6. Blockchain Utility Suite

Smart contracts stored on-chain can directly be viewed in an explorer, where a user can view the smart contract code itself as well as all the transactions that have interacted with it. Being able to directly view smart contract code means that anyone can audit published contracts in order to determine their security and trustworthiness. Most explorers make developers verify their smart contract code once it’s deployed to ensure that the code they provided is the exact match of the deployed on-chain bytecode, or the actual contract users will interact with.

Etherscan is Ethereum’s blockchain explorer and gives users real time information on the state of the network. Users are able to view blocks and their transactions, public addresses, smart contracts, current gas metrics, and all the other data taken directly from the network.

Blockchain explorers are a powerful tool because they let a user see directly into a blockchain’s database and use all of that data to their advantage. Anyone can scroll through the list of incoming transactions to see:

• The movement of money across the chain
• Token addresses and who is holding those tokens
• Deployed smart contracts, their code, and what assets they hold
• Public wallet addresses and their holdings
• The inner workings of the EVM

On-chain address trackers are great for monitoring and analyzing public addresses. They provide insight into metrics such as:

• Transaction history of an address
• Lists of tokens held and their balances within the address
• Interaction with other addresses

One great tool for tracking these entities is Arkham Intelligence, a popular system who’s goal is to deanonymize the blockchain. Arkham is responsible for tracing public wallet addresses in order to determine who they belong to. This will help create a system of accountability, where bad actors can no longer hide behind private addresses to conduct malicious transactions, and exchanges can be held fully accountable for their funds because their holdings are fully visible on-chain.

Arkham is able to trace tons of information regarding any on-chain address including a complete list of transactions, all of the wallet’s holdings, usage metrics, and more. It also allows users to create custom dashboards to track different addresses. For example, searching for Coinbase will reveal this dashboard that contains all of the metrics given about the exchange. Arkham is able to determine the true owners of on-chain addresses by tracking the movements of funds from known wallets and creating a trail from that address’s transactions.

Source: Arkham Intelligence

For example, this image illustrates a Bubblemap for the AAVE token. Each bubble on the map proportionately represents a large wallet holding AAVE, with bigger bubbles holding larger percentages of the total supply. This tactic is useful for determining how many addresses hold and control the supply of a token, since these addresses would be able to dump tokens at any time and cause a drop in the price.

Source: Bubblemaps

Wallet tracking has become a big part of DeFi, with many users looking to profit off of tokens by tracking the movements of famous crypto traders or large token holders. This has become such a phenomenon that a whole social network was created for this purpose: DeBank.

Instead of being tracked down by the likes of Arkham Intelligence or numerous on-chain detectives, DeBank gives users the ability to turn their wallet into a publicly facing profile that is connected to their social media accounts. Users are able to search wallet addresses directly and view their holdings. This image, for example, is of the account DeFi Whale and illustrates their wallet activity. These accounts are then able to gain and interact with followers through posts while at the same time openly showing and promoting projects they are involved in. Users can showcase:

• Token holdings and balances
• Their activity on various blockchains
• Involvement in specific protocols (ex. staking on Pendle)
• NFTs

This social graph lets users create a truly public identity that revolves around an on-chain address while at the same time giving others the ability to see what projects people are involved in and learn more about them. Crypto influencers can utilize platforms like DeBank to showcase themselves and the projects they support.

Source: DeFi Whale on DeBank

One of the most popular and useful applications to be familiar with is DefiLlama, a comprehensive analytics and research platform that tracks the values of all existing DeFi protocols. It provides essential data for tracking the performance of the DeFi market by showing the movement of money across different protocols and how well each one is performing.

DefiLlama includes data on all sorts of metrics including (click on each link to view the metric in DefiLlama):

• Total Value Locked (TVL) in a protocol
• Performance comparisons of different chains
• NFT prices and volume
• Current yields on staked assets and stablecoins
• Total Value Secured (TVS) by oracles
• Project treasuries
• Fees generated by chains and specific projects

Another popular tool for tracking on-chain data is Dune, an application that lets users create custom dashboards using the SQL programming language, which is highly popular amongst data analysts.

Dune offers a high level of customization for its users, where anyone can create a custom dashboard using SQL queries and share it with others. Similar to DeBank, this platform follows the idea of being an on-chain social graph, where users can create and share their own dashboards. Users can create custom dashboards to track specific metrics or view any of the thousands of dashboards available on the platform.

This dashboard, for example, is custom built to track Ethereum restaking. It evaluates data from 3 different restaking protocols: Eigenlayer, Symbiotic, and Karak. These protocols are popular for restaking staked ETH, and this dashboard tracks metrics such as TVL, inflows, liquidity, and volume. Check it out for yourself here.

Having a platform that lets you create custom dashboards for tracking on-chain financial metrics is something that is only possible thanks to the data availability of blockchain. Anyone can go and write custom queries to view any metric they’d like, creating a highly effective way to analyze DeFi trends.

Source: Blocklytics on Dune

These platforms both offer:

• Real time price tracking and historical price data
• Market rankings and overview for individual tokens as well as for the crypto market as a whole
• Filters to track tokens by project categories (gaming, AI, etc.)
• Centralized and decentralized exchanges and their key metrics
• Custom portfolio tracking tools for monitoring your wallets
• API resources for pulling price data for custom applications
• Educational resources for learning cryptocurrency terms and concepts

…as well as other great tools. CoinMarketCap also contains a live crypto version of the Fear and Greed Index. This index acts as a live tracker of market sentiment, and provides a live score of 1-100, with 1 being extreme fear and 100 being extreme greed. A low score on the index means that the market is in a fearful sentiment and more people are selling than buying, while a high score indicates the opposite.

This application is able to give users a higher level of insight into each token pair so that they can effectively analyze it. With new tokens appearing in the DeFi world on a daily basis, DEXTools offers insight into trading data that would otherwise be difficult to find on other platforms such as CoinMarketCap, which only start tracking token metrics once it reaches a certain amount of volume or popularity.

This is protocol is especially useful for traders and investors that want to buy into projects at a very early stage before they become too popular and start losing upward price momentum.

For each trading pair, DEXTools provides:

• Price data
• Contract addresses for the tokens as well as their liquidity pools
• Volume, market cap, circulation, and volatility metrics
• A custom DEXTools community trust rating and other safety information to avoid scam tokens
• Social media and website links to the project