Quicknode

February 2, 2024 — 6 min read

Welcome back to Feature Fridays! This week, we're venturing into the cutting-edge world of web3 analytics with Tristan Tao, the CEO and co-founder of HyperArc.

Tristan comes to us with a wealth of experience in scaling SaaS solutions and a background in analytics education, having co-founded a YC-backed company in the field. His journey into analytics and passion for unlocking its potential in new markets have been the driving forces behind the inception of HyperArc. Tristan's vision was clear: to bridge the gap in sophisticated analytics practices within the web3 space, a sector ripe for innovation yet lacking in accessible, powerful analytics tools.

HyperArc stands at the forefront of this new frontier, offering the first analytics platform explicitly designed for web3. The platform empowers technical and non-technical users to dive deep into complex web3 data, easily unlocking actionable insights. This marks a pivotal shift in how businesses can understand their operations and user behaviors in the web3 ecosystem, mirroring the analytics capabilities long enjoyed by web2 companies.

Check out HyperArc

Q & A with HyperArc 👇

Could you introduce yourself by sharing your name, prior experience, and current role within your company? Additionally, please briefly explain your company's mission and what it offers to its customers.

My name is Tristan Tao, and I’m the CEO and co-founder of HyperArc. I previously led GTM functions at a SaaS unicorn, helping to scale it to $150M+ in ARR, and I also co-founded a YC-backed company building analytics education. This played a crucial role in my realizing how powerful analytics can be and how important it is to access sophisticated analytics. My passion for analytics was reignited when I saw the lack of sophisticated analytics practices in web3. And this leads us to HyperArc.

With HyperArc, we’ve built the first analytics platform purpose-built for web3. Our mission is to allow users, both technical and non-technical, to quickly and easily explore complex web3 data and discover the valuable insights that can actually impact their business results. Web2 companies figured out long ago how to really understand their business and users, how they behave and why. But that has not yet happened with web3, and a key reason for that is the lack of powerful, yet accessible analytics.

How has your company grown and changed since its inception, and what do you have planned for its future?

We started building the product in the last two years and started working with large enterprise customers in the last 12 months. My co-founder led the development of Tableau and Salesforce Analytics at Salesforce, and we’ve built a very capable technical team that knows how to build world-class analytics products.

Our product is already unlike any analytics product out there. We take in massive amounts of raw multi-chain data (thanks Quicknode!), normalize and enrich it so that using SQL and complex table joins are a thing of the past, and then make it available via an intuitive visualization and dashboard platform. We call these dashboards “DataApps” because they are highly interactive and visual, and teams can use them to uncover exciting insights across multiple chains and projects by just dragging and clicking. You can try them out: this DataApp walks you through several interesting web3 data analyses, and this DataApp lets you explore the transactions and holdings of any wallet.

Of course, there is still lots to do and we plan to keep on adding new chains, additional visualization and analysis capabilities, and more powerful ways for customers to combine their proprietary and on-chain data.

What inspired you to develop HyperArc, and how did you conceive of the idea?

HyperArc is really a perfect fit for both my co-founder’s and my experience. As mentioned, he was the Principal Architect for Tableau and Salesforce Analytics, and I started a company helping to educate people on analytics-related technologies. We’re obviously web3 believers and want to see it fulfill its potential, but saw that even though blockchain data is technically “open”, its complexity has kept people from really understanding the insights it contains, especially businesses trying to better understand their users and drive their behavior.

Can you provide insight into HyperArc’s progress by sharing any metrics or milestones indicating its traction?

We now have several large enterprise customers with internal teams (both technical and business-focused) using HyperArc. We can’t disclose their names, but they include some well-known web3 protocols. Combined, they have over $4B in TVL across several chains.

Can you provide insight into the target market for HyperArc and what types of clients you work with?

Our customers today range from small web3 startups to prominent, well-known DeFi protocols. That’s a perfect target market for us because these companies need to understand better how their products are being used and have realized the difficulty of doing this with existing tools. As web3 keeps on growing, we expect more and more businesspeople and marketers at web2 companies and more traditional brands will also need a platform like this. For example, brands releasing NFT collections will want to easily understand who their users are, what other web3 apps they use and how to best market to them and drive fruitful behaviors - and they won’t want to have to employ several SQL wizards to do so.

How does your company utilize Quicknode, and what benefits does it bring to your business operations?

Quicknode is one of our key infrastructure providers and easily the most reliable source we’ve seen for the underlying blockchain data that we then normalize, enrich, and make available through our platform. It’s a huge relief to know that the raw data we count on will come in reliably, day after day. At this point we are talking about billions of data points and Quicknode is a company that we can absolutely rely on for this mission critical aspect of our business.