How Pine Will Use the Metrics App for its Analytics Challenges

A network of analysts enhancing each other’s skillset to take on the biggest analytics projects in MetricsDAO

Last December 2022, I had the chance to speak to prolific on-chain analyst and founder of Pine, Jack the Guy. Pine is an analyst collective that takes on high-level on-chain analytics projects such as this cross-chain NFT comparison dashboard by Elsina, GargariZamani’s multi-DEX analysis on Algorand, and this Solana NFT Ecosystem writeup by Adriá Parcerisas.

We discussed Pine's reason for being, how Jack envisions collaborating with MetricsDAO, and how the Metrics App can help Pine achieve its goals.
According to Jack, Pine was brought out of an idea he had to have a collective  take on analytics jobs as freelancers. He said that with this collective, the members could “combine networks and skills to enhance each other’s profitability” as they take on larger and more complex projects. Now the pines themselves (yes actual pine trees) were just a fun thing, a meme of sorts according to Jack. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) of pine trees were made and people started acquiring them. Coincidentally, a lot of the Pine NFT holders were people in Flipside Crypto and members of its premier group of analysts, called “Cantina”.

“Pine became a combination of the NFTs and the freelance analytics community.”

Jack himself is no stranger to on-chain analytics. Two years ago, a friend introduced him to the Flipside bounty program and he has been doing almost all of the bounties every week since. This amazing feat is on top of being a student as he just graduated from college last May 2022. With more free time on his hands, Jack started to get involved with MetricsDAO, helping manage the DAO’s treasury. According to him, the thing that stands out the most with MetricsDAO is the level of autonomy people have while being able to collaborate, despite the lack of a token/financial incentive to keep things together.

“It’s different from other DAOs wherein a token pushes people to keep working together given the financial incentive. MetricsDAO doesn’t have this type of token and yet, stuff just works.”

So how does Jack see MetricsDAO helping Pine achieve its goals? According to him, the two organizations actually have similar goals, which is to deliver high quality on-chain analytical solutions. The approach is just different in terms of focus. The big idea for Pine is that it is aiming to be a hub of analytics research outputs, potentially catering to institutions and family offices. “When an institution does research, they don’t make money on the research; they make the money on the deals being closed based on the research”, said Jack.

“The goal is to professionalize these research outputs and open up crypto to more audiences.”

While the goals and ethos have been set, Jack admits that Pine has not hit product-market fit yet so they are looking to “try a lot of things and hopefully learn by collaborating with MetricsDAO.”

Now where does MetricsDAO fit in exactly? With the new Metrics App, Jack sees an opportunity to save on technical overhead, recurring costs, and time. Instead of running Pine’s analytics challenges and tasks through other platforms which incur high amounts of on-chain gas, Pine can just run it through the purpose-built analytics challenge market on the Metrics App, saving on the technical overhead. The cost savings come from “permissioning these programs through a combination of xMETRIC tokens and Pine challenger tokens”, according to Jack. Both tokens have a wide and robust distribution already. This is opposed to, for example, airdropping new tokens every time Pine runs an analytics program.

Pine also plans to release a recurring “This Week in Crypto” series across all analytics platforms, including but not limited to Dune and Flipside Crypto, to allow analysts to share their findings on what is happening in crypto.

“MetricsDAO would be a good place to get more analysts to chime in with their different insights and the tools they use.”

In addition to its analyst community, MetricsDAO also has a wide community of partner organizations and protocols that Pine is hoping to tap into. Jack and Pine as a whole have a lot of things planned for 2023 and he sees the collaboration with MetricsDAO and the use of the Metrics App as key to those.

When asked what message Jack had for potential partners looking to work with MetricsDAO, he said “MetricsDAO has a motivated and enthusiastic community to power your analytics needs so do not hesitate to partner with them.”

It was a pleasure speaking to Jack, and learning about Pine and how much alignment it has with MetricsDAO’s own mission. We’re looking forward to helping them achieve the goals they set out for the near future.

If you're an organization in the space looking to unlock insights from on-chain data, reach out and let us help you: https://metricsdao.xyz/partner.