How Base Runs Onchain Data Transformations at Scale with dbt Connector
3 min read
Blockchain
About Base
Base is a Layer 2 blockchain built by Coinbase, designed to bring the next billion users onchain. As one of the main products within the Coinbase organization, Base hosts a growing ecosystem of apps, DeFi protocols, and consumer experiences.
Base has a dedicated data team that is responsible for understanding what’s happening across the chain: which apps users interact with, how the ecosystem is growing, and where their builder activity is concentrated.
Base on Dune
Base has been integrated onto Dune through the Catalyst program, with all of Base's onchain data indexed, decoded, and hosted on Dune's platform for anyone to query and analyze.
Both the Base and Coinbase teams rely heavily on Dune for ongoing business needs. Dune has datasets that don't exist internally within their organization, and it's faster to build on Dune than to recreate them. Use cases include:
- Tracking ecosystem growth, user behavior, and competitor activity
- Monitoring non-USD stablecoin adoption on Base
- Tracking Coinbase wrapped assets (cbBTC, cbETH)
- Analyzing cross-chain bridge activity
- Tracking in-app wallet swap fees on alt-L1s, where Dune's query performance outpaces internal data
There are lots of datasets on Dune that we don't have internally. Our data platform team shouldn't need to recreate what already exists on Dune.
— Kofi, Senior Data Scientist, Base (Coinbase)
Explore Dune’s onchain datasets
The Challenge: Shipping Custom Tables Without the Overhead
When the Base team launched builder codes — an onchain attribution system using the ERC-8021 standard that lets app developers tag transactions with a unique identifier — they needed custom transformation logic applied to raw transaction data, turned into clean tables, and shared publicly with the ecosystem. The team needed a fast and efficient path: full access to Dune's onchain datasets, custom transformations, and fast deployment.
This is where the dbt connector comes in.
The Solution: Dune's dbt Connector
Dune's dbt Connector lets teams run dbt directly on Dune's data warehouse. The key difference from running dbt on Snowflake or BigQuery: Dune's warehouse already contains raw and decoded blockchain data across 100+ chains. No indexing, no ingestion, and no infrastructure setup.
Kofi translated Base's existing pipeline code into dbt models using AI and had a production table live on Dune within an hour.
What this unlocks:
- Build on data you don't index. Write custom SQL models on top of Dune's raw transactions, decoded contracts, token prices, and curated datasets across 100+ chains.
- Share analytics publicly. Base's growth team linked the Dune dashboard as the source of truth for builder code adoption. Any builder can see the data and create their own dashboards on top of it.
- Ship in hours, not weeks. No infrastructure setup. Define models, run dbt, and table is live. Complete lineage awareness to run all dependencies at once, incremental support, Git-based version control, CI/CD with GitHub Actions or Airflow, and native dbt testing.
For teams starting fresh, Dune provides a dbt starter template with example models so you don't need existing code to get going.
Check out Builders Code dashboard on Dune
What’s Next: dbt Connector + Snowflake
Base also uses Dune’s Datashare to sync onchain tables into their internal Snowflake instance. The next step: piping dbt Connector tables directly into Snowflake so custom Dune tables can be joined with private Coinbase data.
This feature is actively in development at Dune. The dbt Connector + datashare feature means you can transform onchain data directly on Dune and deliver it into your data warehouse. Query onchain and off-chain data side by side.
If you are also interested in this feature, let us know.
“I recommend every team to use the dbt Connector. It’s the fastest way to build onchain data pipelines, with access to all of Dune’s existing onchain data. ”
— Kofi, Senior Data Scientist, Base (Coinbase)
Get Started
Available to Dune Enterprise customers. Usage-based pricing across compute, writes, and storage.
