Open data in crypto is a boon and often underutilized. I try to make it a habit to check the chain at least once a day. In practice, this means looking at some homegrown dashes first to find interesting activity and then going to etherscan and manually inspecting txs. Most of the time this ritual doesn’t lead to new learnings, but the times that I do find something interesting more than make up for it. In my experience, the hard part is building good heuristics which is downstream of asking good questions.

I’ve considered making this a weekly activity instead of daily but have held off for a few reasons. Firstly, I think checking daily is good for ingraining knowing relevant numbers. At Eight Sleep, we did a growth meeting daily where we would discuss performance by channel and campaign, and what numbers looked like at different parts of the funnel. While this felt a bit tedious at times, it was extremely effective in getting folks attuned to good, bad, and ugly numbers, and enabling them to focus on initiatives that could move the needle. Clearly I’m not doing stuff in my day to day that will directly affect any of these numbers, but it does help me stay sharp and benchmark potential investment opportunities.

Secondly, I’ve found that doing this daily allows for finding interesting behavior that often gets drowned out on a longer timescale. On a daily timescale there’s more noise, but often the crumbs of things that are worth it. Again, parsing through this is tedious, but often worth the effort. Realistically, this could be improved and is not a blocker.

I’m mostly looking at swap activity, select project activity, and overall chain activity right now.