Sumer

All right, we're live. GM, GM, GM, everybody. Welcome to what is going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or have been working on in Web3. This could 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 Web3 community. And today, I am ecstatic to have on the show Mario and Uri from Sumer. Welcome, gang. Pleasure to have you on.

Hello there! Perhaps do you guys want to start with a brief introduction about yourselves, how you met each other, how you got into Web3, and how you found yourselves in Developer DAO? Yeah. So we basically, me and Mario, we met at Sumer, the startup we're currently working at.

And yeah, a little bit about myself. I'm a telecommunications engineer, with a master's degree in cybersecurity. And I started in the Web3 world back in 2020. As most people, just financially to gain some money and to trade it a little bit. And since it was strongly related to my studies, I got more curious about the technology. I saw the potential, and I went straight into the rabbit hole and here I am. And I built some arbitrage bots back then with Web3.js, which didn't work pretty well because of frontrunning. And also I built a DAO, which was trying to mimic real-world election systems, democratic systems. And yeah, now here I am doing the real stuff. And yeah, Mario.

Yeah, well, I met Uri also in our startup where we are working, Sumer, here in Barcelona. About me, my background is in computer science. I started with Web3 back in 2017. I bought some shitcoins, went to the moon, then lost a lot of money. But I stayed for the tech. Yeah, I saw another tweet and I went direct and joined the DAO, not very actively but I was hearing and seeing what's going on. Also thank you Narb for making possible this space and very happy to be here.

My pleasure, gang. And yeah, you guys have a very familiar story to a lot of folks who found their way to Web3 just out of curiosity and getting into it, at least to start, on the financial side of things. So yeah, and it's a pleasure to have you on. And yeah, let's get into the content here.

Yeah. First of all, we have to say sorry because sometimes you're going to hear people in the background because we are currently at Ethereum Barcelona. And yeah, we couldn't find anything quieter. Just the guy when he stops speaking, it's going to be quieter. So yeah, a little bit about Sumer. At Sumer, we're basically building the Web3 observability market. Sumer started nine months ago as a community CRM for Web3 communities. And as it wasn't much of a product fit, there was a pivot three months into the building. And there was because we found like there was a hole in the observability market. So basically the problem we try to solve is there are Web2 solutions for observability, there are Web3 solutions for observability, but there's nothing that unifies both worlds. Okay?

So at Sumer we believe that at the end of the day, if you want to make blockchain mainstream, it needs to be accessible. And accessibility comes with user experience, simplifying things, and removing all knowledge barriers. So that's basically where we are, trying to improve the developer experience as well as the user experience. So main problems we're trying to solve is basically when you don't have observability in your platform, you get a lot of problems like, for example, you don't know how your users are using your dApp, how you may improve this user experience because you don't know where are the main pain points that your users may have. And this deeply impacts your brand and decreases the revenue and it affects main observability, very important. So why Web2 solutions don't work? Basically because on infrastructure, as most people know here, there's the blockchain and there's the wallet. So you get there's lots of data that gets lost in the void with Web2 events. So basically that's the solution we developed.

So how it works, Sumer. The value proposition that we have is basically we want to make it our focus is on accessibility and make things easy and simple. So basically the integration is completely effortless and the setup is super easy for the developer. As well, we integrate with all Ethereum-based networks, so we're completely agnostic to the RPC communication library that you use and the EVM network that you use. As well, we get to concentrate, aggregate all the data in a single platform, so you don't have to, for example, if you're using six EVMs, you don't need six block explorers, just with one platform you have everything. Also we generate insights on top of all these extracted data. So all your team can make use of this data, so marketing team, business team, we try to make it as high level as possible, so everyone can understand without having to have deep knowledge into the blockchain. And yeah, we mainly focused right now on DeFi applications because they're the ones that have high volume and where transactions are important to know how users are using your dApp because it's about finance and important.

So a little bit about the structure, how we work. Basically we integrate, we have an SDK and we integrate it in the client side as well as it will also can also integrate in the server side. But as most dApps, they just the main things happen in the client interface, in the frontend. So we have an SDK that integrates in both sides. And all this data gets captured, gets sent into the Sumer server where we basically we process all this data, we prepare it for you to use it. And we have a platform where you can get use of use this data as well as you can also use our endpoints to get this data and use it with whatever tool you want. And also we also developed recently two proof of concepts where we are data source with Grafana, Mixpanel. So basically natively we integrate with both of them. So yeah, let's go to the demo.

So a little bit about Sumer, well the intro will be here. So basically this is Sumer, the platform. As of right now, it's a little bit under construction still. We just releasing the MVP and next week we're getting some more features out in the market. I'm really sorry about this noise. So yeah, and first of all, I'm going to present a little bit some metrics here that basically here we do some financial metrics where we aggregate financial prices to the transaction value of your dApp. Okay? Basically we also something I forgot to mention, we also enriched the data that we capture from your dApp with other data from APIs like financial APIs about metrics, gas predictions. So if the prediction was according to the gas the user paid. And well here we have another metric where basically we can see all the transactions grouped by the different networks. And then we have one with active wallets where basically counts the unique wallets by network each day. And here is where the real stuff is. Like this is basically like just raw data. We are just capturing the fundamental blocks of data to build on top.

And basically what we have here is we have the there's I want to start in different. We have made two main separations of events. There's the processed data which basically means like the transactions that get to the blockchain. Okay? Which can be successful, can be in a pending state, or can fail. And then there's the non-processed transactions which basically are the transactions that are related with on-chain data or with events but are not on-chain data. For example, a user rejecting the transaction. Okay? And finally down here we have a table with all the raw data. Basically in this case for the non-processed data you can see well for example in this case we all have errors here and we have like the error name, like the message that the error has, the description, where it happened, which address was the one involved with this error, and finally all the metadata related with the user. And back to the processed transactions we have basically quite similar to a block explorer. So basically what you can see here is all the transactions that reach the blockchain from your dApp. Basically you can see like the who initiated the transaction, to whom it was like the contract, the transaction was targeted to, the transaction hash, block number, and basically it's just raw data. Finally with the metadata.

And as well we also have like with the hash. Okay right now you have... let me try another one... I don't know why this one is not working. Let me try this one. So basically we link the transaction hash with the block explorer as of right now, but this will soon be removed as all the information that you have in the block explorer will also be available at Sumer. So yeah, so this is a little bit about the platform and I'm going to do a little live demo. We have this frontend that is basically the frontend of Aave. It's a fork of the official frontend. And what we're going to do is basically it's the same frontend and we integrated Sumer with just two lines of code. Like a little how we integrate Sumer. It's basically with these two lines of code. Like you would just have to import the SDK and then you just initialize the SDK, the Sumer SDK, and it just starts working. So it's completely frictionless integration for the developer. In this case, at the Aave frontend, it would be like integrated right in the main page. So yeah, now we're going to do real stuff. So we're going to start by switching the network back to Sepolia. Okay. And we're going to start by signing a simple transaction where we would supply some Ethereum.

So yeah, we would sign the transaction. I hope the network doesn't get too busy right now otherwise we're going to be waiting for a long time for transactions to get confirmed. So yeah, we sign the transaction and we can see that transaction is pending. We have one more new transaction in Sepolia that it's pending with the already assigned hash. We can see here that the transaction is being validated. Okay, so go back to the frontend. Okay, so the transaction got confirmed. We're going to refresh. And now we see that the transaction got successful and all the data got completed successfully according to what was done. And you can see that we can see the value transferred. And if we go up here you can see that the transaction value got updated and we transferred about 100 dollars in ether. Yeah. So now we're going to do another supply, but in this case we're going to supply 10 DAI. But in this case the user was about to supply some DAI and suddenly it figures out that he doesn't like what he sees here. So basically he rejects the transaction. Okay? So if we go back here in non-processed transactions, you will see that for example we just received an internal error, based in our time at 17:44. And basically it says that there was a message that was requested to be signed and the user did not sign it.

This is where Sumer gives up a lot of value because this type of data would get lost in the void otherwise with existing Web2 tools, analytics tools. So we capture that and you get to see what pain points the users are facing that you don't get to see with other tools. So now we're going to see another error. And in this case let's see the user signs this message. Oh, wait let me refresh because Aave has a problem here. They have a little bug. And if you reject the message and you sign it again it fails. So yeah, it's a little bit slow... so we connect to browser wallet... sorry about this delay. Yeah. Okay, so now the user was about to supply 10 DAI. It signs the first message, but when it's about to sign the transaction, suddenly he sees... let's see... the user sees that for example the gas prices are too high so he decides to reject the transaction. He doesn't want to pay that much to supply this. So if we refresh here we will say that that there's been another error, and this same user, in this case just denied the transaction. And we can see that it's from the same user. So yeah. So basically we provide observability on that.

Also if we change network for example now we went to for example Polygon... here it is... it's really slow today I don't know why. We're going to supply some USDC. Gonna approve it. Supply. And now what we'll see is basically that's one of the other value propositions that we wanted to show you is that all transactions will get aggregated under the same platform. So for example if as Aave you have different contracts in different networks, you don't need to go around with different block explorers because as you can see all transactions come to the same platform. So basically everything gets aggregated in the same place. We also wanted to show you like our here well as I mentioned before we developed a native integration with Mixpanel for example and Grafana and we also working into some in the future with Datadog and Sentry because they're widely used analytics tools.

So basically what we created here is a funnel of the user in this case trying to supply some assets in the Aave. And you may say okay but I can do this in Mixpanel. Yeah that's true but Mixpanel can monitor these three first events because they're based in Web2 events like they're basically clicks on different buttons. But this last event like if the transaction did succeed in the blockchain or not you wouldn't get to observe that. So this is where the Sumer SDK will come in. So basically we allow you to integrate the same way as Mixpanel will do, super easy to set up these three events plus the last event that will be completely automatically aggregated here with you having to do nothing. So basically we would be observing the blockchain for you. Also well also wanted to mention we have a team's feature, a classic team feature where you can create your own team, you can give different permissions to the users, and you can aggregate users basically with mail and the user will receive a link where he can join your group and he could see like all the dashboards that you have here. And well and on top of that I wanted to also well on top of that we will be building like different dashboards from all like this. This is a little example that we have right now because this is just a work in progress and yeah we'll develop more metrics on top of this.

And finally well just to mention that we also can integrate with backend. So yeah, here due to time constraints I won't execute this but yeah basically you just initialize Sumer like it's a basic TypeScript script. And for example you could create a contract the same way as you would do that in Ethers.js. You could create it with Sumer contract and you can operate it the same way. So everything will get captured and you could also create monitoring for different errors and events. And yeah and mainly that would be like the demonstration that I wanted to show you because we wanted to also do some Q&A. So yeah, mainly that's been the short demonstration that we wanted to give you guys.

Excellent. Yeah that was awesome man. Thank you so much for sharing that. Gang, if you have any questions for either Uri or Mario, please post them in the comments. I'll ask on your behalf. But in the meantime, I have a couple questions of my own. So in the case where you were demonstrating the user rejecting the transaction, in the data that you supply in the table, did it have like the estimated gas cost at that point in time and any other metrics around that?

Yeah. We're currently capturing just the transaction data. For example, we would see like the gas usage, like the gas price at the moment, we'll get all that data. And it's currently not integrated... like this we are already capturing. But what it's not already integrated but we want to do it in the future is like to sync that with a, for example, a gas prediction API. And basically yeah to correlate that so you can see how well the correlation work, like how well the prediction works, and if you're using the correct API or maybe should change to another prediction algorithm.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. The more data you can pull out and have for the user to see like what led to them rejecting the transaction or just whatever, right? The better. Also, we're going to do the same thing but with RPC benchmarking.

So you can you will be able to benchmark how the latency you have with your RPC service and you can see like different users around the world how they how their RPC communication is behaving with them. And maybe how like you could changing to another provider would benefit you. Yeah.

That would be great to have that all in a centralized place so you don't have to go to one dashboard and another if you're using multiple RPCs, which you have to do in a lot of the time. And I guess on top of that, when there are abnormalities in the trends, do you envision having some sort of alerting mechanism in place or do you think that you want to hand that off to like the Datadogs and the Grafanas of the world?

Well actually we have a alert systems already built on top of errors, but now we are focusing on transaction on all the data related. It we need to to just make a couple of of adjust and refactor and adapt to transactions and transaction data related. But definitely we want to to have some alerting systems and maybe notify via email or Twitter or something like that. But definitely it makes a lot of sense.

Gotcha. Yeah, totally. And when I think I might have missed at the start but are you tying a person's wallet to the information that is showing up in the dashboard or can a person sign up without connecting their wallet and say point to a smart contract address? Any arbitrary smart contract address and have the metrics pulled on that?

So an example would be say I create a NFT smart contract, right? And I want to build a dashboard around the to observe the metrics around how my smart contract is behaving. Can I set something up where I point to the smart contract address instead of a wallet address? Or maybe is that like a future iteration you guys are planning?

I think it makes sense in the future maybe. Now we are just really focused on the client side and hearing all the data that is is coming from the client to the node. And but that could be great, that could be great. That could be a great idea. Thanks for mentioning.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I guess kind on that same topic, can you guys speak a little bit on what your future roadmap is? Like after you're done flushing out the client side of things where do you envision Sumer going on after that?

Yeah, so we basically right now we're focusing on building all the insights, well creating all the value with all the raw data that we're extracting. Next week we'll rolling out two new features basically we developed a like a contract explorer like kind of like the one that Etherscan has but user friendly like the user experience is way way better. And it's directly connected with Sumer so basically you can try out your new contracts and how would behave with Sumer and so you don't need to integrate Sumer before you can try Sumer without needing to integrate it first. And also we'll release capturing all the contract function and contract argument so you can see like the like you can get more detail on what the transaction has where was the target of the transaction. And for the future roadmap we also well focused on building these metrics for DeFi and for DAOs as well, but mainly DeFi, and to get create all this value.

And as well as tagging service and alerting service. So basically you can create like under these conditions I would like to get notified or I would like to put this tag so I can easily structure all the data I have and get more knowledge and insights. I don't know if Mario would like to add something.

Yeah sure. And about the vision we as our goal is to build a tool that let dApp owners and dApp managers to have everything in one place. So you don't have to jump in in one explorer to another explorer and maybe understand what are your clients doing and what are you using doing. Yeah that would be our goal to build something useful for dApp owners and dApp managers.

Excellent. Love to hear it and looking forward to Sumer getting continuously iterated on. Looks very promising. At least from what you guys showed today, so I can't wait to see future iterations of it. And I guess if people are interested in potentially helping out build out Sumer, are there any current job postings or any way for people to get involved at this point in time?

Well as of right now we're raising our next round. So yeah it depends on the financials, but as of right now I don't think so. Like we don't have any open job offers. But yeah but maybe soon yeah we'll definitely have some I think more in it comes to data science and creating value with all this data and managing data and structuring you know databases and yeah maybe that.

Yeah and on top of that if someone is curious and want to chat about how Sumer works under the hood I would love to, we would love to. Our tech team is open to communicate with any devs who just want to try a new stuff and play around with Sumer.

Excellent. And I guess follow up to that is how can people reach reach out to you over Discord, Twitter? What's the best way to reach out?

We have LinkedIn and Twitter as well as a Telegram group that we I think we was shared in the post that you made. And yeah and basically any of that like we response like in no time. We're always watching like we always ready for new messages so yeah all these three channels are good for communicating with us.

Excellent. And yes, like Uri mentioned, we'll have all that information in the YouTube description as well as in the supplementary blog post that will come out later today or tomorrow. But with that unfortunately, we are closing out at time here. Thank you so much Mario and Uri for coming on. I really appreciate you guys taking the time out of your ETHBarcelona time to come here and show Sumer to the Developer DAO community. And like I mentioned really looking forward to seeing the future iterations of it.

Yeah, thank you Narb and it's great the work you do. And just wanted to say that it's been a little bit we're sorry about the conditions and the noise and it's a little bit about it's been a little bit difficult to do this, we wanted to do it in a better way, but it is what it is so yeah.

Yeah my pleasure. It came out perfect actually. Everyone mentioned there's everyone mentioned that they were able to to listen so I think it that worked out fine.

So thank you very much Narb for make it this space possible as mentioned before. You're doing a great job in the Developer DAO and yeah.

My pleasure gang. Appreciate it. And before everybody leaves, I do want to share the QR code here for you all to claim your Mint Kudas for being attendees today. So Uri and Mario I have another link for you that I'll share after the fact, but if you were an attendee today at the DevNTell, what you will want to do is scan this QR code and you'll land on the Mint Kudas web page and you can claim your Kudas for being an attendee today. So you will have up to the top of the hour, so one hour from starting from now to claim the the Kudas. So get on that. And with that, just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend, and we will see you back here next week. All right all.

Thank you Narb! See you!

See you gang! Bye!