Concepts

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Chain

Every EVM dataset is scoped to a single chain, identified by its numeric chain_id. The same wallet or token address can exist on several chains with entirely unrelated activity, so a chain_id is required on every request and subscription. See Supported Chains for the list.

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Swap

A swap is a single token exchange event between two tokens, decoded from the swap event a pool emits. Swaps are the fundamental building blocks of liquidity flow. By decoding swap events across every supported protocol and chain, Prism ensures complete visibility into market activity and liquidity dynamics.

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Trade

A trade is a broader concept: a token exchange executed atomically by a single user within a single transaction. A trade may consist of one or more underlying swaps, since routers frequently split an order across several pools for better pricing. Tracking trades enables in-depth analysis of individual and aggregate trading behavior, supporting user-level market insights. To deliver both accuracy and responsiveness in trade analytics, Prism employs two complementary models:

• Position-based tracking: follows each trade from its initial buy to its final sell, capturing the full lifecycle of trading positions and filtering out partial or fragmented trades.
• FIFO-based tracking: matches each sell with the earliest corresponding buy, making it ideal for real-time analytics and short-term performance measurement.

By leveraging both models, Prism provides financial-grade analytics that serve a wide spectrum of analytical and operational use cases.

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Swap vs. Trade

Swaps tell you what liquidity pools and protocols did, trades tell you what users actually intended to do.

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Pool

A pool is an on-chain liquidity venue where tokens are exchanged. Each pool belongs to a DEX protocol and holds reserves of one or more tokens in vaults, whose balances determine the price and depth available for swaps. On EVM chains a pool contract usually custodies its own reserves, so a vault address is typically the pool address itself. Newer designs, such as Uniswap V4’s singleton pool manager, hold reserves for many pools in one contract.

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Price

Prism’s price engine is built on top of raw on-chain swap data, producing a unified price for every token on every supported chain. Rather than relying on a single source, Prism reconstructs pricing by aggregating the most recent swaps across all indexed liquidity venues. Pricing is anchored to a set of trusted reference assets per chain — the native asset, its wrapped form, and major stablecoins — whose valuations are derived from external oracle-grade sources. From these reference points, Prism infers prices for the rest of the ecosystem by propagating through the swap graph. Because reference assets and their token decimals differ per chain, prices are always resolved within a single chain and never mixed across chains. To ensure the resulting price is robust, manipulation-resistant, and actionable, Prism applies a series of filters and structural checks designed to reject unhealthy or distorted market signals.

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Profile

A profile is a pre-computed, continuously updated summary of an entity’s trading activity on one chain. Profiles distill trade data into structured metrics — covering performance, volume, risk, and behavioral patterns — so you can evaluate, filter, and rank entities without processing individual transactions yourself. Profiles are computed for three entity types: wallets, tokens, and positions. All profile metrics are calculated over rolling time windows, allowing you to compare short-term and long-term behavior for the same entity. A profile is always specific to a chain_id. A wallet active on both Ethereum and Base has two independent profiles.