Review: Truflation’s Financial Dashboards Track Everything From Big Macs to Base Metals

Truflation is a financial data provider that wears many hats – or rather tracks many things. It straddles the world of traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi), providing real-time data that’s relied on by protocols tokenizing RWAs (real-world assets) as well as perps DEXs, lending platforms, and prediction markets.

But while the hats Truflation wears may change depending on the needs of the clients it’s serving, its goal remains consistent: to provide accurate, reliable, and unbiased access to financial data that’s up-to-date and easy to digest. Truflation made its name from modeling financial data, which still remains its bread and butter, but it’s since expanded to cover much more. From base metals to Big Macs, Truflation tracks it all.

In this review, we’ll examine Truflation’s core services, how these improve upon incumbent solutions, and the value its data solution brings to DeFi users and developers especially. Along the way, we’ll also get to the bottom of what McDonald’s burgers have to do with the cost of living.

The tl;dr on Truflation

Truflation offers decentralized, real-time financial data and indexes to track real-world asset metrics with a focus on transparency and accuracy. Its products include inflation indexes such as the US Inflation Index, which uses over 13 million data points for daily inflation updates. Truflation also offers specialized indexes, such as the Electric Vehicle Index and Gold Futures, tracking trends in key sectors, and provides alternative economic indicators, allowing DeFi protocols to reduce reliance on traditional data sources.

While its focus of late has been on designing dashboards, indexes, and data feeds that are curated to the needs of onchain users, Truflation earned its spurs from inflation tracking. Its team, comprising economists and developers with a knack for parsing data from thousands of sources, have gained a reputation for accuracy and consistency in their officially published inflation figures.

As an independent data modeler, Truflation has no dog in the fight, so to speak, unlike national governments and financial agencies who have traditionally been the publishers of this data. This is particularly useful in countries such as Argentina, where inflation is rampant and where government officials have been sacked for inaccurate reporting. And yes, Truflation has an inflation dashboard just for Argentina.

Unpacking Truflation’s Product Suite

The main features and products that make up Truflation are as follows:

• Truflation Stream Network: Decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) that routes the vast amounts of data Truflation ingests. This is outputted to dapps in a trustless manner with node operators serving as validators to ensure data integrity.
• Truflation Indexes: Dashboards for tracking global assets from crypto to stocks as well as inflation, technology, and macros. These update daily to provide a snapshot of how key markets and industries are performing.
• Truflation Calculator: A simple to use but extremely powerful consumer tool that calculates the impact on personal expenses for citizens in the US, UK, and Argentina. Enter your details and Truflation will work out the extent to which inflation is eroding your income.

Business Strategy

Tracking all of this data, developing feature-rich dashboards, publishing detailed research reports, and retaining a team of academics and top developers doesn’t come cheap. While Truflation offers many of its services, such as its inflation calculator and access to its dashboards for free, it generates revenue by charging investors and businesses to access its data.

Truflation’s Basic plan starts at $19.99 per month and includes unlimited access to its data oracle, up to three years of historical data, and executive reports and newsletters. It’s also working on new products that will be made exclusively available to subscribers including smart contracts and Plaid integration.

While the Basic plan is ideal for individual users, professional investors will get more out of the Pro package at $888 per month. It provides much deeper insights and access to advanced data sources and sub-categories. For traders and analysts seeking to make sense of the macro landscape, or to get a handle on complex issues such as inflation, Truflation’s Pro package delivers a whole lot of alpha. There’s also an Enterprise option for clients who want fully customizable data and analysis tools.

From Inflation to Decentralized Indexing

Truflation has already made its name as the preeminent provider of inflation data. It’s now intent on doing the same for RWA data with the goal of becoming DeFi’s equivalent of Nasdaq. Similar reach, but fully decentralized to meet the needs of onchain protocols. Truflation is already providing the raw data to power DeFi staples such as prediction markets, real-world assets, perps, and lending. It’s now on a mission to grow market share while bringing even more RWAs onchain, expanding the range of assets that can be tokenized and traded.

While there are numerous web3 data layers out there, each competing to provision onchain data as cost-effectively, accurately, and rapidly as possible, Truflation has the benefit of a deep grounding in traditional finance. It already indexes 18M items, much of it originating from TradFi, and also has the knowledge to accompany its infra, as evidenced by the big-brain research reports its analysts regularly publish. 

Other items on its roadmap include making some of its indexes tradable, including the recent Hedge Index which is formed of a basket of metals, stocks, and BTC. If it can achieve that, it has the potential to evolve from data provider into dapp, empowering users to access a basket of assets through a single token.

As for the Big Mac Index, Truflation can tell you the price of a McDonald’s burger in dozens of countries as well as how much it’s risen in real terms in recent months. Handy if you’re trying to measure inflation in real terms – or are simply planning a vacation and want to know how much you’ll pay.