We collaborated with independent investment bank Canaccord Genuity to provide an overview of the blockchain analytics industry. The full report is available in their Digital Assets Quarterly for Q2, 2020.
The landscape shows all of the companies providing tools and services in the blockchain space as of May 2020. The order from left to right is “up the stack” following the usage of the solutions as they move from infrastructure to specific customer-oriented outcomes.
Node Providers
On the left are node providers who help users run a blockchain server. As the blockchain ecosystem has expanded we’ve seen an increasing number of them also provide analytics and some API access to raw underlying data available on these nodes.
Bison Trails seems to be building the most extensible and robust platform on the market, which unlike its competitors’ specialized solutions, works with any blockchain implementation. Bison Trails raised the most funding, twice as much as Alchemy and six times as much as Blockdaemon.
Moving to the right follows companies which are extracting or utilizing blockchain data and framing it to serve different groups, from crypto traders and investors to regulatory bodies, and blockchain organizations themselves.
Trading Data: This segment of the market has been consolidating, as centralized exchanges expand their product offering, with Kraken having acquired Cryptowatch and Bittrex acquiring Tradedash. TradeBlock is among the most sophisticated trading data platforms and has raised more than $50M to date.
Price Distribution: Coin Metrics, founded in 2013, has raised the most money in the price distribution category), with Kaiko focusing on datasets from exchanges and Nomics focusing more on fundamental data.
APIs for Streaming Data: All API providers came out in 2017, and raised a similar amount of funding, around 2M. Investors use these APIs in their data models, and developers use them to fuel their applications.
Data Aggregation: Data Aggregators all compete to become the go-to platform for accurate data and unbiased information. Their users’ trust is their most valuable commodity – but can it be traded?
In recent news, Binance, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, acquired CoinMarketCap for $400M. The move undoubtedly undermines CMC’s impartiality and is likely to threaten rival exchanges who fear the possibility of Binance harvesting data from CMC. “That data is now being given to a competitor with surveillance abilities. It’s unlikely that other exchanges will want to see Binance aggregating and monetizing their own data,” said Nomics CEO Clay Collins.
News & Research
As digital tokens continue to grow exponentially, news outlets claiming to cut through the noise are also on the rise. One way to do so is by ranking cryptocurrencies, which more companies are doing by looking at various factors. While price and market capitalization remains the most common focus, others are also looking at fundamentals, and Github repos for developers.
Investor Tools
The crypto market has a very foreign and complicated infrastructure, which requires a plethora of tools – from sentiment tracking to more in depth investor insights – in order to interpret the data.
Sentiment tracking: The belief that the cryptocurrency market is void of traditional fundamentals, and very susceptible to news and social media, continues to prevail in 2020.There is increasing interest in leveraging machine learning techniques such as sentiment analysis to detect possible correlations with the price of cryptocurrencies and digital tokens.
Portfolio Tracking: Portfolio trackers are also evolving in nature and expanding their service offerings and target audiences. For instance, Blox, which came several years after Gem and Blockfolio were founded (in 2013 and 2014 respectively), managed to raise a lot more funding by focusing on servicing accounting and finance teams instead of individual users.
Compliance: The compliance industry is spread out globally, with some companies receiving contributions from governments and banks. Chainalysis is focused on law enforcement and has worked on a number of surveillance projects, including tracking down a child pornography ring and analyzing North Korea’s cryptocurrency holdings.
Blockchain Intelligence: The marketplace for data analytics and business intelligence software is gushing with innovative providers and advanced technologies. Blockchain intelligence providers are mostly based in the U.S. and appeared in 2017. The sophistication of behavioral modeling has coincided with the masteration of crypto projects in the space. As teams move from development into more user acquisition phases, the demand for more advanced intelligence solutions has increased.
Token Economics: Token economics solutions are very powerful and crucial to the blockchain ecosystem. As the market starts to see the effects of token offerings, the need for more sophisticated ways to evaluate economic policy within the confines of blockchain ecosystems has increased demand for this expertise.