Better Blockchain Data with Noves

All right, we're live. GM everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or been working on in Web3. It can be an awesome project you've been working on, demonstrating testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the wonderful Developer DAO community here. And today I am ecstatic to have on Christian and Ben from Noves. Welcome gang, it's a pleasure to have you on.

Yeah, thanks. Glad to be here. I've been in the crypto space for a long time, but really professionally just for the last few years since Ethereum came along and we were able to actually start building cool software that did something, that could run in the chains and do something interesting. And I've basically been focused almost exclusively on the data side since I started working on it.

And then myself, I got into crypto in 2020. Panic sold a bunch of crypto in the very beginning and then did a little research and I was like, all right, cool, I'm all in. And then mostly a marketing background, and so I just did very little stuff, started to collect bounties in a couple of marketing DAOs and found my way to Noves and I've been there for about a year. What we're building is really cool. Excited for us to show it today.

So, I have so many things that I could possibly cover today and I talk a lot, so I'm going to kind of jump around and just get a bunch of things out there. But I'm certainly happy to take any questions or to try to clarify anything if something I say is not clear right off. So, Noves is basically focused on trying to help people get data off the chain in a way that is easier to work with and easier to understand. There's a ton of different data projects out there, but almost everyone is real focused on what is available, like let's just show you what we have. And a lot of times that doesn't answer the questions that people want. And so we've come at it from the other side, which is what is it that people want, what is it that people want to know, and then we try to bring the data to them in that way. The problem with blockchain data is that we often have a lot of the data, but it isn't what we want. Like I've got all these fields about gas, I don't know if I care that much about that. What I really want is to know what in the world this transaction did. Or if you look back in your history and you can see you had a bunch of transactions, but without going into those, clicking through the block explorer, you have no idea what it was that you were doing. And really I just want to know at a glance what was happening. Why is this problematic? It's problematic because people keep building new things and everybody does whatever they want, and the data that comes out of it looks different from thing to thing to thing. And there's no real thought given to what's going to happen to people after this happens. Builders are just trying to do cool things and they're not thinking about the aftermath of it. So we do have data, there are events, there's things like swaps, we can go through here and we can parse through it, but the problem is that like I said, everybody does their own individual version of how these things work. For swaps, some of these things are really basic swaps, you can see you've just got one in one out, so we can easily figure out what that was. But if we look at things like limit orders, now you can see there's a whole bunch of transfers that happened inside here and it's a little harder at first glance to just see what it was that was going on. And when we look into the data, here instead of a swap or an exchange, the actual function that got called was a 'settle orders'. And it doesn't take something simple like just the in and the out or the token address, it takes an entire bytes full of data. So we have to go in and dig through more of the data to figure out what happened. And for normal people, or even honestly technical people who are trying to not spend their whole day digging through data, this is just like a pain in the neck and it's not what people would like to have for an experience.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny when I think of it more even when I just got into the space. For most of Developer DAO, for example, you're coming into it with a highly technical viewpoint. And we're in this silo within Developer DAO looking at it from a technical standpoint and you have a very high technical literacy and the ability to understand this information or be able to parse through the data comes a little more naturally. And so for me, who when I first got into the space was very novice and had very little to no understanding of the information, it takes months to understand how the data works and how it gets processed from every different smart contract is going to display this information differently and give you a different function. It's a nightmare. And so when I started to understand how we were solving this problem with our data, it just kind of clicked for me, it just made a lot of sense. And I've gotten that feedback pretty often from most people who have seen our data and seen the current state of data and what it could be. Typically that response is, okay that makes sense, but you kind of have to see the difference before you can understand it.

It is funny, sometimes you'll talk to people who are in marketing or BD or something in our space and they'll give me a whole run-through of their tech and they'll say, well, you know, I'm not actually that technical, you'd have to talk to one of our developers. But their level of technical proficiency is extremely high, it's just in this space that bar is thrown completely out of whack compared to the rest of the world. So I do think that it's kind of easy to take for granted the sort of base layer of knowledge and understanding that people have, even if they aren't the technical people, and especially for developers, it's easy to kind of glide over that like you said. So I want to talk a little bit about where we're going and our roadmap. We have this notion that this is sort of the state of affairs right now in the blockchain space, which is we have the execution side of the blockchain, which is nicely organized, in today's world it's probably modular and it's very finely tuned, it does exactly what it's supposed to do, it's deterministic. You know before you get into it what it's going to cost for you to do the thing you want to do and you know whether it's going to work or not. And that's great, and that's I think a really good environment for building cool things, for trying stuff, for testing things, and I think we all agree that that's great. And then we have trying to get data about what happened, and that's just all then completely thrown to the wind. We just leave that to every third-party vendor to figure out whatever they want to do, whatever they want to offer, whatever spaces they want to be in or chains they do or don't want to index, or how much they want to charge for it. And we think that that's holding back our ability to iterate and to build and to do new things. We think that what we should have is the same kind of structured modular organized approach to data access that we have for chains. I should know that I can get the data that I need, I should know that I can get it at a very reasonable, I would even say like minimal cost, that someone isn't sitting on top of that and extracting more value than they need to, and that I can rely on that data being there tomorrow and the next day and the next month and not have to worry that Snowtrace is going to exit the Avalanche ecosystem and leave me high and dry for ABIs or whatever I need. And so Noves is moving towards building a modular protocol for organizing data access. It's not intended to be the data access for everyone, but just a way for us to coordinate the data access within blockchain ecosystems under the stewardship of the blockchain and the members of that ecosystem so that the people who are running the transactions and actually interacting on the chain sort of have a hand in how they get the data and in making sure that that data is available to them so they don't end up in a bad position. Part of this is us working to design schemas that capture the data in a way that we can agree on. We're working to try to set some standards around how data access works that other data providers and other service providers who need the data can agree on so that we have a standard way to interact. If we didn't have the ERC-20 standard, blockchains would be complete chaos because there would be no way for anybody to build anything meaningful. Like having that standardized way of dealing with tokens is what enabled the space to rapidly build pieces that plug together and work together nicely. And we need to do the same thing for data access at a more semantic layer, at a layer of meaning instead of just this kind of like raw layer where everything exists right now. So once that's sort of deployed and we have this idea of these sort of like standardized chunks of data, like this is what financial blockchain data looks like, this is what security data looks like, and this is how like raw data looks, then pieces of the system like wallets or like block explorers or your accounting stack, your accountant, your tax preparer can rely on those standard formats of data to be able to easily retrieve that and to pull it out. So for us this looks like, you know, our existing translate API that knows how to turn raw data into something meaningful can plug into that financial data component, can plug into that block explorer component to provide that data into those systems. But the end tools, the wallets themselves or the block explorers, can integrate with that standardized layer instead of having to tie into Noves directly. So that if we get acquired and decide to shut down the translate API because whoever bought us doesn't want that side of the business anymore, the ecosystem that people have built on top of those things, they can just switch to a different data provider who meets that same spec, or maybe even run their own.

Yeah, this is amazing. The just like these constructs that you've put forward are going to be very powerful. And the way I've understood it is you have kind of a couple of pillars that you're hinging on here where you have this standardized schema in the same vein as how OpenSea defined like the NFT schema and everybody hopped on that and gave order to a chaotic world. And it seems like you're doing the same thing for the broad spectrum of transaction data, which is really awesome. Two things that kind of pop in my mind or have been kind of bubbling ever since you guys started was kind of this benefit to two sides of the spectrum. So one is like the average person who wants to just make sense of what's happening. And as Billy mentioned in the comments, this smells like a series of modules for upcoming tax season to make sense of all the crypto flips and whatnot people have done.

On the tax side, we work with some accountants and some tax providers, it's kind of where we started from in our focus. So we do have a transaction exporter that we are working to get released hopefully as open source or if not at least in the short term maybe to operate as a public good, where you would be able to go there, you put in your wallet, and it would just give you a single file dump in a CSV that's accountant-friendly. It sounds ridiculous because we've been building here for so long, so many people, and yet still just getting that is hard. You can get it from Etherscan for mainnet, but you have to do it from five separate tabs, the five tabs don't have the same columns, so then you got to bring it into Excel and then you got to kind of manipulate it from there. So anyway, we are working on that tool that will just give you a nice clean export so that people can get their data and not have to spend their whole lives messing with that kind of thing at tax time. For Paul's question, I haven't personally gotten involved with Lens, I've just recently gotten pretty active on Farcaster. So we are playing around in that space, they're pretty developer focused and developer friendly. We aren't currently indexing any of their data, of course their most of the data for Farcaster is not on-chain, that's running through their hubs and there's some other APIs and stuff being built there, it's definitely something we're keeping an eye on I guess. For the moment, to the degree the data sits on a public chain and is available, we would already be processing that data. I haven't seen it specifically so I don't know what it looks like when it comes through our system, but if it's on-chain we are definitely processing it. We're currently on 30-ish blockchains and we cover essentially any transaction from any protocol on those chains.

Gotcha. I guess perhaps this is a nice tangent question but is your schema kind of like a one-size-fits-all for data or can there be customization or extensions of that schema to better fit specific sets of data? What's the best way for folks to start playing around with Noves today? How can they go and start playing around?

Yeah, so the answer is yes to both. So we do have a sort of predefined taxonomy that we fit everything into. I think we have 70 or 80 different transaction types that everything gets crammed into. Most things fit pretty nicely like swaps, but there are things where, you know, like if you're updating the fee on a pool or something like that, we don't have a specific type that captures that, we would put that into like a generic protocol admin type of a transaction. Having said that, we do have the ability to overlay more specific types. So like if we were working with someone on a specific use case where they wanted to have very granular types, our system has no problem overlaying like a second taxonomy over the top to give that data. It's just for most people, like if you're writing a tax processor, you don't want to deal with 500 different types of transactions because they're not that important, right? There's only the kind of like summary ones that are more important. Yeah, so we do have a free account, you can go sign up and grab a key, that would give you access to any chain that you want to use and you can run the translate API. If you want to simulate transactions, you can do that through Foresight. And certainly hit me up with any questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, we love to engage with people and hear what's working great or what they would like to have or anything like that. We'll be around Eth Denver. We're going to be set up at Epic Eth Infra Day and then for a period of time at the Linea booth. And then we're around there all week, so certainly hit us up and we'd be happy to grab coffee or just chat whatever. You can find me at NV Ben on Farcaster, or happy to have someone reach out over email, I'm Ben at Noves.fi.

Excellent. All right folks, I hope you all have a nice Friday, happy weekend, and we'll catch you back here for another episode of DevNTell next week. Righto, cheers!