🛠️ Nansen "Make Alpha"

Developers use make to compile software. Traders use make to compile alpha.

A lightweight, zero-bloat CLI orchestrator. Built to give your terminal an onchain lens for the Nansen CLI Build Challenge.

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🧠 The Concept

On-chain data analysis is often plagued by heavy dashboards, slow browser tabs, and complex API scripts. But the best developer tools in history follow the Unix philosophy: do one thing, do it well, and keep it lightweight.

Make Alpha uses standard, zero-dependency make commands to orchestrate the new Nansen CLI.

Instead of manually typing 15 different queries every morning to check cross-chain flows, a single make alpha command natively executes a suite of Nansen CLI calls in the background, handles errors gracefully, and compiles a clean, human-readable daily_report.md locally on your machine.

✨ Features

• Zero Bloat: No Python, no node_modules (besides the CLI itself), no heavy frameworks. Just a standard UNIX Makefile.
• Fail-Soft Execution: Uses native shell error-handling (- and ||). If one chain's RPC endpoint is temporarily down, the Makefile catches the error, outputs a clean JSON error block into the report, and continues fetching the rest of your alpha.
• Multi-Chain Lens: Automatically queries Smart Money flows, DEX trades, Token Screeners, and Whale portfolios across Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism in one go.
• Self-Documenting: Just type make to see all available commands.
• Auto-Pilot Mode: make watch runs the full suite every 6 hours — set it and forget it.

📸 Sample Output

🚀 Quick Start

1. Install the Nansen CLI

make setup

2. Authenticate

Two options — pick one:

# Option A: Auto-auth (reads API key from .env file)
make auth

# Option B: Pass your key directly
make login API_KEY=your_nansen_api_key_here

Get your free API key at app.nansen.ai/auth/agent-setup.

3. Test the Connection

# Pings a single endpoint to verify JSON output formatting
make test

4. Compile Your Alpha

# Fetch 15 cross-chain data points and generate your daily report
make alpha

5. Auto-Pilot Mode

# Auto-run alpha every 6 hours — set it and forget it
make watch

6. Read the Report

# See which sections succeeded/failed
make report

# View a section as a clean table
make report-1

# View raw JSON data
make report-1-raw

📋 Available Commands

Command	Description
make	Show all available commands
make setup	Install Nansen CLI
make auth	Authenticate using API key from .env
make login API_KEY=xxx	Authenticate with key passed directly
make test	Test a single endpoint
make alpha	Generate full daily report (15 API calls)
make report	Show section-level status (✓/✗)
make report-N	View section N as readable table
make report-N-raw	View section N as raw JSON
make watch	Auto-run alpha every 6 hours
make clean	Remove old reports

🔍 What Gets Fetched (15 API Calls)

#	Endpoint	Chains
1-5	Smart Money Netflow	Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism
6-10	Smart Money DEX Trades	Ethereum, Solana, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism
11-13	Token Screener	Ethereum, Solana, Base
14-15	Whale PnL Summary	vitalik.eth, justinsun.eth

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🏆 Hackathon Context: Week 1 Submission

This project was built specifically for Week 1 of the Nansen CLI Build Challenge (Deadline: Sunday, Mar 22).

As the Nansen Intern noted in the kickoff email: "Give your agent onchain lens." While many reach for heavy LLM frameworks to build "agents," Make Alpha takes a literal approach: the most reliable, fastest, and most useful autonomous agent for a daily trader is a standard UNIX task runner (make). It acts autonomously to fetch your data so you don't have to.

How this hits the 4 core judging criteria:

1. Usefulness: Saves traders 30+ minutes a day. Instead of clicking through explorers, one command generates a comprehensive daily onchain report locally. make watch automates it completely.
2. Creativity: Applying a 48-year-old C-compiler tool (make) to orchestrate cutting-edge Web3 onchain data.
3. Technical Depth: Bypasses basic scripting by using native stderr swallowing (2>/dev/null), fail-soft error handling (- prefixes), standard JSON formatting (--pretty), dynamic timestamp generation via shell macros, and auto-pilot scheduling via watch loop.
4. Presentation: A clean, documented repository that perfectly explains the "why" and "how".

Challenge Checklist:

• Install CLI (make setup)
• Make minimum 10 API calls (make alpha runs exactly 15 multi-chain queries)
• Build something real (A developer-first daily reporting pipeline with auto-pilot)
• Share on X tagging @nansen_ai with #NansenCLI

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Built with ☕️ and standard UNIX tools for the #NansenCLI Challenge.