As Web3 grows at an exponential rate, the demand for a robust data infrastructure has never been greater. At the 2023 Hong Kong Web3 Festival, ZettaBlock's Co-Founder and CTO Scott Shi shared four challenges facing Web3 adoption, and how ZettaBlock empowers Web3 developers to overcome them. 

Challenge 1: Fragmented Data Sources

Web3 data is split across multiple ecosystems, chains, and technologies. This creates two obstacles. First, data structures and metrics are not standardized. Second, data is siloed. 

This fragmentation leads to incomplete datasets and makes it hard to extract meaningful and actionable insights. Different data schemas make it very difficult to analyze the data, and with so many pipelines to monitor, it becomes very expensive.
 

In addition, siloed on and off chain data require creating and maintaining multiple pipelines to move data. Building an in-house solution is extremely expensive, exceeding $1M and requires many developing and maintaining hours.

Solution: ZettaBlock's solution unifies data sources and allows for an easy join of on-chain and off-chain data. Developers can customize the APIs and index the data they need within seconds. Users are also able to import their own data into ZettaBlock, whether it is from data warehouses (such as BigQuery, Snowflake, etc.), storage (e.g. Amazon S3) or various databases (such as Postgres, MongoDB, etc.).

In this way, ZettaBlock aims to provide companies with a more complete picture of their customers, allowing them to make better decisions and create more effective strategies.

Challenge 2: Limited Data Access Patterns

Another challenge facing Web3 adoption is limited data access patterns. In many cases, data is locked up in silos or proprietary systems, making it hard for companies to access and use it in a meaningful way.

Solution: In addition to SQL based explorer, ZettaBlock's solution is to offer low-latency APIs that make it easy for developers to access the data they need in a quick and straightforward way. The APIs have a ~ 10ms latency and are ready in one-click, no matter how complex the underlying logic is. These API also allow for the data to be refreshed at any rate you want. This means you can create the API once, and never worry about maintaining it again!

ZettaBlock also offers the option to explore data using Python. Developers can connect to our Data Lake via Jupyter Notebook in just a few steps.  In this way, ZettaBlock provides companies with the tools they need to extract insights from the data and create better user experiences.

Challenge 3: Unusable Chain Data

Beyond network-level metrics, raw blockchain data cannot be used to derive any further meaningful metrics. Developers must decode data to understand what events are happening and what they mean. Solution providers often do not have high decoding rates, requiring developers to build their own manual data abstraction layers, which are very time-consuming and expensive.

Within Web3, the decoding of the data is usually poor, meaning that developers have to spend extra time to transform the data, before they can build anything from it. This process is very costly, given the issue of decoding data that comes from multiple pipelines. 

Solution: ZettaBlock decodes blockchain data with up to a 97% decode rate on Ethereum.  With metadata tables and abstraction tables, users can extract actionable insights in an easy and straightforward way.

ZettaBlock powers developers with:

• Direct integration with dbt repos for data transformations.

• 96% decoded trace and log data, making on-chain events human readable.

• Complex query pattern support. N number of tables, cross chains, on- and off-chain data.

• Fast query speeds. One billion rows scanned will return within two seconds.

Challenge 4: Poor Data Quality

Lastly, poor data quality is another challenge facing Web3 adoption. Poor data quality can lead to inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent information, which can negatively impact decision-making and business outcomes.

Ensuring high-quality data can be challenging due to various factors, including reorganizations of varying depths. Additionally, it's essential to provide users with the most recent contract metadata right from the start (upon creation), even before the contract is first called. Off-chain metadata, such as NFT image URLs or IPFS URLs, also need to be up-to-date to ensure a smooth user experience.

Maintaining high quality data in-house is a very expensive solution, as the underlying quality checks can get very complicated and time-consuming. 

Solution: ZettaBlock offers data of a very high quality. ZettaBlock prioritizes data quality management practices, such as data profiling, cleansing, and validation, to ensure that all of the data is accurate, complete, and consistent.

ZettaBlock's Solution: Empowering Web3 Developers

The race to the next billion Web3 users is on, and ZettaBlock is excited to be a part of it! Our infrastructure aims to help Web3 companies succeed in the ecosystem and create a better future for everyone. With the challenges of fragmented data sources, limited data access patterns, unusable chain data, and poor data quality, the need for an out-of-the-box solution is needed more than ever.

ZettaBlock's solution provides advanced data infrastructure for Web3 companies. By unifying data sources, offering low-latency APIs, providing tools for working with highly decoded chain data, and ensuring data quality, we aim to help Web3 companies gain a deeper understanding of their customers and improve the experience for everyone!