Walking Through Botto’s Dune Dashboard
Dune Analytics is an Ethereum-based analytics platform that makes on-chain data available and consumable. Any user can create and share dashboards based on on-chain metrics to communicate the insides of a project. We decided Botto deserved one to show the world how this is a project with a real distributed economic model.
If you’re new here, you might not have heard us speak about Botto yet. Botto is a Decentralized Autonomous Artist: its Art Engine generates outstanding pieces of art autonomously using AI algorithms. But since an AI doesn’t have a purpose, an artistic vision, or a business perspective, it needs a team to help with that. Crypto provides unique tools for human cooperation through shared purposes and incentives needed to complete the Autonomous Artist.
Botto is the product of the cooperation of AI, DAO, and DeFi in the exploration of new realms for digital art.
Botto was born in October 2021. And for almost a year and a half, it’s been producing and selling outstanding pieces of art to NFT collectors. And even though it’s the top #12 all-time best-selling artist on SuperRare, and its works hang in the galleries of legendary collectors such as Cozomo or Punk 6529, it’s probably been flying under the radar of most people out there.
Besides the artistic contribution, Botto can brag about being one of the rare crypto use cases of a straightforward business model (NFT sales) actually reverting to the benefit of its community. Since Botto’s Second Period (which started in November 2022), Botto has been redistributing revenue among the DAO members in exchange for their investment in training the AI and curating the art.
We created a Dune Dashboard to show Botto’s economic model in action. Let us walk you through the process, the challenges, and the learnings we extracted.
The process of setting up a Dune Dashboard requires a step-by-step deep dive into the plumbing of a protocol.
Understanding the project
As founding members and active contributors to Botto, that was the easy part. But translating a protocol’s activity into plain English can be challenging.
Mapping out all on-chain processes
Designing a Dune Dashboard starts by dissecting a project to map out all the smart contracts and wallets involved in its activity. Thanks to publicly available information and a lot of Etherscan sniffing, we were able to outline every single process involved in Botto’s activity.
Botto has two main sources of revenue
- Art sales, from the weekly auctions, secondary sales royalties, and some exceptional Genesis period sales, happened either OTC or through ad hoc auctions.
- Collectibles sales. Pipes and Access Passes are secondary collections that generate revenue in sales and royalties (only in the case of Pipes)
Getting all the data right involved tracing the path the money took through SuperRare’s, Opensea’s and even Botto’s smart contracts to the treasury.
Botto redistributes revenue in three parts: 25% replenishes the Active Rewards smart contract, from which Bottonians can claim their rewards for voting; another 25% is allocated for Retroactive Rewards, a process that’s defined once at the end of every period. The remaining 50% of the revenue is allocated to the project’s treasury for future use.
Only the Active Rewards distribution happens on-chain. What you can see on the Dune Dashboard are raw calculations based on revenue data.
Besides the revenue distribution system, the team performs a weekly token burn. The equivalent of 20% of the weekly revenue in $BOTTO is burnt to add a deflationary feature to the token. The DAO has tweaked this percentage several times, and from the Third Period on, it will become 50% of the sales. This has resulted in over 4.4M $BOTTO burned since the beginning of the program, on a 100M $BOTTO total supply (21M circulating).
Scouting Dune for pre-processed data
Dune dashboards feed from previously retrieved and sometimes processed data. Dashboard designers can access data in three ways:
- checking raw transaction data from the massive database
- looking into specific smart contract data, which is often more precise, but sometimes does not fit the purpose.
- From spells, which are are custom tables built and maintained by Dune and its community, that you can reuse for your project.
Double-checking the data
We downloaded raw Etherscan .csv data to cross-check the results. We discovered certain discrepancies that allowed us to fine-tune our Dune queries.
Designing the dashboard
We always understood this was a dashboard for insiders or highly motivated users. Not many people would otherwise take the time to understand the nuances of Botto’s primary and secondary collections, royalties, or art period sales.
Nevertheless, we tried to make the dashboard self-contained and provided as much context as possible for those engaged users to understand all the details without leaving Dune.
Being an art project was a plus: every white space was an opportunity to showcase Botto’s creative prowess.
Next steps
We are currently working on incorporating data retroactively. so if you read this article a few weeks after publication, you might find that the screenshots no longer match.
The Genesis period covered the first year of Botto. the art was minted differently, there was no revenue redistribution system in place, and the DAO modified the burn mechanism along the way. So we’re going to need to do a lot of fine-tuning and explaining.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy it at least half as much as Caleb :P
We’re proud and excited about this Dune Dashboard. We hope it will contribute to attracting more attention to Botto and prove that it belongs to the exclusive category of crypto projects where the pieces actually fit. A project with real economic activity and added value that accrues to the community in exchange for a contribution that’s expressed in the time invested by individuals in the process of training the AI and curating the art.
