In brief
- D5 has released Nansen, its first data analytics platform.
- Nansen uses machine learning and other strategies to label Ethereum addresses.
- It has already labelled 40 million addresses.
D5, the data science DAO, today launched Nansen, its first data analytics platform, in a bid to provide greater transparency over the Ethereum blockchain.
Nansen uses a combination of machine learning, algorithms and research to analyse the Ethereum blockchain. One of its main objectives is to label each blockchain address to show that it belongs to an exchange, a decentralized finance (DeFi) user, or a project. So far, it has labelled 40 million addresses.
“After years of working with crypto projects, we found many of the same needs for analytics recurring,” said Alex Svanevik, co-founder at D5, in a press release. “We built Nansen to provide crypto professionals with an analytics solution for on-chain data, enriched with millions of wallet labels.”
Tracking Ethereum movements across the DeFi space
By labelling Ethereum addresses, Nansen makes it easier to observe the movement of funds across platforms and the DeFi space.
“Some of our early users are crypto funds,” he said, “These users have integrated Nansen into their investment processes—and they simply don’t make investment decisions now before consulting Nansen first.”
D5 is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) made up of data scientists and engineers. It is the primary contributing organization to Ethereum ETL, an open source project, which powers Google’s BigQuery datasets for Ethereum. Its clients include decentralized exchange maker 0x Project, decentralized organization provider Aragon, and DeFi aggregator Totle.
Decrypt has worked with D5 on a previous article. In February, we used data from D5 to track 133,000 Ethereum names. The addresses we looked at contained 364,000 ETH, worth $100 million at the time. We were able to showcase the privacy risks involved with using the Ethereum Name Service, largely due to the transparent nature of the Ethereum blockchain.
But for D5, the transparent nature of Ethereum is what makes Nansen possible.