After doing content for a long time, I increasingly fear two types of pitfalls: one is not being able to capture 'clean, unified on-chain data', and the other is that data comes slowly and is cumbersome to use. Chainbase has pushed both of these aspects forward: on one end, it provides REST and streaming APIs, and on the other end, it offers SQL direct connection to the data cloud, with an intermediary 'data cloud warehouse' to handle performance and calibration. The first time I pulled the address behaviors of Ethereum, BSC, Base, and Arbitrum onto a single timeline, I felt truly reassured—no need to run indexes myself, nor do I have to piece together interfaces between different vendors. The official documentation is very clear: Web3 APIs cover common scenarios like balance, transfers, prices, and holdings; SQL APIs connect directly to their Data Cloud, allowing large-scale queries to return in seconds, which is a hard strength for me in creating weekly reviews and in-depth articles.
Multi-chain coverage is the second key. In the past, when I wrote projects, I was always constrained by the limitation of 'only supporting EVM or only supporting a certain public chain.' Chainbase's network list includes Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, zkSync, as well as non-EVM series like Bitcoin, TON, TRON, Sui, Solana (different capability levels, but unified interfaces), which makes it much easier for me to create 'cross-ecological user profiles' without needing to switch my mindset.
I value its handling of data forms more. Data is divided into three layers: Raw, Decoded, Abstracted: original blocks and transactions, decoded contract events, and then abstracted into easy-to-use tables. This layered approach means I can stay close to protocol details while quickly performing statistics on a 'unified model', without being slowed down by custom fields in each contract. When writing, I tend to lay the groundwork at the abstract layer first, then return to the decoding layer for sampling verification to reduce misjudgment. The official dataset documentation explains this quite well.
There are two points in terms of experience that make me willing to use it long-term. First, synchronization to our own environment: S3, Postgres, Snowflake, and other target warehouses can be configured with one click, suitable for me to store 'weekly leaderboard snapshots' into my own bucket. Second, pricing and thresholds: there are clear free tiers and developer tiers, and SQL can also be converted into an online API, which means I can create a lightweight frontend for readers to check themselves without exposing the query keys.
In practical usage, my top three favorite little things are:
First, recalling old cross-chain users. Extract the interaction frequency and amount from the past 180 days using SQL, generate a whitelist with one click, and write it into the contract;
Second, rough screening for anti-witchcraft. First, filter behaviors using an abstract layer, then randomly sample for verification in the decoding layer, and finally conduct manual review;
Third, market backtesting material pool. Unified extraction of active addresses, transaction density, and LP changes for specified tokens across multiple chains, allowing for 'visuals first, opinions later' when writing in-depth articles.
I don't have to set up index clusters myself, nor do I have to worry about the interface changing today or being rate-limited tomorrow.
Finally, let me talk about my obsession with stability. Writing needs to be fast, but I would rather 'be slow for a second and be accurate.' Chainbase's data cloud operates with a lake-warehouse integration + distributed analysis engine, and with 'smart modeling' makes large tables more user-friendly. I won't elaborate on these engineering terms, but the practical experience is: complex queries need not be avoided, and one can boldly tackle them. For someone like me who writes long-term, the combination of unified standards + multi-chain coverage + layered data + SQL direct access elevates it from 'a tool' to 'the default interface.'
@Chainbase Official #Chainbase $C
