Nansen

Basics

• Launched in April 2020.
• Based in Singapore (16-12-2021).
• From DeFi Prime (12-10-2020):

"Nansen is an analytics platform for Ethereum, which combines on-chain data with a massive and constantly growing database containing millions of wallet labels."

History

• From this interview with the CEO:

"I’ve worked for 10 years around the artificial intelligence and data science fields, plus a few years in management consulting.

2017 was the year I really got into crypto, namely right before the great ICO boom (and subsequent bust). I was drawn to the strange mix of idealism, technology, intellectualism, memes, greed, and general wild fun that crypto offers. In addition, I saw that there was a lot of value I could contribute as a data scientist. There was tons of data easily available, yet still many fundamental pieces missing.

Originally we started Nansen purely as a wallet-labeling service. Yet we quickly realized we should leverage the power of Blockchain ETL, the most popular open-source project for ingesting blockchain data that was created by our co-founder Evgeny, to get a more holistic view of all blockchain activity.

At that point, we’d already worked in crypto for a few years with different startups and projects, and we noticed our clients often had the same needs. Getting a better understanding of the entities interacting on-chain was a recurring theme. Because of this our conviction in Nansen as a product was strong, so we spent a few months building the first version of it and then launched it in April 2020.

We didn’t have any external funding for these efforts, so we decided to only offer a paid version of our product right out of the gate. Additionally, this model could give us stronger validation that we were building something valuable. And in fact we received our first paying customer on our launch day!

The philosophy of pricing as a feature is a key Nansen principle, since it ensures we set a high bar for ourselves. Our customers expect to get “need to have” data, not just what’s “nice to have.”

The three co-founders of Nansen (Evgeny, Lars, and myself) have 25+ years of experience working with data science and engineering between us and that’s definitely helped in building Nansen from the ground up. Evgeny is among the world’s leading experts on approaching blockchain data, which his work with Blockchain ETL and Google shows. Lars is an excellent data engineer who has architected a solution on top of Blockchain ETL (as well as other data sources). His experience working with massive amounts of data is also highly beneficial to the team."

Exploits

• Nansen had a data breach via a vendor, some email addresses, password hashes and blockchain addresses exposed (9-2023).

Other Projects

Ape Board

• Nansen acquired Ape Board on 18-5-2022 for an "eight-figure" sum. It turned it into its own internal Portfolio tool not long after (15-8-2022).

Ronin

• From The Block (17-8-2022):

"Ronin has added three new validators to the project, and increased its validator set to 17. The new Ronin validators include Efficient Frontier, Community Gaming and Nansen."

StakeWithUs

• From The Block (11-9-2024):

"Nansen has acquired StakeWithUs, a staking service provider. Nansen said it plans to integrate StakeWithUs into its platform, enabling users to stake their digital assets directly through Nansen. It intends to offer users access to more than 20 crypto assets, including Ethereum, Solana and Sui."

Usage

• From Decrypt (16-12-2021):

"In an interview with Decrypt, Nansen executive Alexandre Caillol said the company currently has 4,000 to 5,000 customers, and it's turning a profit even as it grows rapidly."

• From Crypto Briefing (28-10-2020):

"Since its launch in April, the firm reportedly has acquired more than 1,200 customers who use Nansen for on-chain analytics and market signals." 

Competition

• From Decrypt (16-12-2021):

"Nansen launched in 2020, which makes it a relative latecomer to the blockchain analytics scene compared to the likes of industry giants Chainalysis and Elliptic.

But unlike those companies, whose primary business is providing intelligence to banks and law enforcement agencies, Nansen has carved out a niche focused on retail investors."

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Alex Svanevik; co-founder and CEO

Funding

• From this interview with the CEO:

"We charge our customers monthly or annually for access to Nansen. Users can try out Nansen for $9 for 7 days to see if it’s worth it. Personally, I’ve been positively surprised by how many people have opted for the trial so far – we’re about to hit 1,000!"

• Secured a $1.2 million seed investment (28-10-2020):

"Mechanism Capital and Skyfall Ventures led Nansen’s first-ever funding round with additional support from Robot Ventures, Volt Capital, Fabric Ventures, and others. Individual investors, including Ethereum developer Eric Connor, Anthony Yoon, and Sergei Chan from FTX and Deribit Exchange, also participated in the seed round."

• From EthHub (6-7-2021):

"Raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Also participating in the round was Skyfall Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, imToken Ventures, Mechanism Capital and QCP Capital."

• From Decrypt (16-12-2021):

"Raised a $75 million funding round. Nansen's Series B funding round was led by Accel, GIC, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Tiger Global, andSCB 10X."

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