Last week, we launched our first public version of Blockdata. Our moods are fluctuating between humility and pride, nervousness and excitement. After six months of building, tinkering, discussing, and debating every last detail of Blockdata, we are opening ourselves up to public scrutiny. But whether you’ve been following us since the start or just discovered us today, we hope that you see the massive potential of Blockdata.
Why have we built Blockdata?
Researching blockchain projects is frustrating and difficult. It’s painful for small investors and massive companies with unlimited resources alike: Big 4 consultancies literally have teams of interns doing Google searches to populate Excel sheets. Information is scattered across numerous sources, from project websites and white papers to Github repositories and ICO trackers. Terminology is inconsistent, grand promises are made, and there often appears to be no correlation between technical progress and token pricing.
We’re all eager to see blockchain change the world for the better. But as the industry experiences these growing pains, it has become clear that we need to empower people to understand the difference between hype and genuine potential.
What is Blockdata?
Blockdata is a research tool for understanding blockchain companies, projects, products, and tokens. We collect, verify, and publish information from a wide range of sources in a simple and clean interface. We intend for Blockdata to be synonymous with reliable, honest data on the blockchain space.
Who is Blockdata for?
We built Blockdata for people who are serious about conducting high quality research and don’t want to waste their time looking for it in every nook and cranny of the internet. These include:
- traders who need data beyond price movements
- consultants and lawyers who need to offer well-considered advice to their clients
- banks and other institutions that require better research standards than what the market currently offers
What information does Blockdata have?
Our dataset is primarily comprised of companies, projects, products, and tokens. At launch, we have over 200 projects listed on Blockdata. Each week, our dataset will grow, with new projects constantly being added, as well as additional data points for projects that are already in our system.
Companies are the legal entities that support and promote blockchain projects. Sometimes they are the sole driving force of a project; in other cases, they provide the human and/or technical resources to a project.
Projects will probably be where our users spend most of their research attention. We collect data on the objectives of a project — i.e. what it brings to the blockchain ecosystem; what technologies it is using; what industry vertical the project is aimed at.
Products include software, platforms, SDKs, wallets, etc.
Token information includes technical specifications like token standards, protocols, consensus mechanisms, and features (e.g. transaction speeds, data storage, etc.)
Markets pages present aggregated data, such as all of the projects within a particular industry vertical or market. As our dataset grows, these aggregate tools are going to become incredibly useful for understanding the ecosystem.
We love feedback!
We know that Blockdata isn’t perfect. Our hope is that over the coming months, as our dataset grows and new features are added, Blockdata will become an indispensable tool for hobbyists and professionals alike. A few months ago, we released our alpha version to early supporters. The feedback they gave us was incredibly valuable and influenced a lot of what you see in this first full release. Now that we’re open to the public, we hope to get plenty more feedback, criticism, and questions in order to make Blockdata even better.
If there is anything at all you’d like to tell us, please reach out on tim@blockdata.tech, follow us on twitter, or message us on any of our other social channels. Of course, we hope you like what we’ve built. But even if you don’t, we definitely want to hear from you as well.
Thank you for joining us on this mission. Ad astra.
