Dune Analytics: A Guide for Beginners

Dune is a free website where blockchain data has been tidied into tables that anyone can ask questions of, and where thousands of people have already turned those questions into public charts. You can get a great deal out of it without writing a single line of code - most beginners never need to. If a protocol like Uniswap or Aave matters to anybody, someone has almost certainly built a dashboard for it already.

What can you do without writing any SQL?

Search for a protocol, a token or a chain and read what comes back. Dashboards show things a price chart never will: how many people traded on Uniswap today, how much is borrowed on Aave, how fees on a network have moved over a year. Save the ones you like. Check who made a dashboard and when it last updated, because an abandoned one quietly keeps showing old numbers rather than announcing that it broke.

Running your first query

SQL is the language databases use to answer questions, and it reads closer to English than most code: you say which columns you want, from which table, matching which condition. The gentlest start is not to write one at all but to fork somebody else's - open a chart you like, look at the query behind it, copy it, and change one thing. A date, a token address, a chain. Run it and see what moves. That loop teaches the structure of blockchain tables faster than any tutorial, because you are reading real queries that already work.

What trips beginners up

• Raw versus decoded tables. Raw transaction tables are hard going; the decoded ones, named after the protocol, are what you usually want.
• Slow queries. Asking for every transaction on Ethereum since 2015 will time out. Always limit the date range first.
• Trusting a dashboard blindly. Anyone can publish one. If the number matters to you, open the query and check what it actually counts.

Start today by finding a dashboard for one protocol you already use and reading it for ten minutes without trying to trade on it. Then fork the query behind your favourite chart. For where Dune sits among the alternatives, see Dune vs Nansen vs Arkham and the best on-chain analytics tools for crypto research.