Transpose Raises $3M to Revolutionize the Web3 Data Landscape

The Problem

Blockchain data is incredibly difficult to work with. When you pull a transaction directly from a blockchain node or browse a transaction in a blockchain explorer (e.g. etherscan), you’ll notice cryptic groupings of hashes. Here’s an example:

Not very helpful for understanding what the transaction is doing. If we look deeper into the smart contract that the transaction interacted with, we can translate the hash above to:

Looks like this transaction was some sort of sale. But who performed the sale? And what was sold? Was the transaction minting an NFT? Trading a stablecoin on Uniswap? Offloading a token to Coinbase? Collateralizing a loan on Aave?

By digging deeper into other logs associated with the transaction, we can manually piece together a more accurate story. Doing so, we’ll find that the hash actually belongs to an NFT sale on OpenSea.

If we integrate additional domain knowledge and contextual information, we can decode the transaction into a simple, human-readable format:

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The Problem, Further Exacerbated

The result of this translation process is quite interesting, but not very useful in absence of smart mechanisms for retrieving this data. To this point, when building Web3 applications, we typically only want to consume a specific segment of blockchain data.

For example, if we’re building an NFT marketplace, we may only want to retrieve BAYC NFT transfers within a specific time range. If we’re forecasting DeFi yields, we may only want to collect Aave loans above a certain loan amount. If we’re performing fraud detection, we’re only worried about ETH transfers within a subnetwork of wallet accounts. If we’re building a wallet application, we’d simply want to display token balances and NFTs for an individual wallet.

However, these sort of specialized queries are impractical if using a local node, a remote node provider (e.g. Alchemy, Quicknode, etc), or even an indexing protocol such as The Graph. Using these solutions to accomplish the aforementioned queries often requires mixing multiple APIs, resolving several data models into one, and hours of painstaking data aggregation.

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The Problem, Scaled Up

Translating low-level blockchain data into a human-readable format is also an incredibly slow process. To do so in bulk as a Web3 developer, you’d have to:

1. Pay a remote node provider or provision 15TB to run your own node
2. Parse, trace, and clean raw blockchain data, one block or transaction at a time
3. Filter, lookup, and download all NFT & token metadata and media
4. Decode transactions into human-readable format (e.g. Was this an NFT listing? A simple ETH transfer? A DAO vote? A token trade? A liquidity stake?)
5. Track all historical token transactions to derive up-to-date balances
6. Cache all this data at scale so you don’t always have to start from zero
7. Create internal APIs that are capable of specialized indexing (e.g. wallet- or protocol-centric)
8. Do this all live to keep up with new activity!

Today, every Web3 developer that ingests blockchain data at scale has to either reproduce these steps, pay asburd fees to a remote node provider, or limit the speed, simplicity, and scope of their service. This is not scalable.

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Our Solution

At Transpose, we’re going to solve these problems by delivering human-readable blockchain data at scale, tailored to your Web3 data needs. To spearhead this effort, we’ll be iteratively launching our Open Alpha over the next several weeks. The Open Alpha will include the following suite of API offerings:

1. Block API: Query accounts, blocks, transactions, internal transactions, and logs in bulk.
2. NFT API: Fetch any collection, NFT, owner, transfer, and sale, backed by a world-class metadata and image CDN.
3. Token API: Lookup any fungible token, transfer, balance, price, and trade, including any ETH transfer or account balance.
4. Wallet API: Retrieve a wallet’s tokens, NFTs, transfers, sales, trades, swaps, loans, DAO contributions, games, and more — all in human-readable JSON format.

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Raise Announcement

Building on Web3 data should be fast and simple. Transpose is on a journey to set a new standard for blockchain data access. By translating low-level blockchain data into a suite of high-level, human-readable APIs, Transpose reimagines the speed and scope of Web3 development.

I’m hugely excited to announce that we’ve raised $3M in seed funding to launch this ambitious mission. The round was led by MaC Venture Capital and joined by HOF Capital, Soma Capital, Pareto Holdings, and many fantastic angels.