Blockchains are now a crucial part of our digital infrastructure. They are the place to create new financial assets, companies, and communities. However, to understand this new financial infrastructure we need Blockchain data analytics. Given the scale and size of public Blockchain ledgers, GraphQL and visualization offers a novel way of analyzing huge volumes of Blockchain transaction data.
Use Case: Visualizing Blockchain Data
Problem Statement
With the rise of crypto and DeFi applications, exploring the underlying Blockchain data becomes vital for analysis and predictions. The traditional SQL-centric approach to technical analysis of Blockchain data has limitations, such as complex schemas spread across hundreds of tables with millions of rows that are not easy to join.
Realization Approach
By leveraging GraphQL and visualization, data analysts can write GraphQL queries to chart Blockchain data from over 30 Blockchain networks.
Solution Space
GraphQL queries are designed to fetch the exact data and reduce data over fetching, as experienced in SQL-based select queries. They operate on the standard HTTP protocol instead of the specific database-driven connection, making them easily accessible from web applications. As a result, they yield a better and faster response to charting requests for real-time Blockchain data analysis.
Featured Blockchain Data Platform
Bitquery offers a suite of Blockchain APIs to query on chain data from over 30+ Blockchain networks. It offers a flexible GraphQL based query format for analyzing historical as well as real-time data, along with intuitive visual tools for investigation.
Analysts and Blockchain enthusiasts are now analyzing Blockchain data and visualizing it to understand DApp and DeFi applications, but it’s not that straight forward.
Many companies in the market provide SQL-based query platforms that are difficult to start with because SQL is not easy. You need to join multiple tables, and understanding schema scattered across hundreds of tables is also challenging. Sometimes these queries become so big; it’s difficult to understand, track and change them.
With Bitquery, you have GraphQL APIs at your disposal, which are easy to understand and covers more than 30 Blockchains. And you can try these APIs through the Bitquery IDE.
This IDE is helpful for data analysts and developers as they can create, save and share their queries quickly. Additionally, Bitquery has also added another valuable feature which will allow users to visualize the API data on the Bitquery IDE directly.
Introducing GraphQL Charting
Now you can write GraphQL queries and use charts to visualize the query result in the IDE directly. For example, check out this query, which is pulling Ethereum transactions since its inception and showing it in the charts.
Visualize more than 30 Blockchains
Currently, Bitquery supports more than 30 Blockchains (Mainnet and testnets). With the charting feature, you can now visualize data for all of them. This will help many Blockchain ecosystems that lack sophisticated tooling support like Ethereum or Bitcoin. For example, check this query, which helps visualize active addresses on the Conflux Blockchain.
You can check more graphs here, here, and here.
Easy Query, Easy Charting
Bitquery APIs have been build from scratch to pursue simplicity and scalability. The platform automatically identifies the result data set and shows you only those charts possible with that result data set. Because of this, you will know ways data can be visualized and won’t miss anything.
With GraphQL and visualization capabilities, Bitquery IDE is one stop solution to query Blockchain data for developers and data analysts. The IDE and the charting library is open source and you can find them on GitHub.
This post was originally published in Bitquery.
