What Dune is
Dune Analytics was founded in 2018 in Oslo by Fredrik Haga and Mats Olsen. It collects raw blockchain data, decodes it into readable tables and lets anyone write SQL queries on top of it, publish the results as charts and assemble them into shared dashboards: a large share of the statistics on DeFi volumes, stablecoins, NFTs and fees circulating in the press come from community-authored Dune queries. In 2026 coverage passed 100 networks.
The company has raised about 79 million dollars, including a 69.4 million round in February 2022 at a 1 billion valuation (Coatue, Union Square Ventures, Dragonfly), and has announced no further funding since. In November 2024 it acquired smlXL and in May 2025 launched Sim, a family of real-time APIs for developers across more than 60 networks. In March 2026 came Dune MCP, a standard server that lets artificial-intelligence agents query the data in natural language; in May 2026 the company cut its staff by 25% to focus on AI and institutional clients.
Regulation and licences
Dune provides data and analysis tools: it does not hold funds, execute orders or issue tokens. It therefore does not fall among the crypto-asset services regulated by MiCA, and no authorisation is needed to use it.
Security
As it is not a custodian, the risk for users is not losing funds but data quality: public queries are written by the community and may contain errors or different definitions of the same metric. Dashboards curated by protocol teams and those highlighted by Dune itself are generally more reliable; for an article or a decision it is worth reading the query, not just the chart.
Costs
From September 2026 the free plan only allows viewing existing dashboards (the change applies to accounts created before 21 July 2026). Paid plans are based on monthly credits consumed by executions, exports and writes: Analyst about 65 dollars a month with 4,000 credits, Plus about 349 dollars with 25,000 credits, Premium around 1,990 dollars, plus a tailored Enterprise offer. The Sim APIs have a separate price list.
Alternatives
For aggregated market data (prices, market caps, exchange volumes) the Directory has CoinGecko. To check in the field what Dune measures, Uniswap is the protocol most analysed on the platform.
FAQ
Do you need to code to use Dune? Not to view dashboards. Creating your own requires SQL or, since 2026, an AI assistant connected via Dune MCP.
Is Dune's data official? It is public on-chain data, but its interpretation depends on the query: two dashboards can give different numbers for the same metric.
Is Dune free? Only for viewing. From 10 September 2026 creating and running queries requires a paid plan.
Who uses Dune? Analysts, newsrooms, funds and protocol teams: Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, Wired and Forbes regularly cite data produced on the platform.
(Verified: September 2026)
Verified sources
- https://dune.com/press
- https://decrypt.co/367949/dune-analytics-slashes-25-of-workforce-in-ai-institutional-pivot
- https://www.theblock.co/post/132759/dune-analytics-crypto-series-b-valuation-1-billion
- https://cryptobriefing.com/dune-free-plan-view-only-access/
- https://news.bitcoin.com/dune-analytics-reaches-100-supported-blockchains-as-multi-chain-u
