Dune turns raw blockchain data into queryable tables and lets anyone publish the result as a dashboard. For newsroom research it has become the first stop, and we used it throughout the reporting for this section.
Decoded contract tables are the core asset. Rather than parsing logs, you query named events with typed columns, which reduces a day of engineering to a paragraph of SQL.
Query speed on the current engine is good, and the AI-assisted query builder is now genuinely useful for a first draft, though it still hallucinates column names on less common tables.
The community dashboard library is enormous and entirely unvetted. Popular dashboards are frequently wrong in specific ways — double-counted wrapped assets, stale contract lists after a protocol migration — and the chart carries no indication of that. The fork-and-read-the-SQL habit is mandatory, which limits how far a non-technical user can trust what they see.
Free-tier limits on query execution and private queries push serious users to paid plans quickly, and CSV export sits behind that gate.
As a research instrument it is excellent. As a source you cite without inspecting, it is a liability — a distinction the interface could make far clearer.
