The cliché that things move fast in the blockchain industry is true.

The names of crypto exchanges festooned stadiums overnight, taking over the conversation about global finance, then those CEXs collapsed just as fast.

Seemingly out of nowhere, “blockchain games” like Axie Infinity became household names, disrupting the video game industry.

Celebrities started buying NFTs and plots of Sandbox land for enormous sums.

Judging by the continuing speed of development, even in the bear market, this won’t change. In 2023 and beyond, blockchain will have new chains, niches, and sub-industries.

The flux of the industry is why Footprint Analytics has always prioritized speed and agility in building our product, the end goal of which is to help anybody uncover the blockchain and help people make more intelligent investing and business decisions.

With 2022 in the rearview mirror, we can confidently say that we built the fastest, most adaptable, and most versatile infrastructure for blockchain data analytics. In other words, we built the foundation to power the platform.

Despite the uncertain market conditions, what keeps us going is hearing from dozens of Web3 analysts and builders, whose processes and insights are improved by Footprint.

What did Footprint Analytics do in 2022?

We parsed 19 chains in 2022. Combined with the 5 we parsed in 2021, and another this year, we now have 24 public chains on our platform. This is the widest coverage out of any data analytics tool in the blockchain space.

Soon after a new domain of the blockchain industry made waves, like GameFi, we were able to focus on it in a matter of weeks by using the Footprint Analytics data infrastructure.

For example, our flexibility ensured we were on top of GameFi summer and the NFT boom, allowing us to work with some of the most prominent outlets in the crypto space to explain trends as they emerged.

CoinMarketCap and Footprint Analytics: 2022 GameFi Industry Report

Coingecko and Footprint Analytics: What Is NFT Wash Trading and Examples of How It Works

Beosin and Footprint Analytics: Global Web3 Security Report 2022

When we indexed GameFi and NFT data, the downstream result was several new metrics in the industry, e.g., user in-game retention and wash trading filters. With the ability to index NFT data and wallet addresses, we can also do in-game NFT analysis and wallet profile analysis. By connecting web2 and web3 data, Footprint now supports a holistic view of GameFi projects, and users can create filters to detect fraud.

As one particularly salient example: Whereas it’s taken better-known competitors years to index Solana, a notoriously tricky chain to parse, it took Footprint several months. You can explore and query Solana transactions and protocols without knowing how to code using Footprint Analytics, thanks to the tireless work of our engineers.

Here are some current stats about our coverage as of January, 2023:

• Over 2,000 GameFi protocols
• 17 NFT marketplaces
• 700,000+ NFT collections

The strides we’ve made haven’t gone unnoticed by analysts.

Going from under 300 at the beginning of the year, Footprint Analytics has attracted 6,000 analysts to our community at 2022’s close. Our platform’s number of community-made charts grew by 900% YoY.

We also understand that it’s not just about the number of projects and chains you integrate in your data, but the quality of the data and the performance of the platform. This year, we have significantly improved our latency from t-1 days to just 5 minutes. We have also expanded our historical data support from 90 days to include full history. In addition, we have expanded the types of data we support from just silver and gold to now also include the bottom layer of the chain. This allows for more free index exploration.

We tackled some of the biggest problems in blockchain data…

A blockchain indexing startup faces several enormous challenges:

• **Massive amounts of data. **As the amount of data on the blockchain increases, the data index will need to scale up to handle the increased load. Consequently, it leads to higher storage costs, slow calculation, and increased load on the server.
• Integration capabilities. A blockchain indexing solution must integrate its data index with other systems, such as analytics platforms or APIs, to provide maximum value to users. This is challenging and requires significant effort to design the architecture.

And especially:

• Complex data processing pipeline. Blockchain technology is complex, and building a comprehensive and reliable data index requires a deep understanding of the underlying data structures and algorithms.

To put it differently, it’s relatively easy to set up a data ETL. However, the difficult part is the implementation layer. Getting this right involves enormous developer resources and staying ahead of all the new protocols, marketplaces, contracts and features.

We had to find a way to standardize the data and have it make sense — no easy task considering it looks very different than in the raw blockchain output.

… and found a solution.

Footprint Analytics has the most comprehensive blockchain data warehouse solution in the world. To reach this point, we undertook 3 major upgrades in 2022 to our architecture, culminating in our Architecture 3.0, Iceberg + Trino.

Recognizing the limitations of Google BigQuery (our Architecture 1.0) regarding storage cost, concurrency, and being locked into the Google product ecosystem, we looked into using OLAP products. This became the foundation of our Architecture 2.0. Still, we soon realized that while OLAP could solve several issues we faced, it could not become the turnkey solution for our data processing pipeline. Our problem is bigger and more complex — OLAP as a query engine alone was not enough for us.

Taking lessons from the two earlier architectures and learning from the experience of other successful big data projects like Uber, Netflix, and Databricks, we have redesigned the entire architecture from the ground up to separate the storage, computation, and query of data into three different pieces.

You can read more about it here — but the long and short of it is that we believe it’s a technical breakthrough in blockchain data. The Footprint Analytics architecture upgrade 3.0 allows users to get insights into more diverse usage, and applications, including its integration with our API.

• Built with the Metabase BI tool, Footprint facilitates analysts to gain access to decoded on-chain data, explore with complete freedom of choice of tools (no-code or hardcode), query entire history, and cross-examine datasets, to get insights nearly instantaneously
• Integrate both on-chain and off-chain data to analysis across web2 & web3
• By building on top of Footprint’s abstraction layer, analysts or developers save time on 80% of repetitive data processing work and focus on meaningful metrics, research, and product solutions based on their business.
• Seamless experience from Footprint Web to REST API calls, all based on SQL

We’ve given everyone access to the best data with an API…

One of our most notable events was the launch of our unified Web3 data API.

This tool allows developers to easily access the most extensive data warehouse of NFT, DeFi, and GameFi projects with just a single line of code integration. This upgrade is a game-changer for the industry, as it simplifies accessing and utilizing blockchain data, making it more accessible for developers of all skill levels.

One example is the team behind Agave, a GameFi analytics tech startup that helps Web3 games create better experiences. Whereas gathering data related to blockchain games used to require significant developer resources, Footprint Analytics allowed them to focus on what they do best.

“We use nearly all of the Token and NFT APIs. The advantage we see with Footprint is being able to get specific relational data with SQL and the cross-chain support,” said Isaac Dubuque, CEO and Co-Founder of Agave.

“Prior, we had to create an internal ELT from the other data providers in order to support this. With Footprint we will be able to focus solely on the research and reports. Combining all the data sources was messy. Now, we can just use Footprint.”

… but it wasn’t a walk in the park.

Talking about our accomplishments is only fair to our users and community if we are equally transparent about our challenges.

Outside of the macro challenges everybody in the market faces, Footprint, as the industry challenger, needs to work extra hard to grow awareness of our product.

It’s only enough for our architecture and infrastructure to be the most powerful if analysts use it and know about it.

In 2023, we plan to integrate features that make it easier for groups and teams to analyze together. We are also investigating ways to incentivize creators, such as allowing paid creators to set prices for chart access and launching a Footprint utility token.

Here’s why we’re hopeful for 2023 and beyond.

When we first started Footprint, there weren’t many low-barrier, self-service analytics products in the market. Users either needed deep business and coding skills or could only view a few fixed panels provided by the platform, forcing them to choose between the ease of use and freedom.

Footprint is a platform that supports 0-code data analysis and an API solution provider. The APIs cover three major areas while providing underlying chain data:

• NFT
• GameFi
• DeFi

The API has two types of access: a simple and easy-to-use RESTful API and a powerful SQL API that supports user customization.

In less than 1.5 years since the launch of Footprint, we have covered 24 public chains and parsed more than 700,000 NFT collections and 2,000 games. Currently, we have 6 chains with near real-time data. In addition to the underlying data, one of the most significant features of Footprint is the abstraction of on-chain data, providing business-meaningful data tables and business metrics that can be used directly by people without technical backgrounds.

This data can provide users with an overview of the development and trends in various fields of the entire web3 industry and allow them to dive into individual public chain ecologies, individual projects, and user group analysis. These analyses can be applied not only to industry/project operations but also to investment analysis.