Dune Analytics was founded in 2018 by Fredrik Haga and Mats Olsen in Oslo, Norway. The pitch was unusual: instead of building dashboards, let users write SQL queries directly against indexed blockchain data, share their queries publicly, and fork each other’s work. It sounded nerdy and niche. It became one of the most important analytics platforms in crypto.
The secret to Dune’s success was the wizards — a community of hundreds of pseudonymous analysts who built public dashboards for every imaginable crypto topic. hagaetc, hildobby, 0xKofi, 21co, Andrew Hong, and dozens of others built dashboards that the entire industry came to rely on for real numbers. Want to know how much TVL is on Base? Dune. Want to see USDT flows between exchanges? Dune. Want to analyze every transaction that interacted with Uniswap v3 in the last week? Write a SQL query, share it, tip the wizard.
Dune raised $69 million in a Series B led by Coatue in February 2022 at a $1 billion valuation. The company expanded from Ethereum-only to multi-chain coverage including Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and most major L2s. Its data model shifted from a proprietary backend to Apache Spark and a DuneSQL engine built on top of Trino. By 2024 Dune was processing billions of rows of blockchain data daily.
Dune’s cultural impact extends beyond analytics. It created a career path for pseudonymous SQL writers — “onchain analyst” became a legitimate crypto-native job that could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars through bounties and grants. Projects competed to hire top Dune wizards. The platform effectively democratized data analysis for a generation of crypto-curious analysts who didn’t need to work at Chainalysis to do serious onchain research.
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