Moonstream’s Query API makes it possible to query blockchain events, transactions, method calls, and state using SQL queries. It allows you to make joins across different types of data and get the results in a single step.
What makes the Query API unique compared to other tools? The most popular tool for analytics is Dune so let’s compare the Query API to it.
Query API vs Dune analytics
- Combining on-chain and off-chain data
Moonstream’s Query API is the only API which allows you to join events and transactions to smart contract state and off-chain metadata.
It’s especially important for projects like web3 games, where data is generated both on-chain and off-chain. To get the full picture of what your users are doing you need to combine data streams from on-chain interactions and from off-chain game servers and game clients.
Dune, like most other web3 analytics tools, provide on-chain data analytics on their product. Meaning you have to create and use the dashboards that are hosted on dune.com, and for the most part, your experience is restricted to that product. You can run pretty powerful queries on on-chain data on the website, but that doesn’t allow for joining on-chain data with off-chain data.
- Visualization vs. easy access for builders
Query API pulls high quality, timely, and accurate data from the blockchain and allows you to synchronize that data into your Google Sheets, Mixpanel, your Snowflake database, your data warehouses, etc.
Once the data is there, you can do whatever you want with it. The flexibility of how you can use that data is one of the main advantages of the Query API. Basically, projects can provide users with up to date information about what’s going on in their protocols. And users can build anything on top of it.
Dune Dashboards are fantastic for data visualization. It makes the data clear, readable, and shareable. It’s easy to understand and base your decisions on.
With the Query API you can create public community data feeds. The point of that is it’s useful for builders. We made it so because a lot of people in web3 gaming communities are building tools on top of the data.
Dune Dashboards are a great product for visualization. Query API is great for builders and second party developers to collect and use data for writing arbitrary apps, web apps, mobile apps, or whatever they want.
If you’d like to make it possible for builders in your community to create on top of your software, the community data feeds are a very important aspect of that.
- Transparency
It’s essential for web3 projects to be transparent to their communities. If you want to make data about what’s going on in your smart contracts and protocols freely available to your community – Query API has that functionality.
To set up a community data feed, specify an interval at which it should update and what data needs to go there. Then the data is made available publicly to anybody in the world without any authentication or payment on their side. All data is returned in JSON format.
Use cases for Query API
DAOs
Data feeds can make your DAO’s governance transparent and help better understand the community. For instance, Query API lets members:
- have oversight on how people are voting;
- check that token distributions are going according to the rules inside a DAO.
Web3 games
Query API is great for building player tools on top of a game. Tools like browser extensions, spreadsheets, bots, etc.
For example, the Crypto Unicorns game on Polygon. Builders are making tools to help players become more skilled and efficient, tools like a Unicorn breeding simulator. Query API unlocks all the builders in that community to build whatever tools they want.
In our community data feed for Crypto Unicorns, we provide up-to-date Unicorn metadata. That data is hard for people to crawl themselves, especially now that there’s almost 200,000 Unicorns in the game.
The kind of data that can be made available through Query API:
- How many Unicorns exist?
- What are their stats?
- What is the stat distribution?
- How many times have Unicorns bred?
And that data can be as recent as 10 minutes ago.
Conclusion
Query API and Dune analytics are similar tools that are useful in different scenarios. Both provide you with a steady stream of high quality data. While Dune is better for data visualization, Query API is better for developing web3 gaming tools as it allows you to get the most recent data from both on-chain and off-chain user interactions with a project.
Query API is open source and you can find it in Moonstream’s GitHub repository. Give us a star if you enjoy new web3 gaming technology! To set up Query API for your project, please reach out to us on Discord.