Introducing Masa Analytics: Unleashing Data-Driven Growth in Web3

Masa’s Privacy Preserving Analytics Solution Reveals Web3 User Behavioral Metrics Never Before Tracked

Masa

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Masa

9 min readOct 2, 2023

Intro

Web3 has ushered in a new era of decentralized innovation, but for many projects, the complex world of data and analytics remains a mystery.

For example, if you’re a web3 project — Do you know how many unique users (not wallets) you have active each day or week? How many of them are returning users, and what retention truly looks like? Most importantly, do you know who your most valuable users are, what their behavior is across other chains, and how they translate into consistent predictable revenue for your protocol?

Most projects still rely on a combination of web2 solutions (such as Google Analytics) and web3 tracking tools like on-chain wallet analytics (such as Dune & DeFi Llama), but with no real way to have a unified view no clear picture exists of a user’s on-chain data, website visits, and social and dApp activities all-in-one.

The mystery of web3 user data is rooted in the fragmentation of multiple wallets and chains, the division between web2 front-ends and web3 back-ends, and the constant challenge of preserving privacy — a key tenant of web3.

Enter Masa Analytics — your map in the vast web3 frontier, designed to empower projects with data-driven insights and privacy-preserving analytics.

Masa Analytics is purpose-built for the biggest communities of the web3 world, including Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) ecosystems with millions of active users, leading platforms, and fast-growing decentralized applications.

We believe that the next bull market will be driven by products that have product-market fit scaled by projects and companies that have a deep granular understanding of their users. In order for big web2 enterprises to enter into web3 — ushering billions of users — a Masa Analytics is a prerequisite to unlocking this market. Billion-dollar corporations and publishers require an understanding of their users and how to optimize their product offering in order to make the leap into web3.

Masa Analytics has established strong product-market fit with leading projects such as Polygon, NEAR Protocol, and QuickSwap as users. We have been behind the scenes powering analytics for some of Web3’s biggest players. With over 600,000 unique users tracked and over 12 million unique data points generated in September, it’s time to reveal our product to the world.

The Pain Points of Analytics in Web3

Currently, there are some major blockers and challenges, which is why in web3 user analytics is still the Wild West. Let’s break down these pain points.

1. Systems Fragmentation: For the vast majority of web3 projects and dapps, they are actively running on a web2 front-end, with a blockchain-based backend. It’s been impossible to connect front-end events, such as source attribution, page views, and clicks, with onchain events, such as transactions, transfers, and swaps.

2. Lack of Composable Identity: While many “identity” projects in web3 exist, there is no standardized and composable identity solution. Wallets have become the de facto unit of measure, but single users have multiple wallets across multiple chains. A unified model is needed where a user can have a unified identity which can be traced to multiple wallets and attributed to their web2 and web3 activities and attributes.

3. Privacy is Partitioned: Traditional web2 systems utilize cookies for tracking, which are running into Global compliance restrictions like GDPR. In order for analytics to stay true to the privacy-preserving, decentralized ethos of web3, event and user tracking has to be private, encrypted, and protected. Never compromising a user’s personally identifiable information at any time.

Now is the Best Time to Get Started on Analytics

In the current state of the crypto market, effective user acquisition, retention, and engagement have become more important than ever. Projects are now valued by the number of their unique users, and the real-measurable activity happening on their platforms. Blockchains and projects that can’t grow their user base will not survive.

Data is often used after the fact to analyze a campaign’s success, but is rarely used preemptively to strategically build a campaign and the content around the user, with incentives that are proven to appeal to your target audience. More so, without a full picture of a project’s web3 user data, custom audience creation, targeting, and source attribution become impossible.

Many web3 projects share the same struggles:

Marketers Heavily Rely on Airdrops: Airdrops have become a lot less effective, attracting lots of bots and airdrop farmers. Creating short-term hype without building a real user base.
Real Active Users are Hard to Come By: In a bear market, real-active users have become harder to acquire and even harder to retain. Builders are now forced to deeply understand their users and behaviors.
A New User-Centric Era: We’re moving past the trader-centric era and entering into the user-centric era of web3, with games, NFTs, DeFi, and even web2 enterprises quietly building in web3

Most projects are struggling to maintain long-term success. While community is often said to be everything in web3, the vast majority of projects have no insight into how their very community members are actively navigating the ecosystem, using products, getting value, and what actions they need to be taken swiftly and iteratively to grow and retain the most valuable users.

With attention at a premium building a sticky product that solves the pain of end users is tantamount to web3. A tightly coupled feedback loop of analytics and product iteration is required to get to the end game — product market fit and scaling web3 to billions of users.

Introducing Masa Analytics

Masa Analytics is a game-changer for web3 projects seeking to make data-driven decisions without compromising user privacy. Think of us as a decentralized hybrid of Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Dune, with the added dimension of user-authenticated social and attestation data. Giving builders a clear map of user behavior in a world obscured by anonymous wallet addresses for the first time ever. We do not use cookies, we do not sell user data, and everything is encrypted, anonymized, and secured using our decentralized zero-knowledge data infrastructure.

We have been behind the scenes powering analytics for some of Web3’s biggest players. With over 600,000 unique users tracked and over 12 million unique data points generated in September,

Masa Analytics Unique Value Propositions:

1. The Unique User View: Masa is able to build a unique user profile (identity), going beyond just analyzing anonymous wallets. In fact, we can tie multiple wallets owned by a single user in a privacy-preserving manner — automatically and deterministically.

For example, in the Masa community of over a half million wallets, we can identify the individuals who possess multiple wallets. With one user boasting a staggering 72 wallets! This user was harvesting airdrops, and our system could track this back to a single user.

We’re building a true, unique, and unified web3 user profile (identity) using our analytics.

2. Data Unification: Masa Analytics is able to unify on-chain and off-chain data across blockchains, as well as web2 and web3 frontend events. We tie all of these events back to our unique user — creating a truly unified data model. With Masa, builders can follow a unique user’s journey, from the moment they read the promotional marketing materials to landing on your website or dApp, to connecting their wallet, to competing on-chain and off-chain actions in your ecosystem.

Masa Analytics can track the previously untrackable, and tie it back to a single unified user. Here are just some of the examples of our data tracking:

Source Attribution: in a world where you have no idea where a wallet came from you can now see the source, campaign, or initiative that drove a user to your platform.
Country-Level Analytics: Understand your most active countries and how country-level metrics drive usage and engagement. We never tie the country back to a wallet to protect your PII and keep users anonymous.
Wallet Interactions: Type of wallet connected (Metamask, OKX, Trustwallet, etc) and in-wallet actions such as message signing, swap, trade, and mint types — ERC-20 & SBT & NFT.
User Activity: User activity times and peak user time periods
Social Events: Encrypted user data, which includes Twitter, Discord, and other social media activity.
Web2 Frontend Events: Site visits, clicks, return visits, and attribution data.
All Onchain Events with Metadata: Data includes exchange balances, exchange liquidation data, all rolled up to a single user view.
Identity Events: Includes 2-factor verification history, KYC, and sanctions checks, permissioned by the user and encrypted with zk-proofs using Masa’s zero-knowledge Soulbound Token (zkSBT).
Other Event Data: Masa has an onchain API that handles many data sources and types. Using other authentication protocols, users can grant permission to transport data on-chain and make it available through our zk-data infrastructure layer.

3. User Segmentation: Once we build a data set of unique users from a platform or protocol, we can utilize this data to create valuable user segmentation insights based on different attributes.

Our analytics engine can answer important questions about your web3 users, including:

Who are the unique users?
Who are the most loyal users?
What users are returning?
What is the average trade value of your users?
Who are the most valuable users based on assets?
Who are the most frequent DeFi traders?
What other Dapps, Wallets or platforms are your users using most?

4. Privacy Preservation: Masa’s cookieless analytics adopts a privacy-preserving approach to data. Traditional analytics tools utilize cookies for tracking, but our analytics engine is powered by zero-knowledge Soulbound Token (zkSBTs).

Our cookieless tracking solution is able to track events on Brave & Incognito. This immediately enables Masa Analytics to track 40% more data than a traditional cookie-based tracking solution, while staying fully privacy compliant within multiple jurisdictions. The compliance regimes we focus on for our privacy-first analytics service include GDPR Compliance, ePrivacy (cookie law) Compliance, PECR Compliance, COPPA Compliance, and CCPA Compliance.

One of the fundamental philosophies we’ve upheld since the inception of Masa is our commitment to radical user privacy and anonymity. Therefore, we intend to be radically transparent about how data is processed and stored. We comply with all relevant privacy laws and ensure that we always practice data minimization — only processing and storing data that’s essential, useful, and privacy-focused. To learn more about the Data Journey at Masa, read our documentation here.

5. Simple Integration: Masa Analytics can be integrated with just a few lines of code. Integration doesn’t require sophisticated development work and can be completed in a matter of minutes.

Whether you’re a marketer, a product manager, an analyst, or a data scientist, you can swiftly integrate Masa’s analytics script or SDK with just three lines of code. Alternatively, if you want to roll your own solution, we have a flexible API that can be utilized in decentralized front-ends.

Masa Analytics is already available for integration utilizing our dev-docs and self-service interface where you only need a wallet to log in and get started.. For larger projects, Masa’s team can support complex and customized analytics integration to make sure every user activity that matters to you is turned into a tracking event.

Get Started Integrating Masa Analytics Here

Be Ahead of the Next Bull Market with Masa Analytics

Web3 is a realm of limitless possibilities, but the next bull market will be driven by data-driven insights and growth. Masa Analytics is your map and engine to get ahead of the competition and ahead of the next bull market. With comprehensive and unified data you can measure what matters, and refine your product iteratively at high velocity.

Right now millions of web3 users are active, but in order to attract, retain, and engage them on your platform, you’ll have to understand their behavior and where they are currently active. We’ll show you how.

Bid farewell to uncertainty, and embrace the era of data-driven growth with Masa Analytics. Measure what matters to you, so you can hone your growth to ensure your success.