Every week there is a new bounty, and our chance of winning a prize! But if you are new to crypto and on-chain analytics, how can you get started?

Here is our guide! In general, you will need to go through three simple steps:

1. Question decomposition,
2. Data sleuth, and
3. Putting everything together!

Let’s dive in each one of them!

Step 1: Question Decomposition

If you are new to crypto, this part is usually the hardest: understanding the question and breaking it down into smaller steps. Let’s take one of the previous Bounty questions as an example:

“Chart daily distinct active users of the OlympusDao protocol. You will need to state your definition of an active user. Visualize the price of OHM over time against daily active users.”

How do we start? There are many ways to break it down, and below is just one suggestion:

1. Define an active user on OlympusDao protocol
   1. What is OlympusDao?
   2. What is an active user?
2. Calculate the number of daily active users
3. Calculate the prices of OHM
4. Visualize (2) and (3) and put them together in a dash

If you haven’t heard of this protocol before, don’t worry. Everyday, there are millions of new projects in web3, so there is always something new to learn. Just Google it, (with a simple phrase like “What is OlympusDao?”) and you should be able to find the DAO website and its documentation.

Now, this part is time consuming, but essential to your quest: you cannot analyze DAO data if you don’t have a basic understanding of it. For example, to define an active user, you need to know the available actions in this protocol (such as staking, bonding, voting, etc.). Luckily, most protocols will have extensive documentation on these topics, just dive in their docs page! If it is still not clear after hours of reading, you can check out their social media channels (Discord or Reddit) and ask questions. Most of the time, someone will point you in the right direction.

It often takes a long time to get a firm grip of a protocol, especially if you have never heard of it before. But it will help you form the right definitions and hypotheses which are important for the next steps.

Step 2: Data Sleuthing

Now that you already understand the protocol and have a list of things to pull, this is the next challenge: where is the data for your analysis?

With blockchain, every transaction is logged and all data is available publicly. You can even download the entire history of Ethereum transactions! However, that will take a long time and lots of computing power.

Using Data Analytics Platforms

The easier route is to use pre-aggregated, decoded data from on-chain analytics platforms. A few popular places are Flipside Crypto, Dune and Google Cloud’s public database. Data is often already loaded and formatted, you don’t have to worry about heavy ETL work. Two added benefits are:

1. Label: you can often query a token by name instead of its lengthy contract address. The platform has decoded and labeled it for you.
2. Community: many other analysts use on these platforms, so you can leverage their existing work and reach out for questions.

Validate your Data

As a rule of thumb, any time you pull data, it is good to check it against another source. The easiest way is to use your own wallet address. Check how Dune or Flipside displays your wallet information. Are there any missing tokens? Do addresses and contracts show up the same way in your wallet and in your data table?

Every platform has some idiosyncrasies, and it is important to know about them via these checks. For example, Dune will display ‘\x’ instead of ‘0x’ for contract addresses.

Another validation check is to use block explorers such as etherscan. For example, you can look up Olympus DAO treasury addresses from their Documentation page, and view their assets on etherscan. Check that against your query result. Are you missing any tokens? Why is that?

For questions about market cap or total value locked (TVL), you can go a step further: you can check historical prices and volumes in public listings such as CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. They will not match 100% but should be in the right ballpark.

Step 3: Putting it all together

This step is hopefully straightforward, because you have already done all the prep work. You just need to put the logic in step 1 into a query with data from step 2, and draw your conclusions. If you need inspiration, please check out our Stellar Submissions from previous Grand prize winners.

That’s it! Now you should be ready! Good luck with your bounty quest!

If you have any questions feel free to ask in our Discord, our community is super friendly and eager to help!