This is an adapted excerpt from Chapter 6 of my book, The DeFi Data Quick-Start: Reading On-Chain Truth with Dune Analytics. The book goes from your first Dune query to a dashboard you can defend. This chapter is the hardest problem in it.
The one field that isn't there
A row in dex.trades tells you the chain, the venue, the tokens, the amounts, and the transaction hash. It tells you everything except the one field half the money in DeFi wishes existed: where the trade came from. No origin: uniswap-web-app, no frontend: metamask-swaps, nothing.
That missing field is worth a great deal. Incentive programs, business development deals, and market-share claims all hinge on an answer nobody can read directly off the chain. Reconstructing it is the discipline called attribution, and it is mostly a matter of knowing where to look.
Two identical rows, two different worlds
