Footprint Analytics: Our 2022 in Review

While 2022 was a challenging year for every company in the crypto industry, we’re proud of what we accomplished in such a short time and are incredibly excited about the future.

Last year, we built a rock-solid foundation to empower the Footprint Analytics platform.

The platform is now incredibly multifaceted, serving many types of users, including casual crypto enthusiasts, Web3 builders, VC investors, GameFi protocol developers, NFT projects, and others. We serve those with extensive data science/coding experience as well as those with none.

In 2023, we aim to help the entire blockchain community use data analysis to get more intelligent insights and create better Web3 experiences. We plan to do this by demonstrating how Footprint Analytics — which we believe is the most comprehensive, easiest-to-use, and best-performing blockchain data platform available — can help them reach their goals.

In terms of data coverage, we parsed 19 chains in 2022. Combined with the five we parsed in 2021, we now have 24 public chains on our platform. This is the widest coverage of any data analytics tool in the blockchain space. Whereas it’s taken better-known competitors years to index Solana, a notoriously tricky chain to parse, it took Footprint several months. You can now explore and query Solana transactions, abstraction tables for different domains (including GameFi/NFT) and protocols without knowing how to code using Footprint Analytics, thanks to the tireless work of our engineers.

Regarding ease of use and flexibility, we remained true to our original vision of creating an easy-to-use, no-code analytics tool. Then, we expanded our use cases to developers and those with a website or platform. Launching our unified Web3 data API was one of our most notable events of 2022. This tool allows developers to easily access the most extensive data warehouse of NFT, DeFi, and GameFi projects with just a single line of code integration. It simplifies accessing and utilizing blockchain data, making it more accessible for developers of all skill levels.

Here’s what one user said:

“We use nearly all of the Token and NFT APIs. The advantage we see with Footprint is being able to get specific relational data with SQL and the cross-chain support,” said Isaac Dubuque, CEO and Co-Founder of Agave.

“Prior, we had to create an internal ELT from the other data providers in order to support this. With Footprint we will be able to focus solely on the research and reports. Combining all the data sources was messy. Now, we can just use Footprint.”

Finally — performance. We have significantly improved our latency from t-1 days to just 5 minutes. We have also expanded our historical data support from 90 days to include full history. In addition, we have expanded the types of data we support from silver and gold to include the bottom layer of the chain. This allows for more free index exploration and data processing capabilities.

The downstream result is that we’ve grown. Going from under 300 at the beginning of the year, Footprint Analytics has attracted 6,000 analysts to our community at 2022’s close. Our platform’s number of community-made charts grew by 900% YoY.

These analysts, charts, and dashboards have been picked up and used by the most prominent outlets in the industry.

A further, innovative way we plan to stoke interest in blockchain data analysis in 2023 is by incentivizing creators monetarily. For example, we want to enable creators to set chart access prices, and we’ll launch a Footprint utility token that makes the system rewarding and potentially profitable. We call it “Analyze-to-Earn.”

In 2023 there will be many challenges, but we believe our team has the solutions. Our technical background, combination of web2 and web3 experience, and expertise in indexing and processing different domains into business data has already allowed us to overcome some of the most significant hurdles companies grappling with blockchain data face.

An example: While anyone can build a blockchain ETL, creating a warehouse and pipeline that processes massive amounts of data, integrates it with other systems like analytics platforms or APIs, and reliably indexes it despite all the different and ever-changing protocols, marketplaces, contracts, and features is a monumental struggle.

Recognizing the limitations of Google BigQuery (our Architecture 1.0) in terms of storage cost and concurrency and the limited application of OLAP solutions (our Architecture 2.0), our team developed something different.

Taking lessons from our two earlier architectures and learning from big data projects like Uber, Netflix, and Databricks, we redesigned the entire architecture from the ground up to separate the storage, computation, and query of data into three different pieces with Iceberg + Trino + Flink. The Footprint Analytics architecture upgrade 3.0 allows users to get insights into more diverse usage and applications, and it’s what allows our API to work as well as it does.

Data as a service. We will provide more developers with unified cross-chain and cross-domain API services and expanded vertical segment solutions such as GTM/CRM tools, making Footprint not only a data provider, but also a data solution provider.

We now have a community for analysts and developers using our comprehensive, user-friendly, and powerful tool, as mentioned above. Going into 2023, we also have a mature global team based in 8 cities in the world. They span marketing, engineering, research, community management, and sales roles. Now being able to attack challenges from many angles and perspectives, we believe 2023 will be the inflection point where the entire blockchain industry knows about Footprint Analytics.