Unmarshal raises $2.6M to build user-friendly blockchain data indexing protocol

The project aims to avoid the complexity and custom development required in other data protocols.

Unmarshal, a new project building a blockchain data indexing solution, announced on Friday a $2.6 million seed funding round from a number of crypto industry investors.

Venture funds that participated in Unmarshal’s round include Woodstock, Black Edge Capital, Genesis Block Ventures, NGC Ventures, AU21, Spark Ventures, BitMax and some others. The round was also joined by individual investors like Ravindra Kumar and Philip Arthur Moore from Frontier; Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon; Aniketh Jindal; Danish Chaudhari and others.

Unmarshal is building a multichain data indexing network that would help offer structured blockchain data for industry participants. The network supports Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Elrond, Polkadot and Substrate-based chains. The team expects to roll out support for layer-two networks through Polygon, formerly known as Matic.

Data infrastructure projects have achieved a significant level of popularity and use, spearheaded by The Graph protocol. Unmarshal is in a similar niche, Manohara Kolagondanahalli, its co-founder, told Cointelegraph:

“Unmarshal is a complete end to end data network. We serve customised data needs for clients without asking them to code. Where The Graph needs developers to build subgraphs, we can provide more generic data such as wallet balance, transaction history for any address etc.”

Though some of the data can be obtained from free APIs, Kolagondanahalli believes that the data is insufficient. “APIs provided by blockchain are block specific or state specific. It will be difficult to answer questions like what are the tokens owned by an address and what is their worth,” he said.

Unmarshal will also feature a token that will be embedded in the ecosystem. “We will have a decentralized network where we onboard indexers, decoders, validators and delegators,” Kolagondanahalli explained.

Potential users of the Unmarshal data include all industry participants, from decentralized application projects to exchanges and trading firms. The data can be delivered through a variety of mediums like push notifications, WebSocket or specific dashboards. Using this data in a blockchain context is harder, Kolagondanahalli said, as it requires a reliable oracle solution. “We can work with oracles or build our own oracles to provide the data for smart contracts,” he added.

Unmarshal seems to be aiming to be a data solution working out of the box for certain data needs, with Kolagondanahalli saying that “You can build a block explorer with Unmarshal.” Compared with competitors like The Graph or DuneAnalytics, which require using elaborate query languages to structure data, this may be an attractive proposition for certain uses.