Flipside Crypto with Angela Minster

Angela Minster

Data scientist is kind of a new term. So new that if data scientists had existed when I went to college, I would've tried to major in data science, but I actually majored in math. And then in grad school statistics. So part of the root of data science is doing things predictive modeling or statistical inference, that kind of stuff. But to me, it also encompasses anyone that can take raw data and turn it into something really useful. They know how to set it up, sometimes clean it, most of the time clean it, do the analysis, and come up with a final product, whether that's descriptive, like a graph, or predictive, like, a machine learning model. So it's a pretty vague term.

For me, I have been here at Flipside for over three years, three and a half, I think, and the company's been around for about four years. I have done all kinds of things the most menial sorting through Excel lists to building those predictive models, to helping figure out how to build certain tables, figuring out the right schema. I've run the gamut, anything data analysis.

Paul

So how does all this work that you do, and the other teams at Flipside, how does that all come together to create some interesting things that people right now can go look at?

Angela Minster

Maybe I'll tell a quick history of Flipside and how we got to where we are, because I think that's illuminating. I didn't know anything about crypto when I started in 2018, I was not a crypto native, at that point, I guess we can say I am now. Just a friend of mine from grad school is one of the co-founders Eric Stone. And he was like, "Come work at the company I'm starting." And I was like, "Okay, what's crypto." I honestly didn't even know what Ethereum was. I'll just say that, I'll be totally honest. And when we started, our only public... because we had no public products at the time, but we created this rating system to try to rate different tokens, it was called FCAS.

And the idea behind it was there's more to a token than its price and market cap and volatility. There's a lot of other metrics, like, are people actually using it on the chain? Or is it just sending back and forth to centralized exchanges? Because in 2018 that was 50% of every chain was just back and forth to finance, basically, on every chain. And so we started digging into that. FS stuck around for a while, then we kind of got into this traditional business analytics model. We were selling protocols, dashboards, and trying to do retention metrics, and a variety of things that, looking back, they were not very crypto. Because the ethos of crypto is open data, community, collaboration and the ability to do anything you can code up. That's kind of how crypto is.

And that was not what we were. So a little over a year ago, we made a pretty major change where we said, "We're going to open up all of our data," because at that point you couldn't just get anything you wanted from our data for free. And there was certainly no way to access our data as a member of the public. So we built this frontend where you can query all of our data and you can build dashboards. And we opened it up completely for free.

And now the way our business model works is that we collaborate with different crypto protocols, like, SushiSwap, Terra, there's a bunch, Algorand, THORChain. And they either give us a grant, or they allocate us some funds that we don't actually get to keep, but we stake it and keep some of the revenue. And we use most of that to send the money back out into the community to get people more engaged with those protocols themselves through using our data.

Paul

Right. Okay.

Angela Minster

And that's in the form of bounty.

Paul

So sort of like a feedback loop.

Angela Minster

Yes. Yes.

Paul

The orchestration between the end users and the data and Flipside and the protocols, because end users enrich the protocols, who enrich Flipside, who enrich the users.

Angela Minster

Correct.

Paul

Right?

Angela Minster

Yeah.

Paul

Okay.

Angela Minster

So the whole time we've had the goal of being a company that uses blockchain data to make blockchain protocols, companies, whatever you want to call them and their users better, in whatever way we can contribute to that. But since last year we've had this total shift to really, in my opinion, embodying the ethos of crypto, where we're giving this away for free and we're educating people. We're helping people do their own research. We're giving or connecting these protocols with their community directly, so that analysis can be done, people can be introduced to their protocols. It's just this really wide open world. And it's so much more people focused, which is-

Paul

This really sounds you can take that to the unknown. I mean, this is uncharted territory, right?

Angela Minster

Dude, yes.

Paul

I'd love to talk about the uncharted aspect of this a little bit. You're selling, let's see, you talked about three different phases of the company. I want to talk about phase two here, where it's, "We're making dashboards, we're selling it to companies." Why was that a thing? If I'm running a plumbing supply company and I'm selling pumps, I know how many pumps I'm selling. I know who I'm selling them to. I know all of that. I think this kind of is a great opportunity for us to talk about the unwieldy nature of the data that powers are L1 chains. And why did Flipside step in there? Why was that a thing?

Angela Minster

Because we were making that rating for as many tokens and coins as we could, we had-

Paul

By rating, you mean dashboard, right?

Angela Minster

No, no, no. The FCAS rating.

Paul

Oh, the FCAS, gotcha.

Angela Minster

Back in phase one, because we were doing that, we had so much data, and the really unwieldy thing about blockchain is that it's very expensive to run a node, or even to have enough memory that you can host and regularly update an entire blockchain.

Paul

And node, when you say node, you mean-

Angela Minster

Oh, sorry.

Paul

... like a layer 1 entity in the network. If you run a node, you're running a box that is running the Ethereum thingy that-

Angela Minster

Yeah. I think of it as, if you want to think about a blockchain as a special type of database, which I do. And if someone doesn't that terminology, I-

Paul

No, that's perfectly-

Angela Minster

... just mean it as a metaphor. I think of it as a specialty database, and that running a node basically means you are keeping a copy of that database that is plugged in to all of the other copies and getting updated regularly. Regularly, meaning like once every three seconds.

Paul

So that's intensive stuff, right?

Angela Minster

Yeah. I don't know how to do that. I couldn't do that for myself. Thankfully we have people in our company who can do that, but I don't know how to do that. I know how to query the data once it's set up, but-

Paul

I can run a Minecraft server does that count?

Angela Minster

It comes through as JSON, just long, long, long JSON. And the JSON is full of addresses, functions that have been translated into hashes, so just like hexadecimal strings, and you don't necessarily know what they're for, unless you can connect it with other pieces of outside data, or if you have a way to label different addresses. So even something as simple as saying, "I want to know in the last 20 days or 30 days, how many addresses sent funds to Binance?" It sounds pretty simple. It's just a transfer of a token on a chain. In my opinion, it's wildly complicated for the average person to be able to answer a question that without having a source of that data already ready for them to tap into.

Paul

Not only do you need the source, but I'm assuming, if you get this JSON, there's a bunch of crap in there, and you're going to need a lot of computing power and time and energy and thought put into, how do I pull out those meaningful pieces of information? So that then somebody yourself can then do all the magic to make human interpretable business intelligence out of that. So this is kind of where the FCAS kind of stepped in, that's why it was a thing, because this is unwieldy. It takes a lot. And so you guys felt that way, right?

Angela Minster

Right. Yeah. And so back to your question of a plumber, yeah, plumber literally knows how many plumb bots he sold, no plumbing pipes. I don't know what plumbers do.

Paul

Or E-commerce, just random [inaudible 00:10:21]-

Angela Minster

Yeah. Whatever it is, you know how many you do, because it comes from you. But if you're running a blockchain protocol, you write up a contract, you launch the contract, but you're not necessarily collecting data on every single block. I've noticed that with these different protocols, some of them have certain metrics that they're able to keep track of, and especially very specific to their protocol. But then if they wanted to answer a question like, "Okay, I'm a decentralized exchange. I know I have 600 swaps this week or whatever, but how many swaps do other decentralized exchanges have? How do I compare my volume, my business to other ones?" Then they wouldn't be able to access that.

Or, like, "People who engage with my decentralized exchange, what else do they do on this chain?" They couldn't answer questions that. So that's the kind of stuff we started building, which is definitely useful. But the other thing about crypto is that it's brand new, in the sense of in the span of all time, it feels very old at this point. But it's brand new and things like what is an important metric for a decentralized exchange or an NFT or anything? They're not fully answered, so we're still exploring what it even means to have important KPIs that you're measuring for your protocol or your business.

I will say, I want to say that in crypto, we avoid sounding traditional business people. So even though something might be a business, we won't call it that, we'll call it a protocol.

Paul

That's not kosher, you can't call it a business.

Angela Minster

Yeah. It's not a business. Ew, that's what your dad does for a living. We don't do that. We're so much cooler.

Paul

So I mean, this data is useful for protocols, for businesses, even if they don't want to call themselves businesses. But what I was really excited, I think this frames, everything really well, and I was really excited to talk about how viewers today can take advantage of what seems really rich business intelligence data that you guys might have been giving to a protocol or something. Because I can go to Flipside's website and query your data for free directly. And if I want to know how many NFTs I have or something, that's something that I could approach with your platform. Correct?

Angela Minster

Yeah. I think, in crypto we say, DYOR, which is do your own research. So if you wanted to invest in stocks, there's a ton of information out there about how stocks have performed over time, what the yield is. I mean, there's actually laws and regulations about who can publish it. Bloomberg couldn't publish incorrect information about stock trading without getting sued, probably. You can kind of trust most of what you read. Well, you should never trust most of what you read. But things have been verified, vetted, if they're not, someone's going to fix it pretty quickly. In crypto, absolutely none of that's true.

So you might have heard of something yield farming in DeFi where you can get a 100 or 200% interest, which is insane. Even compared to regular banking or even the stock market, 20% interest is kind of insane. But how do you know things how volatile is that rate? How long has that rate been that way? For other similar protocols or we call them pools that had a rate that high, how long did it last? How many of those kind of went under and people lost all their money? These are really big questions and they require historical data. And there's a lot of sites that will tell you, "Today, these are the interest rates provided by these different places that you can put your money," but it's very hard to get historical data or very specific questions answered without having a source of data like our data.

Paul

Gotcha. Okay. So we're coming full circle here. So your data, me as a consumer or a crypto aficionado, I can look into and start to inspect this unwieldy, difficult to download and index data about a bunch of different chains on my own volition for free, right?

Angela Minster

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Paul

Okay. Awesome. So I think we will actually hop into taking a look at this live. If you're listening to the podcast, no worries, we're going to be talking through a lot of what we're doing and it's going to be very minimal. So just a few commands here and there and talking about querying some data live on screen. Another interesting thing I want to mention, before we hop into you showing us some stuff, Angela, is we get questions sometimes, like, how do I get into Web3? How do I get into crypto?

And I think this is one of those tools out there, from what I've seen, that is really well-suited for people trying to take that path of self-making, getting into the industry. Because, as you mentioned, crypto is about what can I build? How fast can I build it? And who can use it? And if you're somebody that can insert yourself in those shoes and maybe help give data reports for another crypto organization or build very interesting blog or even start to learn, what are contracts? What are events in contracts? Just playing with data, it's an incredible place to start. It's a level that a lot of people don't even get to sometimes in the crypto world. So if you're interested in getting into it, this is a really cool demoing place, you can get your feet wet right away. Awesome.

Angela Minster

Yeah. Thank you.

Paul

Let's jump into it. Oh, thanks. So Angela's just sharing your screen right here. So we're on app.flipsidecrypto.com.

Angela Minster

Anyone can come here, create an account, and sign in. I already have an account. This is my, I call it my burner account, because on my Flipside account, I can see things that the public can't, but I call this my burner account. So this is my burner account, and this is exactly what you would see if you created an account.

Paul

So it's kind a dashboard, and there's a bunch of folders. So, I mean, it just kind of looks a File Explorer. So in each of these folders, are there queries that you're saving on old blockchain data?

Angela Minster

Yeah. Did you say old blockchain data?

Paul

Or I should say historical-

Angela Minster

Yeah.

Paul

... blockchain data.

Angela Minster

I tend to ignore this page, but there's a ton of queries that you can look through. But I think a lot of these are my queries that I made. My user name is Cool Angela. And a lot of them are blank, like, untitled, untitled, untitled-

Paul

Gotcha.

Angela Minster

... because I run fast and easy with the untitled in every application I use. It's dangerous. But you can make a query by just doing new query.

Paul

So in the upper right, we're clicking on, new. So we're making a new query.

Angela Minster

New query, yes.

Paul

So is this querying an SQL database or there's just-

Angela Minster

Yeah.

Paul

Okay. It is, gotcha.

Angela Minster

This is our own handmade editor. So we didn't use another company's editor. It was written from scratch, but it is just your regular SQL. So if you are just getting into SQL, you can take, I would say, any SQL tutorial and apply what you learn to query through this interface. For people who are more technical, the backend is a Snowflake database. So there are certain fun things that you can do in Snowflake that you can't do in other databases. But you really don't need to know that it's Snowflake just to run a query. So this is the query editor. The basics are that you have a schema dropdown and then whatever schema is selected, you have a bunch of tables inside.

So in a database you have a database as the top umbrella structure. Within databases, you have schemas, and schemas are collections of tables and tables is where all the juicy data is. And a table is just like, if you are familiar with Excel or any spreadsheet, I always just visualize a table as being a spreadsheet. And you just need to use SQL as the language to tell the database engine what to pick out and give you from that spreadsheet.

Paul

Okay. Awesome. So to summarize, we have the database, then schema. So are schema kind of mapped to protocols, so Ethereum, Algorand?

Angela Minster

Yeah. And we actually have some videos on YouTube about this on our Flipside channel that walk you through every single schema. But basically, they're divided into two types of schema. Some are blockchain wide schema that will cover, of a certain type of thing that can happen on a blockchain, all of them for the whole blockchain will be in that schema.

Paul

Oh, so-

Angela Minster

Other ones are more specific. For example, Ethereum is a blockchain you probably heard of, this would have every Ethereum transfer or the balance for every address on Ethereum. Polygon, Solana, Terra, THORChain, those are all complete blockchains. And then you have other schemas like, Terraswap. Terraswap is a decentralized exchange on Terra, so the Terraswap schema is just going to have tables that are specific to things you can do on Terraswap. So basically a subset of Terra. And Aave is on Ethereum, so the Aave schema is going to have a subset of Ethereum specific to the protocol Aave, and the things that you can do on Aave

Paul

Right on. Okay. So it's kind of like there are blockchain levels things, there's cross blockchain levels, and then there's some sublevel schemes that we can poke through. And each one of those has a certain number of tables. So can we hop into a table and just look at some data and see what a query looks like?

Angela Minster

Yeah.

Paul

Awesome. It sounds this data can get really detailed too. If I can get all Ethereum transfers, I could figure out where NFTs are going. Oh, yeah. I see a table there, NFT events, that's cool. Okay.

Angela Minster

Yeah. This is a table of... And you can preview it, so it'll show you which columns are available. Anything Ethereum or Polygon or even Terra, the larger chains, there's billions of records. So sometimes it can be slow to query, if you're not executing a really specific query.

Paul

I'm not sure if you had a query in mind that you wanted to show is there, if you didn't, maybe we could search up a fun NFT or something.

Angela Minster

Do you have one in mind?

Paul

No. No, I don't. I remember, one time I checked this out, I did a query for a Snoop Dogg NFT to see how many times it was transferred, which was kind of cool. But if-

Angela Minster

Yeah. We could talk NFTs. We could talk something more like investing research.

Paul

Yeah, sure. Why don't we get the history of, I'm not sure how difficult this would be, because I haven't used it this, but I'm thinking something along the lines of what you mentioned earlier, what is the yield farm rate of a certain pool?

Angela Minster

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's really too long to do for the podcast.

Paul

Okay. Gotcha.

Angela Minster

But let's talk about what a liquidity pool even is, right?. Okay. So-

Paul

Sure.

Angela Minster

... what is a decentralized exchange? This is a super common thing on blockchains. So let's say that I have a token called, oh, what token do I have? Well, let's just say I have Ethereum or I have Ether. I have ETH, I have some ETH, but I want to exchange it for some new token called Cool New Token. So I have ETH but I want to have Cool New Token. Sometimes you can do that trade on a centralized exchange, but then you have to give up custody of your money. You have to put it into the exchange. Similar how, if you have $20 in your hand and you want to put it in the bank, you no longer have custody of the $20. Technically, the bank has your $20. So in crypto, your funds are only yours if they're in your wallet.

So if they're in an exchange, you don't fully have control over them. They could disappear, if someone hacked the exchange, then you don't have custody.

Paul

Got it.

Angela Minster

So a decentralized exchange basically takes all of the centralization, meaning someone else having custody of your money, someone else having any control over what trades are happening and makes it decentralized. It's also decentralized, because the mechanism by which trades are possible is done in a decentralized fashion. So what does that mean? So say I'm on a centralized exchange, and I want to exchange ETH for Cool New Token. Either someone else has to be ready to sell their Cool New Token for ETH or there needs to be a pile of Cool New Token that I can trade from. Does that make sense?

Paul

Yeah. So there needs to be a preexisting supply ready to go.

Angela Minster

Exactly. Yeah. So a pool-

Paul

Pool of-

Angela Minster

... is what they call it in a decentralized exchange, a pool of the token waiting for you. So the way it works in a decentralized exchange is that for anyone who wants to trade ETH for Cool Token or Cool Token for ETH, there's a pool that holds ETH and Cool Token, and people trade in and out of that pool to do their trading. So in a centralized exchange, Binance just owns that giant stack of ETH and Cool Token, but in a decentralized exchange, many, many, many people own small pieces of that pool. And they do that by already having both ETH and Cool Token. And then they lock it up in the pool to enable trading for other people. Now this is not out of the goodness of their own heart. They earn the trading fees. So centralized exchange... What's that?

Paul

Like a bank fee, right? Or a trade.

Angela Minster

It's just a fee to trade. It's a fee for the privilege of trading. On a centralized exchange, they also charge you a fee for trading, although they don't really make it that obvious that's what's happening. Even on Coinbase, you might see like, oh, a little Coinbase fee for trading one token for the other. But that goes right into Coinbase's pockets or Binance's pockets, or whoever's doing it. In the decentralized exchange, the fees go to the people who lock their money up in a pool to make trading possible, which I think is-

Paul

That's wild that-

Angela Minster

... it's incredible.

Paul

It's wild that that can happen in an organized fashion. I mean, I'm looking at your screen right here. We didn't really run a query, but we have-

Angela Minster

No, we didn't.

Paul

... the event... That's fine. So we have event platform OpenSea. I recognize OpenSea, that's a Web3 trading for NFTs, right?

Angela Minster

Yeah.

Paul

Transaction ID, block timestamp. I mean, this is really detailed information. So if something a pool that we're talking about, if I wanted to go trade on a pool, could I hop in here and check out how legit the pool is?

Angela Minster

Mm-hmm.

Paul

Is that what this can do?

Angela Minster

Yes.

Paul

Awesome. Okay.

Angela Minster

Right. So you have your decentralized exchange. So the two components are that people are adding and subtracting liquidity and people are doing swaps. So adding and subtracting liquidity means I'm locking up my money or I'm unlocking it and taking it back out of the pool. And then swapping, which is people trading one token for the other. So, yeah, this is every DEX swap on Ethereum in certain decentralized exchanges.

Paul

And DEX, for anybody listening, is decentralized exchange. Is this cool sort of construct that we're talking about? And so we're looking at the DEX swaps table under the Ethereum schema right here. And there's information like if it's coming in, if it's coming out, the platform, so Uniswap, SushiSwap. Oh, yeah, I see direction right there, in and out. Right. Okay. Very cool. I mean, this is very highly valuable information. I mean, for me, if I was going to get into yield farming, I would want to know, what was the last six months of the yield? What happened? I don't want something that is advertising a 100%, because there's plenty out there. And then next month it's at one. So this is really good.

Angela Minster

You could do a simple, let's just say, I want to know-

Paul

Ooh, find something awesome.

Angela Minster

... how many swaps there have been in the last 30 days for a specific pool? So let's say I'm into this ARMOR-WETH pool. I'm going to copy the pool address.

Paul

WETH is just like Ethereum, right?

Angela Minster

Oh, yeah. Good one, good question. Ethereum-

Paul

You don't have to get into it, but it just-

Angela Minster

Yeah, it is the same. Think of it as analogous.

Paul

Gotcha. Okay. So we're doing select where... All right, yeah, this looks like SQL.

Angela Minster

So I want to pull only data for this one pool address, and I just copied it from right here.

Paul

Okay. So we're pulling from the ARMOR-WETH pool.

Angela Minster

Yeah. Let's say I want to know, how many transactions there have been in 30 days? That's the wrong language, count distinct, right?

Paul

Count distinct, hey. So we're looking at the query screen here on Flipside Crypto. So we're writing up a query to inspect a liquidity pool.

Angela Minster

Yeah. So let's just see how many swaps have happened in the last 30 days for this specific pool by counting up the number of transactions. Okay.

Paul

So select count distinct, transaction ID, where pool address is equal to the pool, and block timestamp is... Okay, so we're going to limit it by, after a certain date.

Angela Minster

Yeah.

Paul

Okay.

Angela Minster

And we're running. What? Oh, do you know what I did? I didn't say what table to pull from.

Paul

Oh, select count distinct from, okay, there we go.

Angela Minster

Yeah. And one note is that you need to specify the schema and then the table, or it won't know what schema to look in. I've done so many queries while people are watching and I've never gotten it right on the first try. So this pool in 30 days has only had 400 transactions, which is actually kind of low. So this is a pretty small pool.

Paul

Interesting,-

Angela Minster

So you would want to know, if you're investing in a pool, it's a balance that you have to strike between one that has a ton of transactions, aka, a ton of trading fees versus how many other people are invested in the pool. So that's the kind of thing you could investigate here, and to see not only how many are in it today, but how many have been in it over time? And if all of the pieces line up to make it a good investment.

And so you are asking how to get into crypto. It is not that easy. I think there's a pretty steep learning curve. And for anything with a steep learning curve, I think the number one thing that you need is to actually like it. I think it would be really hard to force yourself to care about crypto. I used to work at a bank and I had to care about what consumer deposit rates were, and it wasn't that hard. It's a pretty simple, okay, one percent on savings, next? It's not that complicated. This stuff is complicated. So you have to have a lot of intellectual curiosity and some passion for what it is you're getting into. And you have to do a ton of reading and a ton of investigating. In order to learn how to query this data, I would say, try some of our bounties because they really walk you through how to do-

Paul

What's a bounty?

Angela Minster

Oh, I thought I mentioned that already. Yeah. Our bounties, it's our whole thing these days. I want the right website.

Paul

Oh, this is what we were talking about at the beginning.

Angela Minster

Oh, here we are.

Paul

The final form of Flipside, where we're empowering users.

Angela Minster

Exactly.

Paul

Okay. Gotcha.

Angela Minster

If you check out our main website, flipsidecrypto.xyz, you can sign up to do bounties. Which means that you use our query engine that I just showed you to answer questions about different crypto protocols, and you get paid.

Paul

You get paid, real money.

Angela Minster

With real money, yeah. Well, if you think that crypto tokens are real money, then yes-

Paul

I mean, I have to tell you-

Angela Minster

... it's real money, which I do.

Paul

... I surely hope they are real money. I'd be very surprised-

Angela Minster

Yeah, me too.

Paul

... to wake up the next morning and learn my money was not real.

Angela Minster

Sometimes it doesn't feel real, and we call it fake internet money.

Paul

I mean, how real is the US dollar really? That's another question for everybody to think about.

Angela Minster

That's another podcast.

Paul

But, yeah, let's take a look at some of these bounties. So me as a user, I can come in and get access to this crazy data for free, for my own investing purposes, if I'm curious, but I can also answer these questions that you guys are posting for... And who's asking the questions? Are you guys just doing crazy market research? And you're trying to get people to answer questions? Or where are these questions come coming from?

Angela Minster

It's a combination of things we come up with on our own, but also, we have a lot of direction from the protocols that the questions are about, things that they want to know. For example, there's a protocol on Terra called Anchor, and they have this insane product where you can earn 20% interest on a stable coin, which means it's a coin whose value as pegged to the US dollar. So that's 20% interest on US dollar, that's 20% interest without underlying volatility-

Paul

This sounds incorrect. Wow.

Angela Minster

... in the tokens. So that's huge, but-

Paul

Insane.

Angela Minster

So everybody's using it, tons and tons of people are using it, to the extent that it's getting harder and harder to maintain that 20%. So they're investigating, what's going to happen if we reduce that 20%? Is everyone going to leave our project? At what level can we go to 18? 16? 14? Whatever it is. And they used our bounty program to help answer that question by getting a bunch of people in the community to come up with data-driven analysis of the history, and then to make projections and come up with ideas going forward.

Paul

Awesome. Okay. So it's like, you have the opportunity to really help a protocol do real stuff. That's wild. So I'm looking at your screen right here at the flipsidecrypto.xyz site. So we have beginner, I see beginner, and then some cards underneath that. So I'm guessing these are beginner question, bounty things-

Angela Minster

Exactly.

Paul

... that we can do. What levels are there? Is it beginner, medium, expert?

Angela Minster

Yeah. These are called education bounties, and these bounties are specifically created to actually pay you to learn crypto.

Paul

Wow. Okay, so if you want to educate yourself and get into it, you can get paid to do it right away with these inner one.

Angela Minster

Yeah.

Paul

Okay, wild.

Angela Minster

Exactly.

Paul

So what's an example one of these?

Angela Minster

And then...

Paul

Educational bounties, NFTs.

Angela Minster

Yeah. So you click here and you can see the actual-

Paul

So we clicked on a card, it has a link.

Angela Minster

... text.

Paul

So we're following the link and then...

Angela Minster

This is on Notion. We used to put all of our questions on Notion, but we've grown up a little bit since then, but we're still migrating-

Paul

Gotcha.

Angela Minster

... away from putting everything on Notion. I don't know why it's loading, it's pretty embarrassing.

Paul

So there are just some questions that we can kind of answer. Maybe we could take a look at what an answered question looks like.

Angela Minster

Yes. I have one.

Paul

Do you have one... Okay, awesome. So is it a beginner, medium, or difficult one?

Angela Minster

I think this is either beginner, medium. So the thing that makes a beginner is that it's a pretty straightforward question, but it is a little bit medium, because it's actually crossing three different blockchains. So Magic Eden OpenSea, and Random Earth are three different NFT marketplaces on three different chains, which are in order of the title, Solana, Ethereum, and Terra. And so the question is, compare these three marketplaces. So this is pretty powerful, because there's not too many places that I know of out on the internets, where you can query data from multiple blockchains, all in one query. So this dashboard just walks you through-

Paul

And what are they comparing? I think, I was just seeing at the top. So we're comparing.

Angela Minster

Yes, here we have the daily volume in us dollars on each of these platforms. But do notice that it is in log scale, so OpenSea volume is an order of magnitude higher than Magic Eden and Magic Eden is two orders of magnitude... which it means 10 X, two, 10 Xs over Random Earth.

Paul

And this graph, how... So somebody wrote this page, right? Somebody did a bounty.

Angela Minster

Yeah.

Paul

So is there a platform for me to make this interactive graph? How do I do that?

Angela Minster

This is the dashboard tool from the site I was showing you earlier.

Paul

You guys have a dashboard too as well. Okay.

Angela Minster

Yeah. So you could make a chart out of this single number, because we actually do have a chart that is just a single number. And then once you make the chart, using this new chart button, you can add it to a dashboard by creating a new dashboard. And it would look similar to this, just with nothing in it, except what you put in.

Paul

So you can use SQL, aggregate data, and then there's a button to spit that stuff out into various charts. So you can make these reports.

Angela Minster

Yeah.

Paul

Right on. Okay.

Angela Minster

And I want to throw in two more things about how good this query editor is, if I do say so of myself. Another thing you can do is, once you have the data, you can create an API. So you just click and generate an API. Of course, it's just one number, because that's all our query output, but you can use this API anywhere where you can read an API, so you can take it to another place to do analysis on the data. And that's again, still free. You can also have this update regularly. So I could have this update updating daily. And so then I could have an API somewhere else read in the number of transactions in the last 30 days for this pool. And it will update daily. And I mean, I would encourage you to come back to our site, but you never have to come back to the site to do another query, and you can get new data.

Paul

Because your API is running [inaudible 00:38:25]-

Angela Minster

Every three... Yeah, the API is running. And you can also download the data as a CSV.

Paul

So it's just like every way that it can be accessible, I can grab it CSV, API, making sure I can get paid for it.

Angela Minster

Yeah. And it's free, and we're committed to keeping it that way.

Paul

Do you know anybody that's done all this stuff, and broken into the field this way?

Angela Minster

Oh-

Paul

So many people have.

Angela Minster

... so many. So we have a super active Discord. I would definitely encourage anyone who's interested in becoming a part of the Flipside community to head over to Discord. And you can always get your questions answered there about any of our data, actually kind of any crypto thing. I think the only thing that people don't talk about as much is trading and price ideas, or getting investment advice. That's not the place for it. But any of this on chain data, you can talk about all day in Discord.

And I know quite a few people who have used Flipside Crypto to get a job in crypto, because when you do these bounties, first of all, you're earning a little income, which is amazing. Second you're learning, learning, learning, learning, and sometimes it's hard to force yourself to learn something if you don't have to. So once you have the motivation of answering a bounty question, you're going to, you're going to stick with it a little bit longer than if you're just trying to follow a tutorial or answer a random question that you came up with.

And then the other thing is that you have proof of the work that you've done. You have all of these dashboards that you've made that you can show off on Twitter, or you can put them in a portfolio to share with a potential employer. So a lot of people have gotten crypto related jobs from doing bounties.

Paul

That's wild. Good for people to know. So we are running up on time here, but I'd love to just wrap things up with asking you if there's any one or anything in particular you would to plug. We're certainly going to include some links underneath. So just some to reiterate some that we've mentioned, it's the app.flipsidecrypto.com and the flipsidecrypto.xyz site that we were going over. Any others? The Discord.

Angela Minster

I do want to say one... Discord, yeah, join our Discord. There's one more piece that I think is super cool, which is that all of the bounties that have been done in the past, wrong site, you can search them in the dashboards. So as you're coming up, learning how to do things, you can actually find a dashboard someone else did by searching and then find their query.

Paul

Oh, wild.

Angela Minster

And then replicate it for yourself. Or if you're like, 'I don't know how to find total value locked." You could search for TVL and see all the people that already did it. And-

Paul

I love that, because I'm a big coder by example. I love going to example docs, grabbing code that somebody else wrote, and then adapting it to mine. So this is cool. I can go look at a graph, download the SQL, and then change it. Very good to know. Awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Angela Minster

Yes. So if I had to push one aspect of Flipside, it's the community that we have. All of the people that share information, encourage each other along, answer questions, I think that's probably our biggest strength. I mean the data's... I guess it's the data, but I just love our community and how people are getting educated. They're learning, they're making friends. I feel a little cheesy, but I think that's the best part.

Paul

Hey, feeling cheesy is a good feeling. So why not feel it? You know? All right, Angela, thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure having you and talking about data. I love talking about data on this podcast. I always get excited when we have a guest to talk about the cool things that power our L1 and L2 chains.

Angela Minster

Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Paul

Yeah. Thanks. And we'll-

Angela Minster

All right.

Paul

... see you around.

Kate

Thanks for listening to PodRocket. You can find us @PodRocketpod on Twitter. And don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcast. Thanks.