How Is Alchemy Secretly Fixing Blockchain's Node Nightmare – Part 1

All About Alchemy

Beginning to outsource their infrastructure problems to tiny stealth startup called alchemy are the top cryptocurrency companies while they are making the big public reveal today of its technology that could essentially help developers build what is the killer use case atop Bitcoin or Ethereum. Alchemy wants to be the bridge enabling the blockchain ecosystem in case the operating system connected computers and software as also if browsers connected HTTP to web apps while the middle layer which produced Microsoft, Apple, and Google comes to be some of the most valuable companies in the world. 

So then how does Alchemy work? Here it replaces those nodes where businesses use to read and write the blockchains with what is a faster, more scalable decentralized architecture. Providing tools for analytics, monitoring, alerting, logging, and debugging for the cryptocurrency connected software the two-year-old startup is observed to power infrastructure for hundreds of businesses serving one million customers in 200 countries per week which includes big names like Agur, 0x, crypto kitties, Kyber and the Opera browser. 

According to Alchemy co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan, it is here that people are trying to build skyscrapers with picks and shovels as they need to give them construction equipment whereas none of this exists for blockchain. While lining up to see that it will, Alchemy has with investors announced that it has raised $ 15 million through a seed round whereas now a Series A was led by the Pantera Capital, and also joined by Stanford University, the Coinbase, Samsung, SignalFire, alongside angels like those of Charles Schwab, Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Google chairman John Hennessey and many more of them. As Yang further states for any new technology, the developer infrastructure as well as tools are required to enable broader application development and adoption as they have seen this to happen in previous tech waves like PC as also the web whereas Alchemy tries to do the same thing for the blockchain space as they have the opportunity to meaningfully accelerate the entire blockchain industry. 

The Journey From Down To Lunch To Decentralized Apps

The fact that Alchemy despite its momentum doesn’t want to become one of the overhyped blockchain promises that doesn’t deliver is Immediately clear and as Viswanathan puts it, there are manly two vanity metrics in Silicon Valley where how much is raised and how many people there are on the team is, in reality, keeping both of these as low as possible while being a big success. 

Having a shot at the start-up A-League Viswanathan and the co-founder Joe Lau comes for a brief moment as their simple social app for finding out friends could thereby hang out via emojis called Down To Lunch, which topped the app rankings along with VCs beating down their door with term sheets. Getting knocked off the charts by a vicious rumor that their app helped kidnappers as they call it a purposeful smear campaign the pair of Stanford computer science grads has faced many obstructions. 

Drawing on Viswanathan’s time in product management thereby mentored by executives at Google, Microsoft, and Facebook the two remain resilient as they sat next to Mark Zuckerberg while they brought Steve Ballmer to campus and had meetings with Larry and Sergey with the takeaway being you can have a massive impact on the world as if they can do it, why not we too. They cast aside the budding successors to Down to Lunch they had built as the cryptocurrency hit the zeitgeist in 2017 and thereby dove in headfirst. They eventually spotted the opportunity thereby starting something with more potential than a college kids social app through the frustration of spinning up nodes to build anything decentralized as they saw the chance to seize the bridge layer as the next computing platform called the blockchain. 

The duo is carrying over one strategy from Down to Lunch were it is allowing any Alchemy customer to thereby contact them directly while they had put their phone numbers inside DTL keeping their ears open for problems while recovering about 10,000 text messages per day from the millions of users of the app rendering iMessage from Viswanathan inoperable. While in the email he Hail Mary’d to Tim Cook shows that he’s their only hope begging for a fix that was eventually granted. The fact is that most of Alchemy’s lean team including founders where openly available as customers via Telegram is for instant assistance justifying a CEO was Viswanathan saying it’s not just good customer support as it gives great user feedback while doesn’t want it to change even as the new cash from investors including Stanford’s StartX, Mayfield, Kenetic, Dreamers and former Thompson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer. 

Known in the entrepreneur circles for embracing the thrifty ramen fuelled startup life, Viswanathan and Lau are popular with Lau having once spent six straight days in office to keep things afloat while Down to Lunch was blowing up. The truth is that they still run the scrappy ship as staffers sit on cardboard boxes until chairs have arrived for the new but still snug office. 

To Be Continued

The discussion extends to the next post and here we delve into more reasons behind Alchemy and blockchain.