Atlas Corp and DCL Metrics Help Decentraland DAO in Data Collection
By Decentraland DAO, , in Community Highlights
Atlas Corp and DCL Metrics, two grantees from Decentraland’s remarkable 2022 grant season, are helping the Decentraland DAO collect and make available a variety of Decentraland-related data to all users. For Decentraland, an open, decentralized, and community-driven platform that wants users to create the best possible experiences and make the best possible decisions, both Atlas Corp and DCL Metrics provide essential input for people wishing to understand their role and place in Decentraland. Even though both grants are separate projects, they exist under similar premises and thanks to the same technical aspects that allow Decentraland to be openly explored or measured.
Decentraland has experienced significant growth in the past year, with many businesses and organizations now operating within the platform, including P2E games, event venues, real estate companies, ad agencies, and more. These groups rely on understanding their audience to make the best possible decisions, and, in their ways, both grantees aim to provide them with the tools to do so.
Atlas Corp: Setting out to build the API
Atlas Corp, submitted their proposal in late July 2022 to collect and provide player usage data, such as daily active users, total user growth, and traffic per parcel.
The organization, founded by howieDoin and MorrisMustang, is backed up by a team of experienced professionals who’d been working in the analytics industry prior to submitting their proposal. Atlas Corp believes that player usage data should be collected and made available to all Decentraland users by the DAO, rather than by multiple parties independently.
On top of allowing users to visualize data for decision-making, Atlas Corp inferred that a trusted data source would prevent undue strain on Decentraland’s infrastructure and prevent the data from being monopolized by a private company or individual. Without a trusted source for the data, multiple parties could potentially stress the nodes by making too many concurrent requests for the data, which could impact the quality of service provided by the nodes.
Besides keeping tabs on the infrastructure, Atlas Corp signaled various benefits to collecting and making this data available to the Decentraland community. First, it would help to grow the number of successful Decentraland builders by providing them with essential metrics such as daily active users, total user growth, and traffic per parcel. This would allow builders to focus on their specific use case with facts in hand. The gathered data could be used to determine how many users attended events, to give an example.
On the technical side, the project set out to satisfy data needs on a continuous basis, with frequent updates. According to their initial plans, data would be gathered and sent to a MongoDB Atlas cloud database three times per minute, which would then be connected to a DigitalOcean server allowing for API access and data queries. The infrastructure and API details to create this “DAO-owned data aggregation layer” are available in Atlas Corp’s proposal.
Making the most of a grant
A DAO grant was essential in supporting Atlas Corp’s work to provide the Decentraland community access to high-quality player usage data. Enacted around August, Atlas Corp had anticipated that the vested funds would cover the cost of collecting and making the data available for up to one year and would be used to develop a data warehouse, API, and public data archive.
In addition, the grant would cover the cost of improving the reliability and scalability of the data collection and storage systems. To this end, soon after the grant was enacted, Atlas Corp set up data collection pipelines to gather data from all 11 active nodes in Decentraland. They saved this data to a database to monitor its growth. In their first month alone, Atlas Corp collected almost a massive million and a half documents.
https://twitter.com/AtlasCorp_dcl/status/1601229051607552002?s=20&t=Yj3ZB0x1hqIYOqbkT7Gd7g
In its initial phase, the grant also helped highlight some of the issues that Atlas Corp encountered while attempting to collect data from Decentraland in a consistent and standardized format. Many of these problems have since been fixed.
Atlas Corp is currently running: HowieDoin recently announced the application was online and confirmed three recurring use cases that were using the API plenty of times per minute. According to the latest update, each consistent user on the platform prevents approximately 45,000 calls a day (3x per minute, 11 current nodes) from reaching the catalyst node network.
How DCL Metrics leverages Atlas Corp’s data layer
One of the unaccounted-for beneficiaries of Atlas Corp’s grant was a second grantee: DCL Metrics, a platform that, via their website dcl-metrics.com, provides fundamental metrics to each Decentraland user.
As their leader Dax explained, the scope of each project was different. In contrast to Atlas Corp’s focus on facilitating developers' access to Decentraland's public data, DCL Metric’s grant proposal—enacted last year—sought to make that data readily consumable by end users with varying degrees of technical expertise.
As such, one of the main goals of DCL Metrics is to make data about Decentraland more accessible and interpretable for various groups within the community, such as developers, event organizers, and real estate companies. By providing data about daily active users, concurrent users, land sales and rentals, and other metrics, DCL Metrics aims to help these groups make informed decisions about their operations.
The organization has also helped keep the facts straight. When, in October 2022, certain outlets professed to know the alleged number of players participating in Decentraland, the official response was based on insights collected by DCL Metrics.
https://twitter.com/decentraland/status/1578454105533534210?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
To date, DCL Metrics has already made a lot of progress on its roadmap. The organization launched a dashboard with basic global metrics, which includes the ability for users to select a date range to view data for the past week, month, or quarter. They also developed metrics for scenes, which allows users to view data for larger areas rather than individual parcels. In addition, they have started displaying data for all parcels and scenes on their map, and they plan to add user data and dashboards in a future iteration.
In the next few months, DCL Metrics plans to introduce more detailed parcel and scene-based metrics, and advanced user analytics. They also plan to add Z-axis analytics, which will provide insights into user behavior in the three-dimensional virtual world and track Wearables, POAPs, and DAO activity.
Visit www.dcl-metrics.com
One of the critical challenges that DCL Metrics faces is ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the data they provide. To address this issue, in the last quarter of 2022, they integrated with Atlas Corp’s new data warehouse, allowing them to pull data at a higher frequency and reduce strain on Decentraland's catalyst servers. They also plan to build metrics for all users (parcels and scenes have all data generated daily) rather than just top 10 lists, providing a more comprehensive view.
How do both organizations interact?
DCL Metrics and Atlas Corp are independent organizations that both work to provide analytics tools for Decentraland. Although these grantees are not directly affiliated, their developments are complementary in that they both aim to provide valuable insights and data to the Decentraland community.
DCL Metrics, which explicitly lists HowieDoin, Atlas Corps, and grantees 8 MetaBalls and Wilderness P2E as advisors, is focused on making data about Decentraland accessible to the community so that it can be used to improve the platform. The organization has introduced daily new users and has incorporated land sales and rental data.
On the other hand, Atlas Corp has been awarded a grant by the Decentraland DAO to collect and provide player usage data. As examined, the organization plans to develop a data warehouse, API, and public data archive to make this data available to the community. Atlas Corp is also improving the reliability and scalability of its data collection and storage systems. It is committed to working closely with the Decentraland community to ensure that its data is accurate and useful.
Together, the analytics tools provided by DCL Metrics and Atlas Corp can give the Decentraland community a comprehensive understanding of the platform and its users. DCL Metrics can provide data on the overall health and growth of the platform, while Atlas Corp can provide detailed data on player usage and activity. Builders, investors, event hosts, and other stakeholders can use this information to make informed decisions and improve their experiences in Decentraland.
Both organizations set out to make technically different, yet similarly spirited, undertakings around data analytics. During their path, both grantees performed their tasks under Decentraland’s premises of collaboration, stressing how important it is that the community keeps signaling grantees towards these kinds of unexpected alliances.
How to help Atlas Corp and DCL Metrics
Tune in to each organization's updates to keep track of their latest efforts—including the dashboard website and metrics for the last 30 days—and chat with the teams. Both Dax, from DCL Metrics, and howieDoin, from Atlas Corp, are very active in the Decentraland DAO forums. You can also join the Atlas Corp Discord server.
The metaverse is full of yet unrecognized potential and opportunities. Do you have an idea that could benefit the Decentraland community? Learn more about the DAO’s grants here.
Do you know of a cool Decentraland community project that you think should be next in the Community Highlights series? Contact the Decentraland Foundation team @decentraland on Twitter.
Disclaimer: The service described in this article was not developed or audited by the Decentraland Foundation. Always be careful when engaging in any kind of transaction. Decentraland is not responsible for any loss of funds/assets.