How the concepts map
The practical difference: a webhook tells you something happened, and building state from webhooks (balances,
holder counts, volumes) is your accounting problem. A Data Feed hands you the rows already in SQL: state is a
query, not a pipeline you maintain.
Why teams move
- No delivery infrastructure. No public webhook endpoint, no signature checks, no retry handling, no ingestion queue. Data lands in your database directly.
- History and live in one pipe. A new stream starts at “now”; a feed backfills as deep as you need, then stays live.
- Consume it your way. The same feed can flow into Postgres today and your own Kafka, AMQP, or SQS consumers as the platform’s export options roll out; see What are Data Feeds? for the consumption model.
Try the model now
You can evaluate Data Feeds against your current Streams setup today:- Run the quickstart: live decoded data in your own Postgres in about ten minutes.
- Find the recipe closest to what your stream watches (token transfers, contract logs, swaps, NFT activity).
- Keep your stream running in parallel while you compare; nothing about trying Data Feeds disturbs your existing Streams setup.

