Why did we decide to create Agnostic?

A few words on the existing Web3 ecosystem and what we believe we can bring to it.

Synopsis

Our goal at Agnostic is to ease access to Web3 development and data analysis. There are a lot of tools we admire available in the market, but we believe we can bring a unified platform that will unleash many possibilities.

What did we experience?

The Web3 ecosystem is far from the maturity of the traditional web. We identified some missing tools for two personas we know well due to our experience; developers and analysts:

• An easy and performant way to access data produced by smart contracts. Web3 developers do not always agree to maintain another brick of architecture like TheGraph, and querying nodes using a provider like Infura can be even more painful. Serverless is the answer to building more and more reliable apps.
• Moreover, node providers and current state-of-the-art indexers are not great solutions to display time-series data to customers because of how the data is stored. A simple chart display can trigger hundreds of API calls, and the customer suffers from that bad experience. It is a big issue when most decentralized apps today are financial ones that need to display a lot of historical and aggregated data.
• Nansen and Dune Analytics bring access to that kind of data, but they are limited to some contracts and not practical for integration as they don’t get interactive speed; queries can take 10 to 15 minutes to respond to; live data streaming, data exploration, and live dashboard are not conceivable with that kind of constraint.

What are we building?

1. The Foundation
   - Reduce the query execution time to tens of milliseconds to seconds in the worst case.
   - Our deep understanding of EVM byte code allows us to automate the indexing of smart-contract calls and events (~90% decoding rate, including 100% of the standards). There is no need for manual action to add each contract, start a job, and reindex the chain.
2. A better developer experience
   - A GraphQL API to easily encapsulate query complexity, integrate with your app, and display the data you want.
   - Interoperability with existing data exploration tools like Grafana or Tableau thanks to our broad PostgreSQL protocol compatibility.
3. Open-source SDK
   - Components to display your dApp data with almost no code (compatible with React, Svelte, Angular, Vue, Ember, and Vanilla)
   - Benefit from the libraries we built to build Agnostic (EVM and Solidity tooling).

Who are we?

We build Agnostic with Arnaud. We are autodidacts and passionate programmers since childhood. We have experience with heavy-loaded and high-demand big data projects: Arnaud made his career in the ad-serving industry. I’ve been head of engineering of different companies, notably in the fintech and institutional organizations. We both know analysts very well, working very closely with them, and the developer experience has always been a big concern for us as team leads.

When?

Our private beta is open 👉 https://agnostic.engineering/. Follow Agnostic and subscribe to the newsletter to never miss anything about our releases.

We are live on the Ethereum main net and expect to add more EVM-compatible blockchains in the coming months.