I realized these aren’t just for developers. They matter to analysts too. They bring structure. Functions like transfer() and events like Transfer are what make on-chain data queryable on platforms like Dune.

I began with LINK. Found its contract on Etherscan. Tried to make sense of what I was looking at: token holders, event logs, decimals, total supply.

Then I switched to Dune and wrote my first evms.erc20_transfers query. It failed a few times. Wrong column names, hex formatting issues, missing datasets. But eventually it worked. And more importantly, I understood what I was querying.

Then I noticed something. OM token had dropped nearly 90% overnight. (While staring at the chart, I’ll admit I had a moment where I thought, “Could this be a buy-the-dip opportunity?” )

But today, I wasn’t just curious about the price. I wanted to understand what caused this drop. So I paused the theory and decided to follow a real on-chain event.

Using Dune, I filtered OM transfers from the night of April 13. I listed the top sender addresses. Some of them had sent OM to Uniswap pools. Others sent to centralized exchange wallets. With Etherscan, Debank, and Arkham, I tried labeling those addresses.

I found a MEV bot that dumped millions of OM tokens into a Uniswap V2 pool. I also found wallet addresses linked to OKX and Binance. And even though the co-founder said it wasn’t Binance, the largest transfer by volume, at least on-chain, seemed to be to a Binance deposit address.

I didn’t reach a final conclusion. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to test myself. Could I take a real event and try to explain it with SQL, logs, and block times?

• Why ERC standards matter when analyzing token movement

• How varbinary, FROM_HEX, and transfer logs work in Dune

• That CEX addresses don’t always behave transparently

• How MEV bots can play a role in sudden token crashes

• That real events push me to learn faster than any tutorial

I may not have published a final theory.
But I got my hands dirty, and that’s the only way to really learn.🙂

I realized these aren’t just for developers. They matter to analysts too. They bring structure. Functions like transfer() and events like Transfer are what make on-chain data queryable on platforms like Dune.

I began with LINK. Found its contract on Etherscan. Tried to make sense of what I was looking at: token holders, event logs, decimals, total supply.

Then I switched to Dune and wrote my first evms.erc20_transfers query. It failed a few times. Wrong column names, hex formatting issues, missing datasets. But eventually it worked. And more importantly, I understood what I was querying.

Then I noticed something. OM token had dropped nearly 90% overnight. (While staring at the chart, I’ll admit I had a moment where I thought, “Could this be a buy-the-dip opportunity?” )

But today, I wasn’t just curious about the price. I wanted to understand what caused this drop. So I paused the theory and decided to follow a real on-chain event.

Using Dune, I filtered OM transfers from the night of April 13. I listed the top sender addresses. Some of them had sent OM to Uniswap pools. Others sent to centralized exchange wallets. With Etherscan, Debank, and Arkham, I tried labeling those addresses.

I found a MEV bot that dumped millions of OM tokens into a Uniswap V2 pool. I also found wallet addresses linked to OKX and Binance. And even though the co-founder said it wasn’t Binance, the largest transfer by volume, at least on-chain, seemed to be to a Binance deposit address.

I didn’t reach a final conclusion. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to test myself. Could I take a real event and try to explain it with SQL, logs, and block times?

• Why ERC standards matter when analyzing token movement

• How varbinary, FROM_HEX, and transfer logs work in Dune

• That CEX addresses don’t always behave transparently

• How MEV bots can play a role in sudden token crashes

• That real events push me to learn faster than any tutorial

I may not have published a final theory.
But I got my hands dirty, and that’s the only way to really learn.🙂