Despite the fact that Ethereum was launched in 2015, there was no easy way to query blockchain data until a few years ago. Although Ethereum clients expose APIs for accessing account balances and transaction logs, they lack options for efficiently filtering and aggregating data for analytical purposes.

In this article, we'll take a look at four data providers who are extracting and transforming blockchain data into relational databases so that analysts and researchers can explore it using SQL.

Blockchain ETL - Self Hosted

Blockchain ETL is a set of open source scripts for extracting, transforming, and loading blockchain data into csv or a relational database. This gives you complete control over exporting blockchain data to your own database. However, this involves a bit of overhead before you start querying.

If you're just getting started and want to start exploring right away, the dataset is hosted in Google BigQuery.

Blockchain ETL - Google BigQuery

Google cloud hosts blockchain data as part of its public dataset program. It only supports six blockchain projects including Ethereum. You can immediately begin writing SQL queries in the BigQuery console. It also provides an estimate of how much data your query will consume. If you want to get fancy, you can use Colab to load an Ethereum dataset into a notebook and carryout some interesting Ethereum data analysis.

Users may query up to 1 TB of data for free each month. After that, each 1TB of data will cost $5. Google cloud offers new users $300 in credit, allowing them to query 60 TB of data for free before having to start paying.

Dune Analytics

Dune Analytics enables community driven blockchain analytics. It offers a SQL interface similar to BigQuery. Furthermore, it allows users to discover other user's queries, fork them, and experiment with them. It is especially useful when you are just getting started and need some guidance to progress further. As part of their community, you can learn about any bounties, freelance, and full-time job opportunities.

It is free to query. If you want to download results or gain API access, you can do so by subscribing to a paid plan.

FlipSide Crypto

Similar to Dune, the Flipside Crypto provides community-enabled analytics. With a free account, you can download query results to csv and also get API access, which is great if you want to export the data to a jupyter notebook to do some exploratory data analysis.

Flipside's bounties are organized into levels to allow anyone to get started quickly. They also have Godmode, which grants you access to far more resources than usual.

FootPrint Analytics

FootPrint Analytics offers flexibility and caters to the needs of diverse users. In addition to SQL, you can use their drag-and-drop interface to quickly create charts. Similar to the previous tools, it provides options for finding and replicating community queries and dashboards to help you get started quickly.

Token Flow

Token Flow is a new one that has just launched their beta program. What we see as promising with Token Flow is the ability to query state data, which other tools do not allow yet. Similar to BigQuery, storage is free, but computation must be paid for, though free credits are available.

With blockchain containing a wealth of information, it is exciting to follow how the blockchain data analytics ecosystem evolves. You could begin with any of the tools mentioned above. Begin by exploring the tools and engaging with their community. Find out what works best for you and start your web3 analytics journey.