Build vs. Buy: The Blockchain Data Infrastructure Question Every Financial Institution Gets Wrong

The original ask was simple: get onchain data and make it compatible with SQL so the analytics team could build compliance reports. Two engineers working for two weeks, maybe three. At least that was the estimate.

Six months later, those two engineers had become five.

They'd built a custom indexer, a reorg detection service, an ingestion queue, custom code to translate each new contract, and a reconciliation job that ran nightly because no one fully trusted the data without it.

The analytics team, the people who were supposed to be building the reports, were still waiting. Every time they got close, engineering would get pulled back into fixing something that broke when a protocol upgraded, or debugging a problem that no one could explain.

By month nine, the head of engineering said what everyone already knew: “We're not building analytics anymore. We're running a blockchain data platform. And we're not very good at it.”

That's the trap most financial institutions walk into. Not a single dramatic failure, but a slow slide from “data integration project” into “full-time infrastructure operation” that was never in the roadmap and never in the budget.

Financial institutions expanding into digital assets don't want to become blockchain infrastructure companies. They want reliable data they can query, analyze, and act on. But getting blockchain data into existing analytics stacks is harder than it looks. What seems like a straightforward data integration project often becomes a sprawling infrastructure effort that consumes engineering resources and delivers inconsistent results.

The Problem: Blockchain Data Pipelines Are Deceptively Complex

At first glance, the requirement seems simple. Track token transfers. Monitor liquidity pool activity. Measure user engagement. Generate compliance reports. Standard analytics work.

The complexity emerges quickly.

Blockchain networks experience chain reorganizations. When the network resolves competing blocks, previously confirmed transactions can be replaced. A naive data pipeline will either double-count events or miss reversions entirely. Your dashboard shows a swap that never actually settled, or omits one that did. Without proper reorg handling, the data looks complete but can't be trusted.

Every smart contract has different structures. Integrating a new protocol means parsing new formats and testing the outputs. Teams that start with one or two contracts soon find themselves maintaining dozens of customizations.

Then there's the infrastructure itself. What started as a data integration becomes a platform responsibility.

The typical outcome: engineering teams spend more time maintaining data pipelines than building the analytics products those pipelines were supposed to enable.

What This Costs in Practice

Most institutions that build in-house follow a predictable trajectory. What begins as a small integration project gradually becomes a dedicated platform team. The costs show up in three places.

Headcount creep. Maintaining blockchain data infrastructure requires specialized engineers who understand both distributed systems and blockchain mechanics. These roles are expensive, hard to fill, and hard to retain. Worse, they end up doing maintenance work rather than building anything new.

Data quality incidents. Without built-in handling for chain reorganizations, errors accumulate silently. Trades that reversed still appear in reports. Gaps in the data go unnoticed until someone downstream asks a question the pipeline can't answer. Each incident requires manual investigation and reconciliation.

Delayed time-to-value. The analytics team, the compliance team, the risk team, they're all waiting on clean data before they can do their actual jobs. Every month the pipeline isn't reliable is a month those teams are working with incomplete information or manual workarounds.

How Amp Solves This

Amp is purpose-built to eliminate the infrastructure burden between blockchain networks and your analytics stack. Instead of building and maintaining custom pipelines, institutions point Amp at the blockchain activity they care about and get clean, queryable SQL tables in return. From local prototyping to large-scale deployment, Amp delivers reliable production ready data pipelines without operational overhead.

Blockchain data becomes SQL automatically

Amp reads the structure of any blockchain protocol and generates organized, queryable tables without custom code. When your team needs to integrate a new protocol, they'll know its SQL compatible without extra engineering work. No manual data mapping. No hand-built parsers that break when something changes upstream.

Chain reorganizations are handled invisibly

This is the problem that quietly undermines most in-house pipelines. Amp detects reorganizations as they happen and corrects the data automatically, with zero downtime and no impact on active queries. Your analysts never see phantom transactions. Your compliance reports never include activity that was later reversed. The data is simply correct.

Data arrives in minutes, not days

Traditional batch pipelines update once a day, sometimes less. Amp delivers data in under three minutes from the moment activity occurs on-chain. Risk teams see positions as they change. Compliance teams monitor activity in near real-time. Trading desks get the visibility they need to act, not react.

It connects to the tools your teams already use

Amp exposes data through standard SQL interfaces, which means it plugs directly into your existing BI platforms, data science notebooks, dashboards, and reporting tools. There's no proprietary query language to learn. No special tooling to adopt. Blockchain data becomes just another source in your analytics stack.

The Build vs. Buy Calculus

The question isn't whether your engineering team can build a blockchain data pipeline. They can. The question is whether they should.

Building in-house means taking on a permanent infrastructure obligation: staffing it, maintaining it, debugging it, and evolving it every time the blockchain ecosystem changes. For most financial institutions, that's not a core competency and not where engineering talent creates the most value.

Buying purpose-built infrastructure like Amp means your team skips the months of pipeline development and goes straight to the work that matters: building compliance reports, risk models, trading analytics, and customer-facing products on top of data they can trust.

The institutions that move fastest in digital assets won't be the ones that build the best data plumbing. They'll be the ones that never had to.

Getting Started

Amp is open and ready to evaluate. Explore the Amp Repository, walk through a demo, or connect with the team to discuss how it fits your infrastructure.