Building Custom Dune Analytics Dashboards for Crypto Editorial
How to use Dune Analytics to build editorial dashboards that surface story leads, verify claims, and produce data-driven content that readers and Google reward.
Senior Crypto Editor & Content Strategist
Dune Analytics transformed how I approach crypto journalism. Instead of relying on press releases and project-reported metrics, I can verify any on-chain claim myself and surface stories before they hit the mainstream news cycle.
Why Every Crypto Editor Needs Dune
The crypto industry has a trust problem. Projects routinely exaggerate TVL, inflate user counts, and cherry-pick metrics. As an editor, being able to independently verify on-chain data isn't optional — it's what separates journalism from marketing.
Dune lets you write SQL queries against decoded blockchain data across Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum, and dozens of other chains. If it happened on-chain, you can query it.
Essential Dashboards for Editorial Teams
The Market Pulse dashboard tracks daily active addresses, transaction volumes, and gas fees across major chains — this surfaces stories about network activity trends before they show up in price action.
The DeFi Monitor tracks TVL changes across top protocols, new liquidity flows, and large wallet movements. When $50M suddenly moves into a new protocol, that's a story lead.
The Stablecoin Tracker monitors supply changes, redemptions, and peg deviations across USDT, USDC, DAI, and others. Stablecoin flows are one of the most reliable leading indicators for broader market movements.
SQL for Journalists: Getting Started
You don't need to be a developer. Start with Dune's community queries — thousands of pre-built analyses you can fork and modify. Learn three SQL concepts and you can handle 80% of editorial queries: SELECT/FROM/WHERE for basic filtering, GROUP BY for aggregation, and JOIN for combining tables.
For example, to find the top 10 protocols by TVL change in the last 7 days, you're looking at a simple query joining protocol data with historical snapshots and calculating the difference.
From Data to Story
Raw data isn't a story. The editorial skill is contextualizing what the numbers mean. A 40% drop in a protocol's TVL is data. That drop happening right after the team announced a token unlock schedule is a story. Connecting on-chain evidence to real-world events and explaining why readers should care — that's the job.