The blockchain data analysis firm Dune Analytics today announced it has closed a $69.4 million in new funding round led by Coatue, bringing its valuation to $1 billion.

The Series B round brought the total amount raised by the company to more than $79 million. Existing investors, including Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital, also participated in the round.

Dune is an analytics and visualization toolset that provides visualization and query capabilities into blockchain data. The platform and its dashboards cater to a community that the co-founders Fredrik Haga and Mats Olsen call “Dune Wizards,” who can use the tools to dive deeply into the publicly available information on blockchains in order to understand what’s happening behind the scenes.

Although the data in blockchain ledgers is publicly available, it can be somewhat inaccessible because of the sheer volume and a lack of tools and skilled users to take advantage of it. Web3, the decentralized ecosystem of apps and financial interactions on blockchains, has grown into a massive marketplace housing an immense amount of data.

Just going by market capitalization alone, decentralized finance market value reached an all-time high of $174 billion mid-November, according to a report from Consensys, although a downturn in the market caused the market cap to drop to $105 billion by the end of January. In spite of that, the number of DeFi wallets rose to 4.3 million unique addresses this month.

Web3 data can be used for a variety of purposes, including better optimizing decentralized applications, discovering and fixing bugs in smart contracts and revealing new niches in investment markets. In traditional financial forums, this sort of data would be siloed, cloistered by finance firms and sold at top dollar, but Dune wants to build a different model.

Using Dune, anyone can access blockchain data for free. Although that’s only the first step, actually understanding it and turning it into something actionable is another. With the new funding, Dune intends to build educational resources to teach the next generation of Dune Wizards how to use the dashboard and visualization tools to analyze blockchain data.

To get the ball rolling, Dune also intends to reward community members for their participation. This means creators of projects built within the platform that add value will be paid accordingly for their queries, templates, dashboards, education and other open data.

Going forward, Dune is also building a completely new engine that will soon be released. It will substantially speed up query execution times, permit support for all major blockchains and allow members to query across all chains at once with a single query. Users will also be able to import their own data, private and public, into the platform and query against it.

Finally, Dune is planning to ship its own application programming interface. That would allow third-party developers to incorporate Dune’s tool stack into their own apps and query against its data, tools and engine with their own creations. As a result, it would empower even more analysts to do research, tinkering, trading and more.

Image: Dune Analytics