Democratizing crypto
Hello world! We are the team who stands behind Bugout.dev, a devtool product that helps improve developer experience through usage metrics and crash reporting. While our competitors’ products are usually set up on a server and are centralized in their data collection, Bugout’s distinguishing feature is its decentralized architecture. We built Bugout to collect crash reports from millions of users as opposed to a handful of servers. Bugout is an open-source self-hostable product. Check it out on GitHub.
A couple of months ago, my father asked me to purchase some cryptocurrencies for him. He wanted Bitcoin, of course, but also Ether and Cardano. My father is 74 and he is an intelligent person, but he is not normally at the bleeding edge of technology. His request really shows the level of mainstream interest in crypto. An interest which is growing despite the technical difficulty of working with cryptocurrencies.
Currently, people mainly interact with the public blockchains through intermediaries – exchanges (e.g. Coinbase, Binance), brokers (e.g. Robinhood), and cryptocurrency ETFs. Most of the people that we speak with are hungry to interact directly with the blockchains. Once we started thinking of it, we realized that Bugout’s decentralized architecture means that it is perfectly suited to making this possible. More importantly, to making it easy. We are doing it with Moonstream.
The crypto market is not slowing down
Cryptocurrencies are becoming more and more integrated into our daily lives. Unfortunately, it is still difficult for a casual user like my father to figure things out and not to lose all their money in a trading mishap. It is especially difficult to distinguish substance from empty hype, especially when you are not plugged in directly to the blockchains.
The Ethereum blockchain itself takes up over 450 GB per node of high class storage. Synchronizing a fresh Ethereum node with the rest of the blockchain takes weeks. This is before adding indices so that the data can be easily queried for the kind of information that a trader or an application developer might want from it. It is not reasonable to expect anyone but the most hardcore miner or validator to go to the trouble of running a node.
Moonstream collects data sources like the Ethereum, Solana, and Algorand blockchains, the Ethereum transaction pool, news, and social media. This allows someone who may not have the operational experience required to run their own nodes to make informed decisions about their cryptocurrency holdings.
Our biggest challenge has been to store this data and make it accessible in a cost effective manner. We have figured out how to solve the problem. Everything we build we are doing in full transparency. All of our technology is open source. If you are interested, you can see how we did this here.
Financial inclusion requires full transparency
There is not much value in a huge stream of raw data. That’s why Moonstream presents it in a digestible form (dashboards and graphics). Moonstream will also allow users to execute transactions directly on supported blockchains from the Moonstream frontend.
You can also create webhooks and set up programs which execute (on- or off-chain) when your stream meets certain conditions. Data is only as good as the decisions it informs. We are building Moonstream to be much more than a database.
This information is available to anyone wishing to participate in the public blockchains. Whether you are a crypto trader, a smart contract developer, or even a hedge fund, we are building Moonstream for you.
Blockchains are about transparency. And because we believe in transparency, we are building Moonstream completely in the open. It is an open source project, and we make all our decisions in the open, as well.
Want to become part of the movement and contribute? You’re welcome in our community. We are hanging out on Discord.