What we do
TONalytica is a powerful tool for blockchain research, complete with all the tools you need to discover, explore, and visualize vast amounts of blockchain data.
TONalytica is your key to answering questions like:
How the data flows
Public blockchains are open and free, so getting data from them shouldn’t be that hard right?
Yes and no.
Compared to getting siloed data from traditional businesses to, say, analyze how international shipping speeds affect consumer demand for orange juice in Oceania…
Yes viewing and analyzing blockchain data is “easier.”
But there’s a lot going on under TONalytica’s proverbial hood. Let’s pop it open and take a look to better understand how state changes on a public blockchain like TON turn into data you query to build charts and graphs.
1. A chain adds a block
While the technical details vary, at the core of every blockchain a set of transactions is proposed, agreed upon, then appended to the end of a chain of blocks containing transactions previously agreed upon.
There are a variety of consensus mechanisms, and methods of determining which block is the next block, but once consensus is reached information about the latest block is broadcasted across the blockchain’s network to let its participants (“Nodes”) know about this new block and add it to their records.
Check out this awesome Blockchain 101 demo for more details about how blockchains work!
2. Node providers transmit data to TONalytica
To receive this “new block created” message, someone has to run a blockchain node - a computer running “client” software that connects them to a blockchain’s network, allows them to send information back and forth between other nodes, and in some cases validate transactions and store data.
With a bit of technical know-how, anyone can run a node - that’s a big part of what makes a blockchain public!
Because almost anyone can run a node, there’s a lot of transparency in the system to keep participants honest.
This transparency also makes it possible to leverage the hive mind by allowing data analysts to access a complete picture of “what’s happening” and do any sort of analysis they want.
No struggle to access raw data is required.
To help projects like TONalytica operate at scale, node providers build and operate node infrastructure that captures blockchain data and makes it accessible to us via an Application Programming Interface (API).
In this way, we can focus on making the best possible data-accessibility experience while the node providers can focus on running nodes as efficiently as possible.
3. TONalytica adds raw data to SQL tables
Our node providers send blockchain transaction data to us as hashed bytecode.
The TONalytica Data Engine takes this bytecode and extracts it into a set of Tables we call “Raw Data.”
This Raw Data can also take a lot more work to manipulate into interesting insights, which is why TONalytica decodes this data.
4. TONalytica decodes raw data
Data in this form has some fairly limited data analysis use cases.
To transform this data into something a lot more usable, we submit smart contracts for decoding here.
We then create Decoded Tables that are a lot easier to do analysis with.
5. Community with TONalytics makes magic
With the help of our amazing community, TONalytica goes a step beyond just decoding data with custom tables.
These custom tables, built and maintained by TONalytica and our community, make it easy to aggregate lots of data with as little friction as possible.
For example one of the most popular, jettons.market_data, makes it easy to explore and transform Jetton's trading data across blockchain without having to compile trades from DEXes or CEXes, etc yourself.
From all this data, the Community builds Queries using SQL, a widely-used language for storing, manipulating, and retrieving data in databases.
From these Queries, they build the Visualizations and Dashboards we all know and love!
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