What Is Dune Analytics? How Dune's Blockchain Data Platform Works

Dune is a data company, not a crypto protocol. Its Terms of Service name Dune Analytics AS, a Norwegian registered company, as the provider of every Dune service ². According to Dune's About page, two founders, Fredrik and Mats, started the company in Oslo in 2018 by cleaning up Ethereum data for a single paying customer ¹.

The company grew quickly during the 2021–22 market. In February 2022 it raised a $69.42 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, led by Coatue, with existing investors Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital also taking part ³. Dune now says it has raised $80 million in total and employs more than 50 people ¹. Those figures are self-reported.

Over time Dune's emphasis has moved from a community dashboard site toward paid data products for teams: enterprise plans, data connectors and curated datasets ¹.

Dune ingests blockchain data, organizes it into tables and lets users query those tables with SQL in a browser editor. Results can be saved, turned into charts and assembled into public dashboards ².

Three data layers. Dune's catalog organizes data in layers that build on each other ⁶:

• Raw: blocks, transactions, logs and traces indexed directly from nodes.
• Decoded: contract events and function calls translated into readable tables using verified contract ABIs on EVM chains, or IDLs on Solana.
• Curated: cleaned, cross-chain datasets such as DEX trades, NFT trades, balances, prices, bridges, lending and labels. Much of this layer is built in Spellbook, Dune's open dbt project on GitHub. Each model there is a SQL query, and Dune accepts outside contributions selectively ⁸.

DuneSQL. Queries run on DuneSQL, Dune's modified fork of the Trino query engine. It adds data types for blockchain values such as addresses and hashes ⁵.

Community dashboards. Most dashboards people search for, such as ones tracking a specific DEX or prediction market, are written by independent analysts or by the projects themselves. Dune hosts them but does not vouch for their logic. Before relying on a number, open the underlying query: a wrong filter, missing chain or stale label can change the result.

Beyond the browser. Dune also offers a SQL API for running queries programmatically, the Sim API for real-time wallet balances and transactions, data uploads, and Datashare, which pipes Dune data into Snowflake, BigQuery or Databricks ²⁷.

Which blockchains and data it covers

Dune's documentation lists raw, decoded and curated data across "100+ blockchains" ⁶. (The pricing page's description says 130+; the figure depends on how chains are counted ⁹.) Coverage is uneven by layer. For example, the curated DEX trades dataset covers 50 EVM chains plus Solana. Some datasets, including stablecoins, EVM balances, perpetuals trading and most prediction-market tables, are gated and need a workspace entitlement ⁶.

Dune sells subscriptions priced in credits. Running queries, exporting results and making API calls all consume credits. Larger query engines finish faster but cost more credits per run ⁴.

Source: dune.com/pricing ⁴. Annual billing is advertised at 15% off. Extra credits cost $0.016 each on Analyst and $0.014 on Plus. API limits are 40 calls a minute on Analyst and 200 on Plus.

Three details are easy to miss ²⁴:

• Self-serve plans license data for internal use only. Commercial redistribution needs an Enterprise agreement.
• Paid plans attach to a Team, not an individual account. You create or join a team, then upgrade it.
• Dune's terms reserve the right to make free features paid later.

You need a Dune account, with a login and password, to use the platform; payment details are required only for paid plans ². Dune reads public blockchain data, so using it never requires your private key or seed phrase. Treat any "Dune" page that asks for one as a scam. Queries and dashboards on lower plans are public by default; private queries start on the Plus plan ⁴.

Dune publishes a public status page at status.dune.com that records service incidents ¹⁰.