Chainspy
Blockchain usage and social media statistics
Hello IH!
After a mockup was drawn up by our lovely designer we've completed the 1st version of our new non-user front-end. Go check it out -> https://chainspy.net
It's all a bit bland at the moment as we are still focusing on the MVP of the dashboard which is the meat of our business.
That said my co-founder and I are taking a 2 week break from the project to recharge our batteries. We've been working 4 hours every week since December on the project, so it's good to take a step back and enjoy our progress so far.
Creating a data-serving subscription as a service (SaaS) means we need to crunch a lot of numbers. In our case at chainspy.net, this means summarising data, like number of transactions, volume and distribution of wealth on multiple blockchains like bitcoin every 10 minutes. This is so users of our service can see what people are using blockchains for and how they are performing usage-wise historically and in real-time.
We decided to use Celery to automate all of this for us. No, not the vegetable, but the Python (programming language) library. It lets us schedule these business-critical tasks whenever we please. Because they are automated, it cuts our workload from something that is pretty much impossible to something that is quite easy to maintain. I think this is critical for a startup, as it means we can move fast and add more features for our users.
If you're also trying to automate part of your business, I recommend checking out https://realpython.com/asynchronous-tasks-with-django-and-celery/ for a good write up on the subject. We now have a critical part of our product automated and are well on our way to getting our first beta!
What other tools do you use to automate part of your business?
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Just out of curiosity, have you looked into the usual automation tools like make/integromat, n8n or even Zapier before setting up your system with celery? Would that have been possible and/or faster ?
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Hey ToPe, Chainspy Co-founder here.
Truth be told, we did not look at online alternatives for this as it's just our internal tooling.
We do plan to have alert features in the future, which would integrate nicely with an online integration tool like Zapier however, so the user can do something E.g. Send an email when Bitcoin mining activity reaches below a threshhold.
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I use Rollideo to automate video creation.
Recently Jake has started working on the metric calculations based off of the blockchain data we scraped in the last post.
We also started working with a wonderful designer who has given us a great new landing page that JB will soon work to implement.
JB also is very close the finishing the Blockchain Explorer for Dogecoin. This is relatively easy as Dogecoin is actually based on Bitcoin, and therefore I can inherit the Bitcoin explorer's code and override methods as needed.
Overall feeling is good and every week we are making progress towards a Beta!
This is the first step in being able to run analysis on the blockchain.
JB wrote an implementation in C# .Net with Entity Framework and Postgres DB, that runs along the blockchain using Nownodes.io to grab the data.
This milestone marks the day we started syncing the explorer with the blockchain. At its current rate, we expect it to take 24hrs to complete, pulling in 700GBs of data, just for Bitcoin!
We conceptualized Chainspy in December 2021. During the christmas break, we worked to explore how we would architect our application.
Analytics on the blockchain is no easy feat, so planning ahead like this has given us a stable runway to expand upon, free of technical debt.
2 Comments
Just had a look. Really cool idea.
TBH, I didn't really understand what you were offering initially. I had to spend about 5 minutes navigating your site and only understood it when looking at the "metrics" section.
I think since there are so many services helping to give insight into the "user's activity", I was not understanding that your service is to identify the macro trends of the coin's ecosystem.
Just some feedback on the initial copy on the front page to help your tweaks.
BTC and Doge alone aren't really compelling for me to explore, but I might poke around a bit to see what you can do with other chains/coins. Perhaps some more popular ERC20 tokens?
Hey Zeath!
Thanks for the roast!
We definitely plan to add more coins in the future. We're still pre-MVP and that's why our offerings are so limited currently.
I'll see what I can do add more clarity on our services.