Crypto Data Engineering Guide 2025

The guide, now in its fourth annual edition, focuses on Ethereum (EVM) data engineering for building continuous ETL pipelines that acquire onchain datasets for apps. It argues that backfilling raw chain data is growing expensive as chains scale: a Base backfill of blocks and receipts on Quicknode RPC costs almost $10k, and most platforms quote around $4k for a Base backfill of traces and logs plus about $2k per month for frontfill. Solana and Base data are cited at roughly 500TB and 50TB, respectively. The guide presents "post-execution transforms" as an alternative to backfill-then-transform, and surveys tools such as Ponder, Quicknode Functions, Cryo and Dune for that approach.