Why Solana Data Doesn't Agree (And Why That Matters)

That was a fantastic introduction to this initiative.

I feel like you've not done this the first time.

But it works very well.

And I, for one, think this is a huge problem.

And I think... does it reveal something about Solana or does it reveal something about the state of data reporting on industry? It's probably more on the latter.

It's like, you know, just very simple things of like, okay, how many active traders are there on decentralized exchanges in any given days? Big disagreements between like multiple different providers.

How much volume is there being traded on Solana? Huge disagreements between different providers.

It's like all of this, all of these things, like just they're so like, Yeah, it's kind of difficult because, like, I guess now we can go into a little bit of, like, where do things disagree and, like, what has actually happened here.

And I think before pulling up charts, I think just kind of high-level talking about, like, okay, how do you even define something like dex volume? Where it's like, okay, there's, like, a huge range of, like, okay, what even is a dex at this point? Because, like, is it decentralized? Like, I think we...

we had Katja from Bebop on a couple of weeks ago and she's like, yeah, this is not really a decentralized exchange anymore.

Like we're more, more or less operating like a market maker on chain.

So like, is this really like, should this even be included in the category of DEX? I think there's like simple heuristics problems like this where it's like, okay, what, what category of like on-chain events do we even kind of like slot into this bucket of decentralized exchanges? But then also like what, which of these are valid or not? And like, should you filter your metrics by like some wash trading volumes or should you not filter them? And I think like all of these things, it's essentially just making apparent of like the kind of like implicit assumptions that a lot of the different data vendors are making or that they are kind of like reporting.

Let me draw an analogy for you.

Okay.

We're all data people here.

And there's often in building this out, we sculpt it

and

like spoke to multiple nine to 15 providers in trying to scope what we want to do here.

And here's the pattern.

The funny part is the data providers don't actually understand why they're reporting the data.

This is the general pattern that I've noticed.

The very boring analogy is weather data.

Okay.

Why do you care about whether data being accurate? If you ask your Siri or your Google, why do you care? As a retail user, I care about the data being accurate because it dictates what I'm going to wear.

And you think this is it, right? You think this is the world in which I live in, whether data has to be accurate so I know how to dress.