dashboard, an Arkham trace, a DefiLlama metric, or a Token Terminal income statement.

Also in this lesson

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.

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Educational only — not financial advice.