Background

The NEAR Foundation is a non-profit, non-beneficiary foundation based in Switzerland that supports community-driven innovation with a specific focus on open-source Web3 projects and tooling on the NEAR Protocol.

In 2021, the NEAR Foundation shared a brief with Datrics to develop a set of analytical tools that could identify the most promising projects built on the protocol, support them, and issue grants, to facilitate the growth of the NEAR ecosystem. It was the start of a partnership that, within six months, would become a foundation for data-driven development and decision-making for the entire project's ecosystem.

"We were looking for an experienced development and data analytics partner who could own the strategizing and development process and deliver the exact result our business needed" — says David Weinstein, Chief of Staff and Head of Analytics at NEAR Foundation.

The Challenges

The task that the NEAR Foundation set for Datrics was to build end-to-end analytics that could measure the ecosystem's health and key success metrics. The analytical system was conceived with the ambitious goal of obtaining insights throughout the entire portfolio of projects developed on the protocol. These included community activities, overall contributions to the product, and user retention.Here's a brief introduction to what features Datrics had to deliver:

• Identification of the most promising projects at the stage of their inception for issuing additional grants for development
  
• Analytics for referral programs
  
• Tracking user reviews and overall satisfaction from the ecosystem
  
• Building analytics funnels inside the off-chain and on-chain data
  

The ambitious task was further complicated by three serious challenges:

• The entire technology landscape around the blockchain is non-trivial. There are no pre-built analytical tools, as in the case with well-established web analytics.At the moment, the development of blockchain is ongoing, and there are many complexities associated with accessing data. You can't just pull the data and build a dashboard like you would in Google's Data Studio. You need to find a way to connect and understand which data to access and analyze. It requires people with a high level of expertise who are rare and expensive
  
• The data is located in multiple different places on and off the chain. To build a seamless analytics funnel, one needs to combine data from the web, blockchain, and other systems such as GitHub repositories. It can be tricky to link web behavior analytics and blockchain activity
  

"In blockchain projects, you cannot simply find an analog of Google Analytics and set it up in a couple of clicks. Such systems simply do not exist. Combining blockchain data with traditional web analytics is a major challenge that is critical to thoughtful business development. Add to this the mandatory requirement of maintaining anonymity and aggregation of data that protects the privacy of our users, and you begin to understand the complexity of the task", says David Weinstein when describing the challenge.

The Solution

It all started with a pilot period of 1.5 months. NEAR Foundation and Datrics worked together to better understand whether the partnership was a good fit for both companies.

"It came as a real surprise when, at the end of this period, Datrics managed to deliver more than some other companies committed to doing over the course of six or more months", says David Weinstein.

During this short period, Datrics managed to develop a complete set of analytics that covered the key components of ecosystem success including:

• Number of smart contracts in active development (general metric for the developer activity on the platform)
  
• Number of developers (Mainnet/Testnet/GitHub; full-time/part-time)
  
• The average number of daily commits
  
• Community activity on social media and community channels like Telegram or Discord
  

The Results

On average, the development of analytics within blockchain projects still leaves much to be desired. This means that systematic work with key marketing and growth metrics remains impossible. Blockchain analytics has traditionally lacked the consistency and reach of traditional web analytics.

The uniqueness of the analytical system developed for NEAR Foundation lies in building a seamless connection between the web activity and its on-chain component.

By combining its analysis of web and on-chain user activity, NEAR Foundation managers can identify and amplify weaknesses in user acquisition and effectively adjust the retention strategy.

The entire set of analytics is presented as a series of dashboards that allow custom filtering and provides insights into the success of the NEAR community as both developers and general users.

Today, the set of metrics is widely-used at the company to identify and nurture the most successful projects in the NEAR ecosystem. The acquired data allows team members to identify strong product and marketing strategies and abandon weak ones by adjusting advertising budgets and prioritizing product development.

"After working with Datrics for more than six months, it's obvious we made the right choice in data analysts. We received unique results that helped NEAR enhance its business vision and become better partners for our community. When it comes to blockchain and web data, I can't recommend Datrics enough. The guys have unique skills and expertise in this market", concludes David Weinstein.