Ethereum-centric analytics platform Dune Analytics has raised $69,420,000 in Series B funding led by New York-based private equity firm Coatue.
According to the announcement, the funding will educate, reward and empower a new generation of web3 data analysts.
Dune will be committed to attracting one million talents from all over the world to join the web3 field and become the most convenient and powerful data tool on the planet from three aspects: education, reward and Empower.
For education, anyone can access blockchain data with Dune for free. At the same time, the creators will be paid according to the creative content.
Dune Analytics says a brand new Dune query engine is coming soon. The new search engine will support all blockchains and allow users to import public or private data.
Other investors include Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital — who also participated in Dune Analytics’ $8 million Series A funding round on August 12 last year.
Dragonfly Capital Partners injected $2 million into it as the lead seed round investor on September 23, 2020.
Dune Analytics has raised a total of $79.4M in funding over 3 rounds. Dune Analytics is funded by 21 investors.
The company is currently valued at over $1 billion and achieves unicorn status with only 16 employees,
Unicorn refers to a technology start-up company that has been established less than 10 years ago but has a valuation of more than $1 billion ($1 billion) and has not been listed on the stock market.
Dune Analytics, a leading data analytics platform, has announced a capital raise of $69,420,000, in addition to a $1 billion-dollar valuation, the latter of which means that the company attained “unicorn” status, which describes privately-held startups that have attained a valuation of $1 billion or more.
The Series B raise was led by New-York based private equity firm Coatue, with additional participation from previous investors Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital, among others.
The raise succeeds the company’s seed funding round of $2 million in September 2020 — of which Dragonfly Capital Partners was the lead investor — and its follow-up Series A raise of $8 million in August 2021 led by Union Square Ventures.
According to the announcement, the capital will be utilized to “educate, reward, and foster a new generation of analysts, who will be empowered with real-time, actionable insights into web3 data.”
Dune Analytics is highly-regarded throughout the space for providing real-time, on-chain quantitative metrics, graphics and charts on the crypto, blockchain, decentralized finance (DeFi), and more recently, nonfungible token (NFT) markets. As of now, the platform publishes blockchain data from Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Binance Smart Chain and xDAI.
Blockchains generate an *ocean* of data
As more and more value moves to crypto…
Extracting insight from it presents historic opportunities many times greater than siloed, paywalled data platforms of the TradFi past
The revolution will not be reported quarterly
— Dune Analytics (@DuneAnalytics) February 2, 2022
Related: Decentralized exchange aggregator trading volumes surge to new highs
In a new initiative to promote Web3, Dune is seeking to expand its existing community of 10,000 contributing analysts up to a figure of 1 million through the construction of a community-centric architecture that incentives contribution on the platform.
Referred to as Dune Wizards, this community of analysts will be responsible for creating compelling content in the pursuit of decentralizing knowledge, and in turn, empowering investors to make insightful, data-backed decisions. This marks an evolution of the walled-garden traditional financial market model in which Wall Street investors were granted informational advantages over their retail counterparts.
Dune co-founder and CTO Mats Olsen pledged the company’s intentions to build a community-centric model in the Web3 landscape:
“Dune will provide the necessary tools so that users of all skill levels will be able to conduct more thoughtful, impactful analysis and gain deeper insight into the ever-evolving world of web3.”
The Uniswap community is debating against a new proposal that favors Flipside Crypto to the tune of $25 million in funding. The funding is for two years, but the arguments against it are numerous.
Many DeFi protocols such as Uniswap provide governance tokens for people to participate in core decisions on their network.
The recent proposal also passed through the votes of the community. Although, before the vote for the proposal could be concluded, Dune Analytics raised the alarm against it.
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The Flipside Proposal
The proposal states that holders of UNI will get funds from the project’s treasury to give it $15 million in grants. If the whole program succeeds, an additional $10 million will also go to Flipside next year.
Accordingly, Flipside will channel half of the grant to bounties for new Uniswap users who want to learn everything about analytics and DeFi as a whole.
Related Reading | SushiSwap Narrowly Escaped A $350 Million DeFi Hack, Here’s How
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The bounties aim at attracting new users and holding them. Flipside anticipates that such a program would raise 900 new members who won’t cash out the bounties but remain in the network.
This is not the first of such programs that Flipside is funding. It is funding others such as yearn, Aave, Uniswap. Another thing is that this proposal would enable people to fund the service. Also, some other analytics providers who will be eligible include The Graph and Dune.
Flipside To Use Uniswap Governance For Educational Services
According to the proposal, Flipside will use half of the grant to run the program. They will pay up to seven staff members full salaries and seven other half salaries from the grant. Then the yield from the program will go into its funding.
Also, Flipside aims to use Uniswap’s governance process to become an official provider of continuing education services. It also expects payments for the services. Also, the seven members of the committee will generate 30% of the funds they receive.
The daily chart shows Uniswap is falling by 2% as the community criticizes the new proposal | Source: UNIUSD on TradingView.com
Another three-member committee will vote for the continuation of the program to another year. All the committees are from Flipside, giving it total power. With such a structure, a lot of people have raised concerns about the proposal.
Before this controversy, one has occurred in July and caused a lot of commotion in the community. The “DeFi Education Fund” proposal and its controversy led another group to launch a new initiative called “Builder-First Legal Activism DAO” by LeXpunK.
Related Reading | Why Chinese Banks Are Adding Digital Yuan To Apps? Here’s What You Need To Know
Many people voted against this proposal after Dune Analytics raised the alarm. Many people agreed that the proposal wasn’t okay, including Compound CEO John Palmer of PartyDAO and Dharma & Argent wallet teams.
However, it seems that it won’t be so easy to cancel the proposal. The people supporting it more are the university blockchain organization since it is about continuing education.
In addition, many of the top organizations in Standford, UC Berkeley, Michigan, and Penn have thrown in their support. So, there’s going to be a huge difficulty canceling.
Featured image from Pixabay, chart from TradingView.com
Dune Analytics, a decentralized finance (DeFi) analytics service, has voiced its opposition to a Uniswap (UNI) governance vote for “Community-Enabled Analytics” that would see fellow analytics provider Flipside Crypto managing about $25 million worth of UNI tokens.
Tweeting on Thursday, Dune highlighted the lack of community attention to the matter while also stating that grants should be given to community members and not to service providers.
Indeed, the governance voting page for the proposal shows over 41 million votes in favor, against 2.5 million in opposition. The vote will end on Friday, Aug. 20 at 7:05 AM UTC+1.
According to Dune, funding one single provider among several analytics platforms “makes no sense.”
“There is no sense for @uniswap to fund @flipside’s daily operations with eight full-time employees,” Dune added in its tweet.
The grant itself will see Flipside Crypto receive $25 million in two annual installments of $15 million and $10 million respectively.
Half of the yield generated by Flipside from the fund will reportedly go towards improving the Uniswap ecosystem in the form of bounties to community members, according to the details shared in the proposal document.
The other 50% of the yield generated by Flipside will be used to fund the platform’s operations such as payment of salaries — a provision that could be construed as a 50% management fee on earnings from a community grant.
Dune Analytics and Flipside Crypto did not immediately respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comments.
Related:Uniswap proposal under fire for enabling Dharma to ‘take over governance’
Dune’s opposition to the proposed $25 million grant to its competitor is the latest controversy stemming from the apparent centralization of Uniswap’s governance.
Back in July, the DeFi Education Fund came in for some criticism within the crypto space for liquidating half of its 1 million UNI token donation amounting to about $10 million at the time.
The DeFi Education Fund did defend its actions stating that the move was necessary to kickstart its operations.
Ethereum-powered decentralized exchanges, or DEXes, continue to surge despite high transaction fees — with DEXes processing more than $120 billion in 2021 so far.
According to Ethereum market analytics platform Dune Analytics, combined DEX volumes posted a new record of $63 billion in January. February’s volume currently sits at $59 billion and is on track to hit $67 billion at the month’s end.
DEXes have already processed more volume in the first two months of 2021 than during all previous years combined.
Monthly DEX volume: DuneAnalytics
The Ethereum-powered DEX sector is still dominated by Uniswap and Sushiswap, who account for 65% of February’s trade combined. Uniswap currently represents more than double Sushi’s volume, controlling almost 50% of DEX market share.
However, looking at the weekly number of active traders on each platform shows that Uniswap represents more than three-quarters of Ethereum DEX users. Over the last seven days, nearly 142,000 unique wallets traded on Uniswap, followed by decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch with roughly 18,450 traders, and SushiSwap with 8,911.
However, not all DEX trading activity is occurring on Etheruem, with Binance Chain’s Pancake Swap surging to report a daily trading volume behind of more than $1.1 billion.
Despite some users migrating away from Ethereum-based DEXes, confidence in the sector as a whole is at an all-time high, with the total value locked in these exchanges sitting above $40 billion for the first time during recent weeks.
On Jan 16, 2020, the parent company of K-pop sensation girl band Mamamoo revealed that it would release non-fungible tokens (NFT) on Hong Kong-based exchange Xeno.
K-pop Merch Going Digital
The move by RBW (Rainbowbridge World), a South Korean entertainment company that represents top K-pop bands, will enable music fans to purchase digital merchandise associated with their favorite band conveniently.
In an exclusive interview with Coindesk, Xeno stated that RBW had provided the exchange special rights to mint and list theirNFT-based digital collectibles.
The token listing will offer K-Pop music fans genuine ownership of NFTs associated with RBW performers such asMamamoo, Vromance, and Oneus.
Jae-Woong Wang, CEO of RBW Japan, explained that digital items such as event tickets and digital content rights could be captured and housed on the blockchain as NFTs.
“Fanbases get digital goods for their favorite artists that they can truly own, and artists and content creators get new and exciting products to offer their fans,” the CEO explained.
Digital Commerce in Entertainment is on the Rise
The decision by RBW to start offering the sale of singers’ digital products highlights the growing trend of digital commerce in theworld of entertainment.
NFT-based digital items offered by RBW will include 3D model renderings of the top K-pop idols on the South Korean music scene. The underlying digital items will also consist of occasion tickets for virtual shows and other merchandise that will enable k-pop celebrities to engage their fans easily.
NFT trading volumes have tripled in the past year as per data fromDune Analytics. Demand for digital tokens is driven by the need for digital alternatives to access performers in the wake of the cancellations of in-person events during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Unlike fungible cryptos such as Ethereum, holders of NTFs can’t exchange them one to one. Therefore, holders of these special tokens gain ownership of a unique digital collectible established around a specific band or vocalist.
Xeno Taps into the NFT Market in East Asia
Xenodelved into the NFT marketlast month after its executives saw the vast untapped potential in East Asian jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea.
Unlike most NFT exchanges that currently leverage the ETH network, Xeno is constructed onPolkadot, an emerging blockchain that offers better scalability and broad cross-chain interoperation.
Xeno’s president, Anthony Di Franco, added that his company chose Polkadot due to its unique “parachain” function that offers dev teams full control of the system’s procedure layer.
By working with RBW, Xeno has now positioned itself to offer reputable digital products markets to the South Korean market, which boasts the fourth-largest video gaming market in the world.
The Asian country also has “very high engagement” with fans worldwide due to its broad range of home entertainment avenues, such as the flourishing K-Pop market.
