In brief
- Nansen has carved out a niche in the blockchain analytic space by catering to retail investors.
- Its dashboard tools label transactions on various blockchains.
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Blockchains provide a transparent record of transactions—a feature that can help investors who know how to read them make money. One way to understand the signals a blockchain is sending is by using an analytics service like Nansen.
On Wednesday, Singapore-based Nansen announced it has raised a $75 million funding round that will help it expand its suite of dashboard tools that help users track activities like yield farming and NFTs on Ethereum and other blockchains.
In an interview with Decrypt, Nansen executive Alexandre Caillol said the company currently has 4,000 to 5,000 customers, and it's turning a profit even as it grows rapidly.
Nansen launched in 2020, which makes it a relative latecomer to the blockchain analytics scene compared to the likes of industry giants Chainalysis and Elliptic.
But unlike those companies, whose primary business is providing intelligence to banks and law enforcement agencies, Nansen has carved out a niche focused on retail investors.
The company's marquee feature is a tool that labels various blockchain transactions based on who is conducting them. In practice, this means Nansen might associate a given transaction as associated with a large institutional investor or even an individual company.
According to Caillol, this is especially useful in the world of DeFi (tools that enable peer-to-peer lending and trading) where investors have numerous options to make high yields—but where it can be hard to decipher if a given opportunity is safe or legitimate. By using Nansen, he says, a user can vet an investment—such as a yield farming pool—by looking at whether credible firms are putting their money into it, and then immediately follow suit if they choose.
Caillol says that, as NFTs have come to be a bigger part of the crypto landscape, Nansen has developed tools to help parse them as potential investors.
In addition to Ethereum, Nansen's tools currently work to analyze Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Fantom, Avalanche and Celo. Caillol says that it will add capacities for the Solana and Terra blockchains by early next year.
Nansen's Series B funding round was led by Accel, GIC, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Tiger Global, andSCB 10X.