Behind the Charts is a blog post series about MetricsDAO’s analyst community. It serves as a way to get to know and feature some of the best analysts in the crypto space. As we seek to empower protocols and organizations in the crypto space, it is important to empower on-chain analysts as well and highlight their skills and talents.

In this edition, we speak to marqu, a blockchain analyst star who has participated in 100+ bounties, winning 2 MetricsDAO stellar submissions, and 16 Grand Prizes on Flipside Crypto, despite starting only 7 months ago. Let’s dive into the conversation!

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Vetaverse - Interviewer (V): Hi Marqu! Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed and featured on MetricsDAO’s series of Analyst Interviews. Can you start by telling us a bit about yourself?

Marqu (M):  I’m decidedly indecisive about who or what I am. Professionally I’ve gone from sales, to web development and graphic design, to support. Luckily I’ve always been interested in tech, I just couldn’t find an angle that would really keep me interested enough.

Until now. Tracking what’s happening on-chain? That’s weirdly exciting!

I started exploring crypto analytics about 7 months ago. At that time, I just finished a few online classes for data analytics and saw a few bounty programs. I couldn’t stop since.

“I just couldn’t find an angle that would really keep me interested enough. Until now. Tracking what’s happening on-chain? That’s weirdly exciting!”

V: How did you first get into crypto?

M: I started with trading, then was trying everything. I eventually gave up trading though, too much effort for too little gain.

V: Now that you have won a few bounties and got lots of experience, what are some tips that you can share for a newbie?

M: My top tip is to “Read the documentation,” really, just read the damn documentation. There is so much information there that can easily be lost.

Second, sometimes you think you need to move faster. But that is not necessarily true. You need to understand what you are doing. It might require more time to understand, but it is important to learn it well, and use it again.

***“Just read the damn documentation. There is so much information there that can easily be lost.” ***

V: Great advice, could you share with us an example where it really pays off to go slow and understand instead of rushing?

M: Sure. Let me talk about the Olympus DAO bounty. I first started by reading the documentation, and then searched for relevant dashboards on Dune. I discovered that everyone was using the same table but the table was not very explicit. Preprocessed data is great for speed, but it doesn’t help you understand what is going on under the hood. How is “Total supply” different from “Circulating supply” and why? Is this a legit metric? I had to find out.

I could have used the same data source as everyone, but I decided to spend time tracking down the underlying data and to build it in my way. The benefit of doing this is that I can check against Olympus’ official website and dashboard, and go back every single step to know if I am right.

Luckily, Olympus also has all of their code generating the dashboards available in Github. I read all the code, which has all the variables, the contracts, and the constants. This is how I discovered on-chain contract addresses which hold non-circulating supply tokens, to be added to the circulating supply, and reconstruct the total supply on my own. This way I had a good understanding of all the token sources. It took a lot of time, but it was well worth it.

“Preprocessed data is great for speed, but it doesn’t help you understand what is going on under the hood.”

V: Wow, that sounds like a lot of detective work.

M: Yep, it is like being a detective.

V: What do you consider as your greatest skill as an on chain analyst?

M: I’m still learning, there is a lot to learn. My greatest skill might be that I’m always looking to improve.

V: What in particular do you look to improve?

M: A couple of things. I think I made the greatest improvement in SQL and understanding the data sets in Dune and Flipside so far. But I need to improve writing, creating insights, and communication. Sometimes, I look at the data for so long that certain things become obvious to me. But actually, the obvious thing might be the most valuable insight, and I miss communicating that.

V: Any plans in the near-term you’d like to share or goals you’d like to achieve?

M: I enjoy being a freelancer, and hope to do more on-chain analytics!

V: Good luck with your journey, and thank you for this conversation! **
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