Original source: readthegeneralist

Author: Mario Gabriele

This article comes fromFastDaily。

Original source: readthegeneralist

Author: Mario Gabriele

• This article comes fromfirst level title

• Actionable InsightsIf you only have a few minutes, here's what investors, operators, and founders should know about Dune:

• Lean management, perseverance.in Dune"Figure 8 flywheel"The business model center is the creator of the platform, more commonly known as"wizard". These data analysts create dashboards for consumers to view. In the process, they build a resume of their skills, get paid through bounties, and discover career opportunities.

• Figure 8 flywheelThe business model center is the creator of the platform, more commonly known as

• wizard. These data analysts create dashboards for consumers to view. In the process, they build a resume of their skills, get paid through bounties, and discover career opportunities."Tokenize cautiously."At first glance, Dune seems like a perfect fit for the token. It has a thriving community doing meaningful work for the cryptocurrency ecosystem. While they are not against the possibility of a native currency, Haga and Olsen are wary of doing so too soon."Arrakis"Omnichain (full chain) is the future.

Or, maybe now. The advent of Solana spawned a wave of chain-specific projects. Dune needs to support consumers' desire to better understand the data behind these initiatives. The company's upcoming

Dune Engine V2

, which is internally called

, trying to do this.

In 2019, Dune is dead.

This result was almost equivalent to closing the door for a company driven by a core product at that time. Founders Fredrik Haga and Mats Olsen spent over a year trying to raise money for their blockchain data analytics platform, but investors didn't take them seriously. Over a hundred conversations with investors have resulted in the same relentless response: No!

No, we won't give you money.

No, we do not believe that cryptocurrencies are the future.

No, we don't think there is a big market for cryptocurrency analysis tools.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw famously said: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the irrational man insists on adapting the world to himself, and therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." This sentence has become the catchphrase of entrepreneurs -- But what does unreasonable mean? What does that look like?"wizard"It must have crossed Haga's and Olsen's minds that there was little point in holding on. They haven't been paid for more than seven months. Moreover, the market not only said it, but repeated it many times.

Faced with failure, Dune's founders did an unreasonable thing: they persevered. What are a dozen rejections if it only takes one supporter to change their fate? Thankfully for the company and the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem, Haga and Olsen have found believers.

• Two and a half years after his near death, Dune is not only surviving, but thriving. This data analytics platform has established itself as the blockchain data standard, embracing an innovative user-generated model that enables the world's data analysts -- in Dune's wordswizard

• -- able to demonstrate their skills and earn a living. This is a powerful, accessible utility that offers consumers a potential generational business network effect. Now, investors are waking up to the opportunity, having committed $80 million to Dune's most recent round at a valuation of $1 billion.From a near collapse, Haga and Olsen have minted a unicorn that highlights the unique advantages of encrypted data. It's a hero's journey that even Frank Herbert, author of the science fiction novel of the same name as "Dune," would have found especially attuned. In fact, the founders of "Dune" seem to enjoy playing with this beloved saga, borrowing words and metaphors to describe the strange blockchain wilderness story they help make sense of. In today's article, we will explain in detail the iterative "evolution theory" of "Dune", telling:

• There is bound to be failure.Several times in its history, Dune has faced closure, struggled to raise capital, reorientated, and taken risks for its clients. Its existence is a testament to the stamina and value of its founders' iterative approach.

• encrypted currency data.Financial data is usually reported on a quarterly basis. Blockchain changes this configuration, making vast amounts of information instantly available. Dune was built for this radical new reality.

• multilateral platform.The genius of Dune lies in how it coordinates mutually beneficial relationships among the three stakeholders. It's similar to Github, with an extra-dimensional twist.

• business model.How do you make money from free data? Dune seems to have figured out a way to create a consumer platform with a monetization campaign akin to a large enterprise.

• Vibrant culture.Near-death experiences are supposed to bring new life to survivors. Dune seems to prove that the same is true for companies. Few startups seem so resolutely basking in the joy of working."Dune Engine v2 "future.

let's start.

Dune's core platform is undergoing a major overhaul.

let's start.

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Origin: Strange Waters

Every founder’s journey takes courage, but few as much as Dune. The analytics firm dodged death several times before becoming a hit.

first level title"Dune's original intention"In 2018, Mats Olsen decided it was time for a change. He spent two years as a software engineer at Schibsted Media Group, based in the company's Oslo office. He enjoys working at the conglomerate, which owns the most prominent publishing houses in the Nordics and several large online marketplaces. Schibsted gave Olsen the chance to build a series of smart contracts for the trucking industry as part of an internal experiment."While it had fed his interest for three months, the desire to follow his curiosity deeper into the world of cryptocurrencies forced him to take the plunge. That summer, Olsen handed in his resignation. He immediately told his now former colleague, Fredrik Haga, what he had done."Although Haga and Olsen only met a year ago, they quickly became friends. Like Olsen, Haga became interested in blockchain a few years ago, finding it more intellectually stimulating than his economics master's program. Haga recalled:

It got me thinking about a lot of deep questions that I didn't really learn or ask myself,

He made me think about things like"what exactly is currency"Like his friend, he managed to turn his original traditional role at Schibsted into an experimental one, moving from the ad group to Olsen's two-person blockchain team. Schibsted showed a willingness to explore new territories, but Haga quickly realized what that flexibility meant in the context of a large legacy business. All the beliefs in the world will not be able to convince a newspaper-centric corporation founded in 1839 to embrace a radical new financial and computing paradigm.

So when Olsen told his friends he had resigned, Haga spent

half a second to realize he'd do the same

. It's time for an adventure.

first level title"Dune Company"Based on their own strengths, Olsen and Haga picked a perfect and scary time to launch a cryptocurrency business. In January 2018, cryptocurrency prices plummeted, with Bitcoin falling from highs above $19,000 to below $4,000. As enthusiasm crystallized into fear, scammers and speculators fled the industry, leaving only those genuinely interested in the technology and willing to endure the pain that an unproven, volatile market could inflict."This is good news. The bad news is that many venture capitalists are also in the retreat. While any half-assed token project could have raised millions 12 months ago, the specter of a bear market meant that even serious builders struggled in 2018."。

Haga and Olsen are one of them. After weeks of brainstorming, the entrepreneurial duo settled on an idea that lived up to the adage that selling picks, shovels, and water was the best business in a gold rush. Having the infrastructure could prove very influential if cryptocurrencies turn out to be the kind of epic turmoil the duo sees. In particular, they decided to build tools to analyze and visualize blockchain activity, as described by Haga,"Dune "Cryptocurrencies for Mixpanel or Google Analytics. While the need for such a tool seems obvious today, Olsen recalls that it was”

nonexistent

They determined without much thought

the name. It's a strong, evocative word. Even better, Dune's ups and downs are reminiscent of data set fluctuations, with each hill and hump a change in value. Olsen and Haga knew Frank Herbert's eponymous classic, though their company predates the blockbuster. If familiar with them, Herbert's words may be an apt description of the next few months: ""Survival is swimming in unfamiliar waters. To survive, one must find currents and their patterns in these unfamiliar waters."Dune's life started off simple. Shortly after its founding, the company won funding from the Norwegian government, enabling its founders to attend blockchain conferences around the world. It wasn't much money -- a few thousand dollars -- but it was enough to send Olsen and Haga to Berlin, then San Francisco. They save money by booking seedy rooms in less affluent parts of each city. They also shared rooms and even shared beds, despite Haga's impressive snoring."While the travel of Dune's two founders meant grant funding quickly bottomed out, Haga and Olsen did manage to bring in a little revenue, too. At the ETH conference in San Francisco, the pair convinced Dharma co-founder Nadav Hollander (now OpenSea's CTO) to become their first client, paying $600 a month. That suggests Dune hasn't solidified its value proposition yet. While Hollander wasn't interested in the company's dashboards, he was very interested in the data they were cleaning to create them."

It was followed by a second client, CredMark, a financial modeling platform for cryptocurrencies. Together, they bring Dune $1,000 a month—not an eye-popping figure, but concrete proof of need. In the often ethereal world of cryptocurrencies, an influx of real dollars could make Dune an elite company.

We have a paying customer,

Haga said,

"This was very, very rare in cryptocurrencies at the time."Haga and Olsen quickly learned that it didn't matter. Any optimism the pair had as they headed into their first round of funding was tempered by a flurry of rejections. They hear the same voice over and over again."How could this market be worth more than a few hundred million dollars?"

That's absolutely brutal,

Haga said of that time,

We got rejected 50 times. And heading into Christmas, we were absolutely broke.

first level title"DuneCommunity"The loss of a few dozen investors is enough to end many ventures. Haga and Olsen can say they've tried and failed despite their best efforts. The market is simply not ready for a product like theirs.

Instead of giving up, the founders of Dune forced themselves to sum up. Do they really believe that basic applications will be built on Ethereum and other protocols? They do. What feedback did investors give them - how much should they remember?

During a series of fundraising conversations, Olsen and Haga realized that the VCs had a point.

Olsen remembers,"It's not a fast-growing business, nor is it that easy to defend. Just cleaning up public data is enough to attract some customers, but not enough to build a new global giant."。

In going back to the drawing board, the duo found a new direction. What if the fact that encrypted data is freely available is not a bug, but a feature? What does this mean for their patterns? Olsen recalls the moment the light bulb came on:"We are using dashboards to show the value of our data. We realized that we had everything anyone needed to create a dashboard for any Ethereum project or protocol."Haga thought: Rather than Dune being a bottleneck for creating dashboards and datasets, it is a platform on which others can build.

Let's flood the world with dashboards and become the application layer of the cryptocurrency market!

Are we really giving up that income?

Haga thought.

By 2019, the founders have made a decision: it's time to launch Dune2.0, a community product.

The shift did not immediately reflect a change in wealth. Haga tried to close a funding round in just over two months, but received more than 50 rejected papers. The team's confidence hit rock bottom at the ETH Denver conference. In hindsight, Haga thinks he and Olsen are two weeks away from giving up.

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Enter BinanceTeck Chia was impressed by what he saw. The head of Binance Accelerator doesn’t see many startups with real traction because the group’s focus is on early-stage companies. Even though Dune has let go of their paying clients, the fact that they have them puts them ahead of the industry in Chia's view. Additionally, the team was tackling an obvious problem market - Chia knew that cryptocurrency analysis was an ample opportunity. He decided to bet on the two Norwegians by inviting them to Binance’s project, an offer that brought in $250,000 in investment.。

Haga recalls the comfort offered in that moment:

After I got accepted to the accelerator, I remember getting on the phone with Olsen and just laying on the floor, happy and relieved that we had finally made sure Dune survived. The next $4000 salary was the best salary of my life when I went seven months without a salary."Dune is officially a funded business with the world's largest cryptocurrency company behind it. But that doesn't mean discussions with venture capitalists have gone smoothly. Over the next 15 months, he tried unsuccessfully to raise a seed round four times, according to Haga. A trip to San Francisco created good relationships that would later prove influential, but at the time it seemed that"This is nothing more than an industry friendship without capital

While struggling with fundraising, Dune began to find its footing among new clients and users. To a large extent, the company's success rests on the tenacity and commitment of its founders. Haga and Olsen manage the business with a tight fist, paying themselves low wages to maximize runway. Dune will not hire another full-time employee until the end of 2020."The company's founders also followed the classic Y Combinator advice that"do things without scale

. This includes teaching users to use SQL, a programming language for navigating and querying databases."Matteo Leibowitz is one such student. In 2019, the current head of Uniswap Labs served as a research analyst for the cryptocurrency media "The Block". Maintaining a keen eye on the ecosystem, Haga noticed Leibowitz's writing on DeFi and recognized that he was the influential user Dune needed to court. He reached out to Leibowitz to see if he was interested in using the platform. He's interested -- but there's a catch."Leibowitz said:"I don't know how to write SQL statement."Instead of letting this be the end of the conversation, Haga strikes up an unlikely mentoring relationship. Every week, Haga calls with Leibowitz to teach him the basics."He is very patient,"Leibowitz pointed out,

I don't always do my SQL homework."Olsen also gave Leibowitz his Telegram account so he could answer any questions. Leibowitz reportedly found it challenging at first, but"Miraculously, after a few months, it started

. In hindsight, it's easy to see how Haga and Olsen's willingness to do this type of unscalable activity helped Dune. By bringing Leibowitz on board, they ensured that their dashboard would feature prominently in The Block's articles, giving them an otherwise unmanageable spread.

Heading into 2020, Dune continued its rise. data

wizard"People flock to the platform to build and present their own dashboards, while consumers visit the platform to gather information on any items they might be exploring. Thanks to the paid premium plan, Haga and Olsen hit $60,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR)."That momentum was dampened by a failed San Francisco fundraising trip in early 2020, with Dune failing to raise a $1 million seed round. As Haga later wrote."In hindsight, it's rather absurd that someone would have acquired ~10% of Dune's company for $1 million less than two years ago, and not a single investor in Silicon Valley was interested."Haga and Olsen's decision to operate on a lean budget started to pay off in the summer of 2020. Known in cryptocurrency circles as"Summer of DeFi"

Overnight, Dune was everywhere,

Olsen recalled.

By the end of that summer, we were on a lot of people's radars."In the unfamiliar waters where Dune swims, the tide seems to have turned. In September 2020, Dune raised a seed round of funding from some of cryptocurrency's most forward-thinking investors, including Multicoin Capital. The $2 million round included Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, and Hashed."。

first level title"Rise of Dune"。

Haga and Olsen put the money to work, employing two full-time employees. Olsen recalls: The bottleneck came quickly. While DeFi Summer brought good news for Dune's development, with business growing 5% weekly by most key metrics, it also put pressure on the core architecture."Our infrastructure is torn to shreds"To a large extent, this is due to Dune's humble beginnings. To get up and running, Olsen forked an open-source analysis tool called Redash. While it has a good enough foundation, it wasn't built to handle thousands of simultaneous users. New engineering technician Vegard Stikbakke remembers,

If you try to execute a query it will take a long time

Now is the time to level up. With a team of just four full-time employees, Dune rebuilt its entire application and query execution layer from the ground up. It's the kind of massive upgrade that could have taken a year or more with a larger team, but under Olsen's leadership, Dune's engineers pulled it off in just two and a half months."Stikbakke says:"。

The more I think about what we've built, the more amazing I feel."Aided by improved infrastructure, Dune has continued its significant organic growth. Soon, its dashboards seemed to be everywhere, dotting blog posts, filling Twitter timelines, and popping up in Discord channels. Investor interest has escalated as Dune's profile has grown. Haga went from getting no response to his outreach emails to venture capitalists reaching out to him."With most of the seed money still in the bank, Dune didn't need to raise money, but they decided to jump at the chance. Specifically, they reached out to Nick Grossman, a general partner at Union Square Ventures (USV). During a walk on the Stanford campus in early 2020, Grossman impressed Haga and Olsen with a level of thoughtfulness and humanity not often seen in fundraising discussions. This warm reception is mutual. Grossman remembers that he had a kind of love for both of them.

Authentic, visceral personal responses"Although USV ultimately did not invest in the seed round, the two parties remained in touch. In the months since, Grossman's faith in Dune has only grown. As cryptocurrencies come back to life, he knows better than ever that"The information universe of the blockchain is expanding exponentially

. Dune doesn't just support dozens of protocols or projects, but thousands. When Haga got in touch again, Grossman was ready -- though he and the USV investment team didn't have much time to discuss the project."In stark contrast to Dune's previous attempts, the fundraising went at lightning speed. Haga remembers that he and Olsen decided to raise Series A funding on Friday. To kick off the round, they emailed some investors. Over the weekend, Haga put together a set of materials and made several phone appointments. By Tuesday, Dune had two agreements."Haga says:"This completely changed all our previous experiences."What follows in Haga's life

most stressful week". Suddenly, he found himself on a partner call between Europe and the US, as VC firms scrambled to consider the latest funding. Grossman remembers that when Haga and Olsen introduced the USV collaboration,". Competing offers boosted Dune's valuation, but in the end, Haga and Olsen knew who they wanted to work with.

On that Friday, a week after starting their collaboration, the pair signed a terms agreement with USV. Haga described the company as his

dream

Partner that combines a deep understanding of cryptocurrencies, community-based business and pure gaming software.

first level title"Dune's Moon"If Dune's Series A gave Haga and Olsen a sense of high demand, the Series B showed what it felt like to be pursued.

With an $8 million Series A round closing in late summer 2021, Dune finds itself in a comfortable financial position. It has expanded its team, but it has done so carefully without overextending itself.

But investors kept calling. What might have started as a trickle turned into a torrent that Haga received every day

very many

information. Although the Dune Company rejected the vast majority, one managed to slip in: the Coatue Company.

These findings were turned into a detailed 40-slide presentation. Fredrickson asked again if Dune would consider raising money. Again, the answer is no.

Fredrickson returned two weeks later with a term sheet. How about a $50 million, $500 million valuation? That number is a big jump from the round that closed a few months ago. Tempting though it was, Haga and Olsen found themselves in an advantageous position in the negotiations. Instead of accepting the terms directly, they countered them. If Coatue's valuation doubled, making Dune a unicorn, they'd consider taking a deal.

Three years ago, Olsen and Haga worked together at a traditional publishing company in Oslo. They complete the helm of the newest unicorn in cryptocurrency in the first quarter of 2022.

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Product: Revolution doesn't report quarterly

Haga and Olsen have created a business that serves the cryptocurrency industry and leverages its unique characteristics. As a result, the product's simplicity belies its power.

• first level title

• Cryptocurrency data is a living thing

• There are four main differences between traditional financial information and cryptocurrency data:

• scale

availability"Operability"connectivity"scale"。

The most obvious is usability. Because cryptocurrency projects are built on transparent, auditable blockchains, information is immediately visible. In discussing this, Nick Grossman described cryptocurrency data as

7X24 hours available in real time". Compare this to a business whose activities are not run on-chain. If you want to see how much money Starbucks brought in last week, you'll have to wait until earnings time. The Dune team sheds light on this distinction, stating that"Revolution won't report quarterly"It is also more actionable since the data is continuously available. Consumers, investors, and developers can make decisions based on changes from one moment to the next. For example, a DeFi farmer might track small changes in interest rates to boost their yield. Alternatively, an NFT collector might track the precise financial health of a project to justify or discount participation. Different types of activities are facilitated by more granular data."。

Cryptocurrency data is also fundamentally more correlated due to the composability of Ethereum, Solana, and other protocols. Actions in one part of an ecosystem have direct effects elsewhere. For this reason, Grossman described the cryptocurrency data as close to

, and a blog post by Dune calls it the equivalent of a

live quarterly report

In the end, there is a fundamental scale difference at play -- at least, when inferring the state of a project's maturity. Today, most traditional business data is tethered to silos, accessible only to large enterprises. Crypto makes it almost completely open. Suddenly, a top-down B2B industry became a bottom-up consumer industry. The impact is a massive TAM expansion for data tools infrastructure providers as they manage many times more information and complexity. This is part of the reason why juxtaposing Dune with a web2 business analytics platform is logically flimsy, a bit like comparing Ctrl-F to Google. Both can help you find things, but the scope of information sought is different.

To understand this, we have to take a closer look at Dune's offerings.

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Consumers and Dashboards

Want to know the monthly output of OpenSea? There is a dashboard to display.

Dune

In total, Dune has over 22,000 different dashboards. Given that these are user generated, the quality varies. Some may be professional-grade and easy to scan, while others are the fruit of an earlier course by a SQL student. These are searchable by name or tags."the star"ranking system. If you prefer a dashboard, you can choose"image description"To help consumers find the best resources, Dune utilizes a"the star"ranking system. If you prefer a dashboard, you can choose

trend"wizard"。

. The accumulation of stars over that time period roughly defines this ranking.

Consumers can drill down into different datasets within the dashboard for a more granular view. If they want, they can re-run the query to refresh the data, get an embed code for their website, or fork the query. Once consumers start writing their own SQL and creating new dashboards, they join the legion of Dune creators, more known as"wizard"first level title"wizard, wizard, wizard"In Dune's internal year in review report, Haga outlined the company's priorities for 2022:

. like Steve Ballmer yelling at a Microsoft conference

Developer

As the word dies down, Haga and the team fanatically want to serve the stakeholders who are at the heart of Dune's model.

"Wizard" is the creator of the content. Using their SQL skills, these stakeholders created dashboards that consumers viewed. Every graph or table on the Dune platform is user-generated and assembled by this community."first level title

Why do "wizards" do these jobs?"The short answer is that there are economic and social incentives that drive creative contribution. To better understand the work of this group, I spoke to Hildebert Moulié, or Hildobby, one of the platform's most famous wizards on Dune."As a curious data science master's student, Hildobby gravitated towards Dune. He enjoyed gaining a better understanding of different protocol activity and soon started creating dashboards himself. He started focusing on DeFi before migrating to the world of NFTs. This gave Hildobby its first taste of consumer demand.

I see that some people like my work, so I make my dashboard easier for everyone to see."Soon, Hildobby's work attracted attention. The heads of various web3 projects started getting in touch asking if he would create dashboards for them. Some of these jobs can be well paid. For example, the decentralized NFT marketplace LooksRare paid Hildobby a few thousand dollars to make three of these dashboards before launch — a task that took him more than a month. In addition to her introverted interests, Hildobby has also been involved in Dune's"bounty"Program to supplement income, which provides wizards with paid web3 opportunities to complete."In addition to financial rewards, Hildobby also accumulated social and professional capital. Not only does he think the Dune star is in the line

, and as he explained,

Working at Dune is worth more than my studies

. It's perhaps no surprise, then, that Hildobby has left his master's program to focus on Dune full-time.

While Hildobby is the third wizard in Dune and thus in high demand, his story is not isolated. Thanks to this platform, dozens more wizards are thriving, either getting new jobs or getting big bounties. According to a survey conducted by the company in October 2021, 92% of wizards are active supporters, and no one is an opponent. Haga and Olsen hope to maintain such an impressive level of satisfaction as Dune's full-time wizarding population reaches the thousands."first level title"。

loop inside loop

What company is Dune most similar to? In my conversations, one name came up most often - Github!"It's easy to see the merits of this comparison. Dune is a place for tech users to host and share their work, and fork the efforts of others. Tom Schmidt, Partner at Dragonfly Capital said,"The result is an interesting "flywheel," which Olsen calls the company's

Dune

Figure 8 flywheel

. As creators build more dashboards, more consumers come to the platform to watch. This incentivizes creators to improve and expand their work, bringing in new data suppliers. As more data becomes available, more dashboards are created and more consumers access it. It's a virtuous cycle that enables acceleration from multiple stakeholders."image description"first level title"Melange"Model: Monetizing "Spice""Scarceest resource in Frank Herbert's Dune is fictional narcotics"

spices

,is also called

Imagine a substance with a global value equal to that of cocaine and oil combined, and you'll get some idea of ​​Melange's power.

In a way, data is a mixture of Olsen and Haga's Dune, the source of platform value. Unlike Herbert's Spice, though, the data is readily available. It's not a scarce resource, but an abundant one, and -- at least in theory -- easy to get.

This presents a challenge: how do you monetize it? What revenue can be gained by charging for a mixture that is somehow ubiquitous?"Dune Pro"For now, Dune has taken a lightweight approach. Platform monetization at scale may require product additions and a slight paradigm shift.

first level title"free service"Today, users can access blockchain data, create dashboards, share charts, and fork existing queries without paying a penny to Dune. Only when customers need to run several queries concurrently, skip query queues, export results, keep information private, or remove watermarks should they upgrade to

, which is a premium plan with a flat rate of $390 per month.

Dune's approach here is generous. Not only is the free tier very comprehensive, but compared to other cryptocurrency data providers,"Professional Edition"The cost is very low, and some providers charge thousands of dollars per month. Active protocols and prominent investors are unlikely to turn a blind eye to numbers like this.

Dune is wary of monetization at the expense of growth. As an internal document explains, Haga and Olsen were keen to ensure that the company's flywheel could spin unfettered. As long as users add value to the platform as a whole -- making dashboards, forking queries -- they should be allowed to do so without restriction. only when the user

Dune

, Dune will draw a commission.

API

This strategy seems to have had the desired effect. Dune's user and engagement numbers have ballooned to over 150,000 queries and 17,000 "wizards." The number of queries created per month has risen to about 23,000 from about 3,000 a year ago, an increase of 766%.

image description

There has also been impressive growth in monthly pageviews over the past year, up 670% to 3.9 million. Dune has successfully guided growth, even if it has come at the expense of short-term revenue."Pro "first level title

A better approach might be to provide an API. As it currently stands, the only way for users to access Dune data is through the GUI or through an export. Neither is ideal. The graphical interface is not suitable for technical use, and the exported data, by its very nature, is not real-time. An API would solve both of these problems, allowing more complex, programmatic use without sacrificing usability.

Pursuing this path will open up many new -- and perhaps better -- monetization levers. like the current

Like plans, Dune can be priced based on usage and priority -- but on a more granular level. At the same time, providing APIs will deepen the connection between enterprises and customers, transforming them from an external data supplier to core infrastructure.

The company recognizes the opportunity, and appears to be working on it. The upcoming "Arrakis" update discussed below will enable exactly this API. Growth manager Hugo Sanchez notes that many of his conversations with current and potential clients focus on the usability of this approach. "There's a huge demand for access to Dune's data through the API," he noted.

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Culture: never give up (you)"It is said that a brush with death can give the most decadent of us a desire to embrace all that life has to offer. Dune's brush with failure seems to generate a similar sense of joy—both Haga and Olsen are committed to bringing joy to their work, whether it's something big or small."Let me explain what I mean."Never Gonna Give You Up "Earlier this year, Haga completed the purchase of the Dune.com domain name. Purchasing this domain name took time and a lot of negotiation. After the deal was finally closed, it came time to make the announcement.

However, with

Compared to the information available, Dune's team decided to take a more creative approach. Before implementing the new domain name, they redirected to Rick Astley's

on the music video. They then broke the news to their fans on Twitter.

Who else would use a moment like this to Rickroll the Internet? While that domain has since become Dune's homepage, the episode illustrates the sense of fun that pervades the company. When faced with a decision, Haga and Olsen almost always look for a more playful path."While this may be Dune's most prominent personality trait, it's also what makes the business special. Haga and Olsen created a culture of hunger, focus, ownership and craftsmanship."first level title"stay hungry"。

Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, said of Dune’s leaders:"Honestly, in many ways, they're some of my favorite founders". In explaining why this is the case, Samani emphasized the hunger and fighting spirit of the team. With the company's problematic fundraising history, Haga and Olsen have learned to do more with less. Haga himself said,""It's the trials and tribulations that really make us

This quality also caught Vegard Stikbakke's eyes. When he considered joining the company as an engineer, it was the intensity of Haga and Olsen, combined with the aforementioned gameplay, that got his heart set.

Stikbakke said:"They seem to have this lighthearted and fun vibe while being horny and obsessive at the same time."。

To their credit, after Coatue's investment, Dune's founders didn't let that feature slip. While the pace of hiring has picked up, the company is still small, with just 35 full-time employees. At the time of the Series B round, there were only 16 employees, which meant that Dune's team had effectively managed to create a market value of $62.5 million per person - something a master of scale like FTX would be proud of. Even more notably, according to Haga, Dune's burn last year was just $1 million. That's in stark contrast to many well-capitalized, high-growth companies.

Describing himself, Haga sums up this trait:

I get pleasure from the pursuit. almost always

first level title"focus until it hurts"As Sanchez recalls, the venture capital firm wanted access to Dune's data through an API, and they were prepared to pay. Haga turned them down. Dune's founders explained that the company wasn't ready to serve them this way, and they couldn't redesign their roadmap until they were ready to roll out the API to their entire user base.

In Sanchez's view, it was an extraordinary testament to Dune's focus. Haga couldn't be distracted by the possibility of serving a lucrative and prestigious client -- he knew what the business needed to build next.

Sanchez said:"This blew my mind."。

first level title"asynchronous ownership"Dune operates remotely with teams spread across Europe and North America. Staff are based in London, Lisbon, New York, Oslo and Toronto. Unlike Levels, Dune avoids synchronous communication by not trying to arrange competing time zones. According to Olsen,

We discourage recurring meetings and try to ensure communication flows better asynchronously"Product Manager Bernat Fages describes the team's communication process. Most discussions take place through long written memos or through task management platforms, not meetings. although"face to face

While aligning with the right communication tools is an integral part of running an asynchronous playbook, a culture of ownership is even more important. Community manager Florian Barth sees this as one of Dune's core qualities. The company's managers don't pin down or micromanage -- instead, employees are expected to proactively address issues that arise.

Barth joked:

If you're not good at Googling, you're in the wrong company.

To maintain leverage at scale and growth velocity, ownership is non-negotiable."first level title"pursue beauty"At times, Fredrik Haga seems like an unlikely guy to run a cryptocurrency data analysis business. Visiting his Twitter profile feels quite different from browsing the pages of other cryptocurrency builders. Among the updates about his company are observations of art films, nostalgia for classic rap albums, and evocative black-and-white photographs of brutalist architecture."。

In describing Dune's CEO, Vegard Stikbakke pointed to Haga's integrity."not only in a moral sense,"He clarified,"in the artistic sense as well"

Stikbakke's observations echo other conversations, including mine with Haga. When I asked about his expectations for Dune, Haga likened it to the excitement that a great piece of music generates. He said:"He said,"

The way I click this button, the way I get this response. Everything should be woven together with passion.

Dune is a streetwear brand instrumentalized through encrypted data.

image description

Dune's styling book starring international model Teo Leibowitz"It's yet another example of Dune's dedication to creating something truly beautiful, and doing it in a way that balances seriousness and whimsy."first level title"Risk: Fear is the killer of the mind,In Frank Herbert's space myth, the protagonist Paul Atreides utters a short verse to calm himself."

starts with:

I must not be afraid, fear is a mind killer. Fear is the little god of death that brings total destruction

I will face the fear and let it pass through my body. When the fear is gone, I will open my mind and see its trajectory. Where fear has gone, nothing remains but me alone.

Startups that spend too much time daunted by failure can meet the same fate. For their part, Olsen and Haga show no such fear, though they remain aware of the fragility of their particular business. While Dune doesn't show any vulnerabilities or holes waiting to be patched, there are still risks to navigate.

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slow monetization

As mentioned earlier, Dune has been slow to monetize. Its free service is robust, and it makes little effort to upsell users. While this strategy fosters user growth and engagement, it also has drawbacks.

Second, Dune didn't learn how to convert customers by following this gentler approach. Teams will need to learn which levers to pull when it comes time to more effectively extract value from their user base.

Are these major obstacles?

Dune has established itself as a significant player in the cryptocurrency tools space, making it less likely to be locked out by large accounts -- especially given the speed at which market demands are changing. And if that happens by some weird circle of fate, that's fine too. This market is growing, meaning new customers are appearing every day. In the end, while Dune may not have developed a mixed feeling for customer conversions, it doesn't feel like the right expertise to prioritize at this stage of a business' life."Overall, sluggish monetization seems to pose a minimal but present risk."

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slow tokenization"In every cryptocurrency founder's life, they get the same questions."When to tokenize?"Given Dune's community focus, it seemed like a natural extension at first glance. SPICE can be awarded to wizards and other stakeholders in exchange for building dashboards, improving existing work, or sharing platform creations. Incentivizing these pre-existing behaviors can supercharge it, accelerating Dune's proliferation and attracting activity from competing platforms."

Haga and Olsen were wary of such a move, recognizing that it was an irreversible decision. Once an ecosystem token is introduced, you cannot withdraw it. Additionally, neither seems sure the token will create tangible long-term value — at least for now.

Olsen said.

Dune

If you want to start a community, introducing a token is a great way to do it. But we already have a community -- it's not necessarily a tool for us.

Will Dune's silence open them up to competitive invasion?"Both Sushi and LooksRare have successfully lured users away from Uniswap and OpenSea respectively — but only briefly. After the initial surge, Sushi’s trading volume has lagged far behind Uniswap; at the time of writing, the fork processed $587 million in volume over the past seven days, compared with Uniswap’s more than $10 billion. While LooksRare has processed $24 billion in transaction volume since its launch -- more than OpenSea's $15 billion over the same period -- it only processed a fraction of its users, and some say that much of that figure is due to wash trading by whales Caused. In recent weeks, incumbents have regained their dominance."image description"A new up-and-comer or daredevil contender could do something similar to Dune. That doesn't mean Dune, per se, should take this approach prematurely."

We are not against tokens,

Olsen said,

But if we do, we'll do well. We always build for the long term.

first level title"technical slowness"Dune will need to make sure it can keep pace with the market without sacrificing its performance. In some ways, it has the unique ability to do just that. After all, no other vendor has an army of users constantly creating new data visualizations and dashboards. This approach, in turn, creates an incredible burden. As the focus of hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous queries, Dune must sustain the heavy load without major delays. The platform had to be flexible, reliable and efficient in order to serve its dozens of "wizards". It must adapt to the new data set without slowing the query to a crawl.

As USV's Nick Grossman points out,

. Dune's success lies in its ability to build technology that can withstand the challenges it has set itself.

Arrakis

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The Future: The Voyage to Arrakis

True to its name, the Dune is a vast landscape. In the years to come, we should expect the platform to grow along with the economy it supports, supporting new platforms, bringing greater opportunities to its wizards, and expanding its functionality.

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Dune's answer to the last risk mentioned earlier is Arrakis. Arrakis, named after the lava-harvesting Odaily in Herbert's novel, represents a massive upgrade to Dune's architecture. In particular, it will allow queries across different blockchains."Once complete, Arrakis will unlock new capabilities and reduce the cost of scaling. As Olsen explained, since Dune's current architecture runs on Postgres' open source database management system, the increased traffic can only be managed by adding more databases. While these databases increase throughput, they are not the most efficient solution and may prove expensive. Arrakis' data lake is built on top of Amazon S3, utilizing Apache Spark as the computing layer. Olsen expects it will be cheaper, faster and more flexible."

Developer Vegard Stikbakke pointed out the complexity of building Arrakis. In particular, he noted that supporting Solana, for example, requires Dune to process three orders of magnitude more data than can be processed through Ethereum.

Dune seems up to the challenge. Whenever Arrakis arrives -- likely sometime in the next few months -- it will represent a step-by-step improvement of the platform. As Herbert wrote,"first level title"He said."wizard economy"

During our conversation, Mats Olsen recalled how he felt the first time he completed a wizard's bounty on Dune.

That's more than my three months' salary,

He said."In more favorable financial circumstances, Olsen can look back on the event with impeccable pride. It was the first sign that Dune was not just a resource, but a gateway to a new kind of economic power. Thanks to Haga and Olsen's creation, data scientists can showcase their skills, accept clients, and find new jobs."。

However, when it comes to the wizarding economy, there's still a lot going on. An easy addition would be to create an actual marketplace on Dune. Currently, to hire a wizard, the protocol must post a bounty, which is shared via Twitter. All coordination and payments happen off-platform. To simplify the process -- and perhaps secure a share of the payment volume -- Dune could coordinate the process directly. In doing so, the company may make it easier for customers to improve their dashboard pages, improving the product for the rest of the ecosystem.

Another way to increase the earning potential of wizards is to give them the tools to monetize their creations. While this may affect the consumer experience, Dune could offer paid features so wizards can make some of their creations exclusive. This may work best if the company rolls out new tools for this group of people. As product manager Bernat Fages puts it:

• We can do a lot to help wizards express themselves and tell their stories

• first level title

• Endless Data, Endless Features

• The longer you look at it, the more ideas pop up in your head. The core platform is so powerful that it seems capable of scaling in any number of directions. In discussions with team members, investors, and wizards, common areas of improvement emerged. As follows:

cooperation. Dune is now a single player experience. It doesn't have to be this way. In the future, collaborators could work together to create a dashboard with granular permissions. Like Github, Dune enables the ability to submit pull requests to other dashboards, allowing busy wizards to pick up changes and keep their work functional. The multiplayer experience will represent a major upgrade."Improve planning. While Dune's star system is effective, it's not the most elegant solution. More thoughtful curation could improve the consumer experience and give unpopular wizards a better chance of being appreciated."alternative agreement. Arrakis was built to accommodate newer chains like Solana. But is it scalable enough to support radically different projects like Filecoin, Arweave, and Ceramic? These storage and data layers may present yet another technical challenge, but add meaningful functionality to Dune.

Off-chain data sources. Why stop at encrypted data? Some believe that Dune could eventually incorporate off-chain data, whether it be sentimental information from social media or traditional financial inputs. It's interesting to think of what might be created by combining on-chain information with external data sources, although it does feel like a departure from the core business.

"Perhaps more exciting about Dune's future than any single feature addition, though, is the potential for it to come together as a whole. When others compare Dune to Github, Nick Grossman thinks there is a more appropriate comparison. Google."Dune is very, very similar,"Grossman thinks. In his view, Dune can do for the blockchain world what Sergey Brin and Larry Page's businesses did for the web's open, accessible data indexing.

This is a huge ambition. Dune's founders, Fredrik Haga and Mats Olsen, like nothing more than trying to make it happen.

I've always loved deserts,