Introducing OSO

Token Mechanics TPP Builders
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Hey everyone,

I’m Carl, one of the founders of Open Source Observer (OSO), and I’m excited to share what we’ve been working on with the ZK Nation community.

What is OSO?

OSO is an open platform for measuring onchain and off-chain impact across different data sources. We specialize in unified, open data – connecting blockchain data with off-chain sources like GitHub, project registries, package servers, decentralized social networks, and more.

  • We currently feature over 100 TB of public datasets in an open data lake.

  • We’ve developed hundreds of open source models that connect these datasets, plus indexing and ETL pipelines that are fully open and forkable.

  • Developers can integrate with our API for dashboards, data visualizations, or other analytics tools.

Think of us as a public utility for the open source and Ethereum communities to build on…

Why ZK Nation should care

As ZK Nation grows, the need to measure ROI on grants, incentive programs, and open source contributions will become even more critical. There are new projects, Elastic Network chains, and developers joining all the time. Questions like “what’s working?” and “what’s worth funding more of” will only get harder to answer.

In our experience, other ecosystems use one (or more) of the following approaches to build “network intelligence”:

1. Have the Labs team build in-house data infrastructure. This is doable, but requires a large data engineering team and a sizeable cloud budget.

2. Patch together SaaS tools and contractors. This might seem the most decentralized, but it often results in duplicated pipelines, closed-source models, and vendor lock-in.

3. Invest in open data infrastructure. Contribute your public datasets and models to OSO’s open platform; benefit from everything we’ve already built. We maintain the pipelines, so ZK Nation can focus on analytics, incentive design, and impact measurement. Everything is fully open, permissively licensed, and forkable.

These aren’t mutually exclusive: if you do 3, you can also do 1 and 2 … except it will be much cheaper because it leverages common infra.

(There’s also a fourth option: ignore it all and measure nothing. But that’s usually not a good idea!)

What else?

We currently work with a variety of ecosystems - Arbitrum, Drips, Filecoin, Gitcoin, Octant, Optimism, the Protocol Labs Network, and more - to track impact and improve funding allocations. We’d love to see ZK Nation join this list!

We also help power several Ethereum-wide initiatives with open data, including:

For more info, check out our docs and GitHub.

Looking forward to collaborating with you all!

– Carl & the OSO Team

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