The NFT boom has created a massive amount of in a relatively short amount of time. That data is also spread far and wide, with the smart contracts that define a non-fungible tokens project stored on a blockchain, but much of the supporting metadata is elsewhere.

Some of that data is in the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and some of it is stored on public cloud infrastructure like AWS. Marrying up all these disparate data points and analyzing them for actionable insights is a colossal task.

Mnemonic built a real-time intelligence platform that aggregates all of the NFT data for 100% of the NFTs on Ethereum, including all NFT collections, ERC20 tokens, ERC721 and ERC1155 NFTs, historic transaction data, along with pricing and metadata.

After aggregating all this data, Mnemonic went one step further and exposed this data via APIs to provide a data infrastructure layer for developers who want to analyze or incorporate the data into their own applications.

Mnemonic has been in a closed beta since December. During that time, it worked with a number of NFT creators to provide insights on their NFT collections both through the Mnemonic API and via dashboards that visualized the API data.

Why Build a Real-Time Data Platform for NFTs?

In an interview with The New Stack, Mnemonic co-founder and CEO Andrii Yasinetsky said, “Even simple things like seeing who all the holders of a collection are was not easy prior to the release of our API. It also allows more complicated analysis like time series data on a collection.

“In order to bring more users into the Web3 space, we need this kind of foundational infrastructure. The amount of data is growing on all the blockchains, and the rate at which the data is growing is accelerating and becomes increasingly complex to make sure that any developer can take all this data and build a rich user experience on top of it.”

One key part of that experience is verifying the current owner of an NFT in real time, which should increase trust in transactional marketplaces and could lead to new approaches to NFT holder verification.

Learnings from the Closed Beta

I asked the Mnemonic team if they had any interesting discoveries during their closed beta.

According to Elena Ikonomovska, a company co-founder and holder of a doctorate in machine learning, “One realization that came from building the initial dashboards was that early users wanted to know how to reverse engineer the dashboards and get additional analytics on their collections.

“We then realized this is the first thing we need to launch besides the foundational API.”

Two APIs for dApp Developers

If you’re building decentralized applications or want to build tools to better understand the NFT space, Mnemonic has two key APIs for you to use.

The company’s Foundational API has been live in private beta since December. This API includes ownership information, pricing data, transfers and exchanges, and metadata. It is currently free to use for up to 30 calls per second and 500,000 API calls per month, which the Mnemonic team expects will be enough for most developers to build and launch a product without incurring any cost.

A Collection API provides the ability to query for the time series on the history for every collection and historical ownership with a single API call.

About the Collection API, Yasinetsky said, “The API makes it easy to look at the performance of a collection with just a few lines of code with highly efficient results. You could look at a whole year at once, for instance, or go down to granular levels like 15 minutes.”

The APIs are available as either a gRPC service with language-agnostic specifications defined using protocol buffers or via standard REST endpoints. Code examples of API requests are available in Golang, Node.js, and curl.

The team, which has a wealth of experience building large-scale data services prior to starting Mnemonic, is promising no breaking changes to the API, with backward compatibility in perpetuity.

Use Cases for the Mnemonic APIs

What would be some common use cases for Mnemonic’s APIs? “There’s a broad set of use cases our platform is empowering today ranging from some of the more obvious ones like the DeFi space, where you might think of NFTs as assets of value that can be traded,” said Ikonomovska.

Beyond that, the APIs can help answer other questions. For example, she said, “Looking at the utility that can be created and wanting to get better insights on what kind of wallets are actually participating with the collection. Are those the users the creator wants to reward in the next airdrop?”

The APIs, she added, also offer “creator tools to understand the audience, the fans, marketplaces, and wallets.”

The last example seems like a particularly interesting use case. The API allows you to get data about the wallets that have acquired NFTs from a particular collection. Data is also available to see which other collections the same wallet has.

In theory, you could start using that data to create lookalike user profiles or build out a future marketing strategy in advance of an NFT launch. Or there could be other use cases that would allow a developer to make specific implementation decisions based on a cohort of users who all participate with your dApp as well as hold specific NFTs.

For serious NFT collectors, I could also see use cases like historical transaction data that would expose which collections are attempting to artificially inflate the floor price. Or maybe get a jump on a hot new trend by looking at the purchase habits of wallets that are known to be influential.

The APIs are available for public use starting today. At the time of this writing, if you sign up for a free API key from Mnemonic, you will also receive 1000 free API calls for their new Collection Analytics API. Mnemonic is currently indexing Ethereum NFTs, but anticipates adding additional blockchains in the future.

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