How Daylight uses Goldsky to build crypto's leading transaction engine

Daylight is the “onchain for you” API that powers the Home and Discover tabs of major wallets like Coinbase, MetaMask, Zerion, and OKX with personalized transaction recommendations. Their intelligent engine surfaces recommendations for millions of wallets per month.

Large-scale data without a large-scale data team

Daylight is a lean team (hiring now!) faced with a uniquely big challenge — wrangling the scale and complexity of chain-level datasets to build value-add intelligence and recommendations on top. And they need to do this without the typical “full stack” data team of engineers, analysts, scientists, devops, etc.

Unlike other crypto companies who only need to surface a well-defined user base, Daylight must serve recommendations for any address their wallet partners request. As a result, they can't limit their indexing to specific addresses: they must index the whole chain.

This is where Goldsky comes in, solving the backend crypto data problems that Daylight doesn't want to have to think about, allowing the team to focus on their core value proposition: building a novel, personalized transaction recommendation engine.

Goodbye APIs, hello data ownership

Prior to Goldsky, Daylight was primarily sourcing data from a mix of HTTP APIs. It got the job done but came with serious limitations — slow queries, high costs, and zero flexibility. Scaling wasn't an option and they had to find a better way.

With Goldsky Mirror, Daylight now stores and accesses entire chains' worth of data within their own infrastructure, with Goldsky automatically managing all of the gnarly complexity (chain reorgs, data quality issues, and more).

This shift enables the team to perform fast, cost-effective queries on huge volumes of data — a task that would have been prohibitively expensive and time-consuming using APIs alone. By being able to customize the underlying infrastructure (eg. indexes):

• Query times improved by over 300%
• Data processing costs were cut by ~20%, despite taking on significantly greater volumes

Building smarter recommendations

Owning historical and edge datasets transformed how Daylight develops its recommendations. Instead of being constrained by pre-defined datasets or APIs, the team can now:

• Explore existing data to recommend transactions with new relevance factors
• Iterate on algorithms and logic with immediate access to the raw data they need
• Test and deploy new recommendation engines rapidly

Daylight can also release several new relevance factors per quarter without ingesting new data. But beyond increasing shipping velocity, Goldsky also unlocked entirely net-new feature-sets that would've otherwise been impossible.

In the second half of 2024, Daylight added two new recommendations categories: dapp recommendations and token swap recommendations. In an API-based approach, the cost of building these would've spiraled out of control. But with data streaming into Daylight's own infrastructure, the marginal cost of enabling these features became near zero.

Plug-and-play expansion to new chains

Scaling to new blockchains is a key growth strategy for Daylight. But onboarding new chains typically means reinventing the wheel--rewriting workflows, building new ETL pipelines, and handling the quirks of each chain's data.

Goldsky's consistent data schemas and processes across chains make this expansion straightforward, meaning the Daylight team can plug new chains into their existing infrastructure without a hitch.

This capability has already allowed Daylight to expand to multiple chains faster than expected.

Expanding to Zerion's ZERO Network was uniquely easy - Goldsky's team somehow was indexing the mainnet network before it even publicly launched, making day-zero support very easy for us. Goldsky's coverage is not only very broad: it's also very timely. We typically find they already support many of the networks we are looking at.” — Morley Zhi, CTO

A force multiplier

For Daylight, Goldsky has been a force multiplier, helping them:

• Transform data management by moving from APIs to fast, scalable infrastructure
• Accelerate innovation by iterating on personalized recommendations faster
• Simplify growth by expanding to new blockchains faster

For a lean team tackling a big challenge, Daylight is empowered to deliver on their mission to make blockchain transactions smarter and more personalized for millions of users.

Unblock your engineering team

Goldsky manages the gnarly blockchain data challenges for teams like Daylight so that they can focus on building for millions of users.

If your blockchain data feels like a blocker, give us a spin. Sign up for free (no credit card or forms to fill) or instantly schedule a call (again, no forms to fill) to see how we can help you scale.