How Data Lakes solve crypto data’s cold start problem

In our last post, we broke down why ELT is crucial for scaling blockchain data pipelines, especially when you're managing massive amounts of data across multiple chains and protocols.

Now, let’s take that a step further. Should you stick with indexers, or move to a Data Lake approach?

Both indexers and Data Lakes play critical roles in managing and retrieving blockchain data, but they do so in different ways. Indexers quickly organize and make data searchable for real-time querying, while Data Lakes store vast amounts of raw data that can be processed and analyzed later. While indexers are great for immediate analytics, they can become inefficient as your blockchain data grows. In contrast, Data Lakes offer a more scalable, flexible approach to handle large and evolving datasets. A lot of blockchain projects start with indexers for analytics. It works at first, but as your project grows, re-indexing becomes a hassle. Every change to business logic or a metric calculation means you have to reprocess everything. The bigger your data gets, the longer that takes—sometimes hours, and for larger datasets, even days to weeks. Welcome to the crypto data’s cold start problem.

What’s a Data Lake?

A Data Lake stores all raw blockchain data in one place. Instead of re-indexing whenever you need new metrics, the data is already there. You just adjust your SQL queries to get what you need, when you need it.

This approach can save days of downtime on re-indexing, letting you work with the data immediately and keep your analytics flexible.

Why Data Lakes make sense

No more re-indexing. Data Lakes eliminate constant re-indexing. Once the raw data is loaded, you can apply transformations whenever you need using SQL queries. No more hours or days spent waiting for datasets to refresh.

Simpler custom analytics. With traditional indexers, creating custom metrics can require thousands of lines of code. In contrast, Data Lakes allow teams to achieve the same results with just 10-20 lines of SQL. It’s much easier to modify and extend analytics, cutting resource needs by 50% and doubling team efficiency.

Scalable and future-proof infrastructure. Data Lakes are built to scale, handling petabytes of data. They can easily handle your blockchain as it grows in activity from thousands to millions of deployed contracts, with hundreds of teams building on top of it. Now, there’s no bottleneck for these teams and the broader community of analysts to make data-driven decisions and build category-defining winners. It’s like providing Amplitude for your ecosystem.

The industry is shifting to Data Lakes

Polkadot’s DotLake, built by Parity, is a prime example of the shift to Data Lakes. Launched on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), DotLake stores the entire history of over 70 parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem. It optimizes costs and scalability using tools like BigQuery and Cloud Storage, allowing teams to easily query data. In 2024, Parity plans to make the datasets public, offering dashboards and metrics to democratize access to blockchain insights. More info here.

NEAR’s Lake Framework is another forward-thinking Data Lake setup. It uses AWS S3 for data storage and is designed to be highly accessible, even running on small devices with minimal resource consumption. The cost of accessing blockchain data from NEAR’s Lake Framework is incredibly low, at around $20 per month, making it an efficient and scalable solution for anyone looking to work with NEAR’s data. More info here.

By adopting a Data Lake, you’re following the lead of ecosystems like Polkadot and NEAR, which are already leveraging these benefits to scale efficiently and open up data access to their entire communities.

Ready to build a Data Lake?

At Token Terminal, we build Data Lakes for every blockchain we support. It’s how we manage analytics for hundreds of chains and thousands of smart contracts without ever getting bogged down by re-indexing.

If you’re ready to level up from indexers and start scaling with a Data Lake, let’s chat. We can help you set up a flexible, future-proof system that works for your project and saves you hundreds of hours of maintenance and re-indexing.

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