Blockworks: Powering Institutional Crypto Research with Dune

You may know Blockworks as one of the top, most trusted crypto information platforms, but founded in 2018, Blockworks actually began as a crypto events company in New York, connecting traditional finance with the emerging blockchain world. When COVID halted in-person events, founders Mike and Jason pivoted, transforming Blockworks into a media and data powerhouse offering high-quality journalism, analysis, and insights for institutional crypto investors.

By 2022, Blockworks launched Blockworks Research, a dedicated division focused on deep, data-driven analysis of crypto assets and protocols. Since October 2025, Blockworks doubled down on their research and data offering, removing the news department entirely, which made their use of Dune even more impactful.

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“We were trying to build a research product. We wanted to improve the quality of our content offering, not reinvent another onchain data stack”
– Dan Smith, Head of Blockworks Research.

Blockworks faced a classic build-or-buy dilemma: Should they hire all in-house data engineers to run nodes, index chains, decode data, and more, or partner with a trusted data provider?

In the meantime, Blockworks also wanted to make sure whoever they choose to work with will stay here for the long run, so they don’t have to revamp their entire data pipeline every other year.

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“It’s easy to think, ‘running our own node is free.’ But doing it reliably, at scale, consistently, and serving that downstream human-readable data to customers is extremely hard. We needed someone who could be great today and still be around in five years.” Dan explained.

After extensive evaluation, Blockworks chose to build its research infrastructure on top of Dune.

Dune’s platform provided the Blockworks team with :

• Accurate, decoded blockchain data across 100+ chains
• Fast data refresh rates and high uptime
• Rich curated tables like token_transfers
• Flexible analytics APIs for integrating directly into Blockworks’ internal data pipelines
• And now a powerful dbt Connector allowing Blockworks team to write and transform data directly on Dune, and use Dune as their data warehouse

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“Dune gave us the ability to move fast on reliable datasets. That reliability is invaluable.” Dan said.

Explore Decoded VS curated tables on Dune

Explore dbt connector

• Exploration & Querying: Blockworks analysts develop and test SQL queries directly in Dune’s analytics hub with the query editor for topic exploration and thesis testing.
• Building Data Pipelines: Build efficient data pipelines for complex analysis with materialized views and the dbt connector
• API integration: Aggregated data is exported to Blockworks’ Postgres environment through Dune’s analytics API.
• Visualization & Analysis: The data through Dune’s Analytics API then feeds Blockworks’ internal charting engine and dashboards that support reports, podcasts, and investor insights.

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“From Dune query to our Postgres database is seamless. The API has been fantastic, with nearly perfect uptime, which is very rare in this industry.” Said Dan.

By leveraging Dune, Blockworks Research team has dramatically accelerated its research cycles. Analysts can move from concept to production in a matter of hours rather than weeks, and be in time to provide insights for some of the most trending topics.

Because Dune manages the heavy lifting such as indexing, uptime, and data infrastructure, the Blockworks team can focus entirely on what they do best: interpreting data and generating insight rather than maintaining the entire data pipelines or troubleshooting systems.

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