App Analytics in the Bitcoin Era
Modern applications are used to collecting a significant amount of data about their application’s usage. For these applications, collecting data is simple because application usage is a back and forth between the user and the application. In the world of Bitcoin, collecting data about application usage isn’t so simple. Because Bitcoin incentivizes peer-to-peer, often serverless architectures, much of an application’s usage is communication from user to user, or user to blockchain, likely through a transaction processor. Further, increased application interoperability means that best serving one’s users requires collecting data from multiple applications. Capping off the challenge, Bitcoin is quickly becoming the largest dataset in the world making efficient data access patterns a necessity and a specialty.
Unbounded Enterprise’s Approach
At Unbounded Enterprise, we believe that the solution to the the app analytics challenge on Bitcoin is transaction metadata. Application users can include transaction metadata when they send a transaction payload to a transaction processor. This metadata can be made accessible to the originating application, or even made public, a great feature for application interoperability. Keeping this metadata off-chain helps to preserve privacy, reduce compliance complexity, and economize blockchain usage. Technologies like TXT from Planaria Corp and TxBox from Chronos Labs already exist to help applications converge on common formats for transaction metadata.
In the future, this transaction metadata can have immense commercial value. The infrastructure to provide app analytics can be used to create data markets which allow users to generate revenue from their application usage data. At Unbounded Enterprise, we are focused on leveraging these technologies to create a comprehensive solution for applications to easily collect, share, and query application analytics using transaction metadata. If you are interested in learning more about our approach or integrating our solution into your application, please get in touch with us.