Kuan Huang, the co-founder of Scout, said, “Scout’s product feature is to reduce the problem of knowledge centralization by lowering the technology threshold for product use, allowing more people to participate in it.”
Interview & Writer: Pan Zhixiong
For most Ethereum ecological project parties, Dune Analytics is enough to become an excellent carrier for disclosing core data, but from the user’s point of view, there is still a market demand for a data visualization tool with a lower threshold.
As a world computer that carries various general applications, Ethereum generates public transaction data or complex application logic in smart contracts at all times. Scientific analysis and research based on these data may become a very important issue. Important research materials. After all, in traditional financial markets, no bank or institution will disclose every transaction information, even desensitized data.
How to use so much data has become the direction of many startups. A good case is that after the DeBank team sorted out the latest projects for the entire DeFi ecosystem and counted all on-chain data, the entire community began to use DeBank’s lock-up volume (TVL), user scale, and transaction volume data, as An important trend indicator of the DeFi ecosystem.
Scout logo in cartoon style
The Scout (literally translated as “reconnaissance”) team chose another product form to provide users with a tool that can dig deeper into Ethereum data. Moreover, in order to further lower the threshold of the tool, Scout provides a graphical interface.
Kuan Huang, the co-founder of Scout, said to Lianwen, “The graphical interface used in our products means that users do not need to write code or SQL statements, and are not worried about performance. In addition, we don’t want the user group to be limited to developers or data analysis I teach these small circles, and hope that those who use Etherscan frequently, have a basic understanding of Ethereum data, and have a little programming concept can discover the value of Scout.”
Scout team: serial entrepreneurs with technical background
Scout has previously raised a Pre-Seed as initial funding from venture capital and angels in Silicon Valley and New York. The Scout team started development in early 2019, and the product was not officially released until recently. Both co-founders graduated from New York University, and one member is in Bogotá, Colombia.
Kuan Huang, one of the founders, previously started a business in the mobile consumer field, and was later acquired by other brands. Another founder, Chunxi Jiang, previously studied the potential applications of blockchain at Visa, and later became interested in the industry, so he chose to devote himself to this industry. Huang said, “Chunxi and I were both born in technology, and neither was the first time to start a business. They also took multiple rounds of Silicon Valley and New York venture capital, so they are more familiar.”
Scout product features: convenient, powerful, and collaborative
They believe that Ethereum is a new computing platform + database. Such an ecosystem needs to be maintained by the platform’s native data management software. “Historically, such as the traditional Internet, mobile, and cloud, every new computing platform appears. Will lead to the birth of a batch of new applications. Each batch of new applications will generate new data on a new platform. Because these new data are different from format storage to processing methods, they ultimately need those native platforms Data management software to maintain.”
Product entry point: Provide a simple enough data visualization tool for Ethereum
Although DeBank or DeFi Pulse can obtain overall data of many projects or industries, when users want to analyze specific data for a specific application, they need more customized tools.
Especially for the application community that is still actively developing and has more users, if there is a data report that everyone can easily view, developers can optimize products or adjust operational activities based on the data, and users can understand the platform based on the data. health condition.
But many application development teams may not have dedicated time to develop the corresponding tools, and this is the pain point Scout intends to solve. Huang said, “We mainly help those teams who have a demand for Ethernet data but lack engineering resources. By using our products, they can visualize data from the chain simply and quickly.”
Part of the supported Ethereum blockchain applications
Although there are other data tools on the market that provide similar functions, Huang pointed out that the current important task of visualizing these data falls on the engineers who write smart contracts or a small number of community members who are engineers. The technology threshold of China will allow more people to participate to reduce the problem of knowledge centralization.”
He continued to add to the three characteristics of Scout: not using traditional database language SQL , building a large knowledge base, and providing sharing and API calls for created tools .
He believes that compared to SQL, the product use process inspired by MongoDB (non-relational database management system) is better. “Pipeline uses a step-by-step data conversion method, and each step can tell you what the data is converted to. Now, data visualization is a bit like playing Rubik’s Cube. This sounds a bit abstract, but you know what I’m talking about once you use it.
The DODO visualization chart produced by the Scout team shows that the product is still at an early stage and there is still room for improvement in data coverage
In addition, they are building a large knowledge base to explain the current popular protocols to everyone through text and examples. “For example, we recently published articles about dYdX and DODO. We have previously helped Set, Livepeer, Polymath, Compound, Synthetix has done Dashboard, so there is a lot of accumulation in this area.”
Finally, all the charts created on Scout can be shared on the Internet, can be called through API, or raw data can be output, “Of course, some are paid functions.”
Business model: still exploring and considering designing token economics
Charging for some functions of the visual chart may be the most direct profit model. In addition, Scout is still exploring other business models.
Huang said, “SaaS is the first model we thought of. But the current market is very small. To make Scout a big business, there must be many large companies like Fortune 500. Obviously, the market is far from there. Step. We hope to find a native blockchain business model.”
Therefore, although Scout is currently a tool and service in a centralized world, they still believe that it is possible to operate projects with Tokens. “For example, the party who establishes data visualization should be rewarded. Then there is another party to verify. Whether these data are correct, there should be rewards. Then the party who consumes the data or calls the data has to pay the usage fee. In such an ecosystem, it is logically established to issue a coin.”
