DAOrayaki Research|Alchemy： Blockchain Developer Platform and Node Services

DAOrayaki

14 min readJun 7, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount：200 USDC

Category: Developer platforms,Alchemy Supernode, Build, Notify, Monitor

Contributor：Jones@Daorayaki，黑白QB@Daorayaki

Project foundation: Alchemy project was first founded on 2017 by Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau.

Chinese Version:https://daorayaki.org/daorayaki-research-the-apis-eng-chn-2/

Fundraising

Alchemy, which is fast becoming the blockchain world’s version of Amazon Web Services (AWS), has raised $80 million. Alchemy’s ubiquitous infrastructure and developer platform has grown since its public launch eight months ago to reach a $505 million valuation, CEO Nikil Viswanathan said in an interview. The round was co-led by Coatue Management, the tech investment manager led by hedge fund maven Philippe Laffont. Coatue also led a $305 million funding round in March for Dapper Labs, one of Alchemy’s customers. Also, involved in the Alchemy round was Addition, the $1.3 billion fund launched last year by tech investor “Lee Fixel”. Other notable participants include electro-pop duo The Chainsmokers and the Glazer family, who own the Manchester United soccer team and the National Football League’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The funding round in Alchemy represents one of the larger blockchain infrastructure bets in recent memory.

I Introduction

Alchemy is the leading blockchain developer platform, and what does that mean essentially is making a product that enables people to create their own apps for the blockchain.

when you look at the past 50 years there’s been three major technology shifts that have defined our lives first the computer came along and the computer gave you this new building block where now machines could follow human instructions you could tell a machine do this and it would do it until it fell apart, and the second thing that came along was the internet and this enabled a new building block also and this allowed machines exchange information between each other and this was completely game changing. Thirdly, blockchain came along and what blockchain does is enables machines to exchange value and this again is another fundamental building block like we’ve never seen before and even when you think about things like artificial intelligence which is a combination of machines following instructions and machines exchanging information, it’s very powerful field but it’s built on these two building blocks and blockchain is the first new technological change to bring a new building block into the toolkit of people who are building software.

The fundamental challenge with any new industry is how does a new technology grow and that technologies always follow the circle of life developers, build, products, and users use those products and then more developers come, because they see people are using what they built so when you see this circle of life there’s always a key challenge for any new industry and that key challenge is it’s difficult for developers to build products, because the tools they have are really primitive in the early days, this is true for the computer this is true for the internet and this is also true for blockchain, in the early days of computers you had to have these little big punch card things and physically lay them out and stack them and put them into like this giant machine that was called a computer, now you can just press a few buttons on this piece of metal sitting in front of you and you can build a website that millions people around the world use.

So, we’ve seen how far the tools for developers on the computing and internet industries came and now alchemy’s mission as a company is to make it easy for developers to build products, and the reason that this is really important is the Archimedes lever for the industry and what that means is when you think about Archimedes, he had this quote where he said “give me a lever long enough and I’ll move the world”. Similarly, by enabling developers to build products by giving them the tools and infrastructure they need. What Alchemy doing is opening up the whole ecosystem because now people can build great products, so more users will come and more developers come and so on and so forth.

So, what is the big challenge for blockchain developers? the challenge is developing blockchain looks like building a website in 1991 with a lot of terminal commands and a lot of coding, so in that fundamentally if you have primitive tools and you’re trying to build a building you can build a mud hut, if you have a stone hammer and a stone chisel but once you get construction equipment you’re able to build skyscrapers and what alchemy’s goal is to enable the builders to bring the magic of blockchain to the world so at a very high level let’s talk about historically how these industries have evolved? looking back at history looking at the computer, the computing industry formed in a three-layer stack at the very bottom there is protocol layer and that protocol was the RAM the CPU the hard-drive, the physical components that made up a computer the challenge was very very difficult to code and build applications for that kind of hardware layer because you had to write in computer language and ones and zeros right. So, you couldn’t make things like excel word chrome which are what we know as a computer today.

The innovation happened when Microsoft and Apple created the operating systems and what the operating system fundamentally does it’s something that we use for most of our daily live tasks, we don’t even think about it because it’s just in the background but what it does is it abstracts away the underlying hardware and makes it really easy for developers to build applications on top of this. In other words, think of it as a translation layer on top of the hardware that unlocks the power of the hardware for the developers, but makes their lives easy and enables them to create these applications and as you look at this you see that this actually fuels the cycle of innovation and industry, because now developers can build products so more users come so more developers build more applications and the operating system gets better and more applications are built and so on and so forth.

When you look at the internet you see a very similar layout where at the very bottom there is the followed protocol which either http, ftp, or smtp for those of you may not be familiar these are the core technologies that run the internet, but in order to build Netflix or Uber or Pinterest a platform layer is required such as AWS is Amazon Web Services, it is the abstraction layer on top of these technologies that enables it to be to these applications to be built. One really interesting thing to note is for those of you who may not be familiar with Amazon Web Services. Amazon actually has two businesses one business is a shopping business, where you can go and buy things this is most what most of us think of Amazon as. Amazon actually has another business that most people don’t know about, which is called Amazon Web Services (AWS) what AWS does is it is the infrastructure layer that powers most of the internet platforms suh as Netflix Uber, Airbnb, Doordash, and Snapchat so on. All these companies use AWS or similar technology underneath the hood to build their applications, so every time you open Uber you’re actually using AWS making it alone a trillion dollar business, which shows you how big the industry and the opportunity there is and the crazy part is two-thirds of amazon’s profits actually come from AWS and only one-third comes from the retail and shopping business so it shows you how important the platform layer is in making and growing the internet and enabling that industry.

Similarly, when you look at blockchain Alchemy is that platform layer there is bitcoin, ethereum there’s flow there’s all these different blockchains and Alchemy is providing the developer tools and the infrastructure needed to access these technologies, so essentially what Alchemy do is making it easy for developers to build on the blockchain and this enables a whole broad set of industries of specific verticals to come up and what you’ll see with Alchemy power centralized exchanges the basically huge chunk of the NFT industry for those of you who are familiar with NTFs like the Beeple art sale, the Patrick Mahomes NFT and a lot of financial applications and these are just a couple examples, just like the internet AWS powers food delivery and ride sharing and video streaming, and things like Youtube and Doordash and Uber. Alchemy powers a broad section of crypto everything from centralized exchanges to decentralized finance to NTFs to organizations like unicef in in all corners of the globe.

So, alchemy at a very high level is this developer platform that enables people to create applications. One really interesting thing to think about is developer platforms, which are one tiny piece of the computer and internet industries, which are one tiny piece of technology industries, which are one tiny piece of all industries in the world, and even though this is one tiny tiny tiny fraction of all the industries in the world. Moreover, the most valuable companies on earth and the most impactful, if you look at these companies the biggest way you can have the broad impact on the planet is to build a developer platform such Apple Microsoft Amazon these are three of the four most valuable companies on the planet and they’re all developer platforms and you can argue that you know to Alphabet , Tencent, Facebook these all have segments of their companies, which are developer platforms which fundamentally the core nature of a developer platform is it enables people to build applications on top of that technology.

As blockchain grows if blockchain grows to even a fraction of the insides of the internet, which is obviously what is expected to happened or could even potentially be as big as the internet, then Alchemy has a chance to really help create this movement and bring this technology to the world, which is why it’s so exciting. One other thing to understand is developer platforms index the industry. Alchemy’s success is not dependent on NFTs being successful or Finance being successful similar to how Amazon doesn’t need ride sharing to be successful or food delivery to be successful, if anything in the industry succeeds AWS has a chance to succeed same thing with Alchemy, if anything in blockchain succeeds Alchemy has a chance to really build a meaningful impact for the for the world.

For the last bit the alchemy big vision is when you really think about what the blockchain industry can do for the world in terms of bringing democratizing access to financial services and developing new technologies and creating new experiences that weren’t possible before like NFTs this is a really exciting space it’s like we’re in 1991 and get to build the internet from scratch.

II Team members

- Nikil Viswanathan is the Cofounder and CEO of Alchemy, the world’s leading blockchain developer platform. He was honored as Forbes 30 Under 30, received his BS & MS in Computer Science at Stanford, and formerly did product management at Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. A serial entrepreneur, he co-created the #1 social app in the world, Down To Lunch, which was featured in international media such as a New York Times business cover story. He’s been featured in numerous global media outlets including the New York Times, Forbes, NBC, Business Insider, and TechCrunch.

- Accounts:

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikilster

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Nikilster

- Github: https://github.com/nikilster

- JOE LAU is the cofounder and CTO of Alchemy. A serial entrepreneur, he cofounded the #1 social app in the world and has been featured in international media including a New York Times Business cover story, Forbes, Business Insider, and TechCrunch. He has been honored as Forbes 30 under 30, formerly did engineering at Pinterest, Google, and Linkedin. Joe graduated with both an undergraduate and master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University.

- Accounts:

- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephlau

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/thejoelau

III Alchemy Core products

In order to facilitate Ethereum development a suite of developer tools, enhances APIs, and superior node infrastructure have been built to make the building and running of blockchain applications seamless.

Alchemy Supernode:

Alchemy Supernode is the mose widely used Ethereum API with all the functionality of a node, with supercharger reliability, data correctness, and scalability.

Benefits:

1.Reliability:

-Peak reliability node services.

-100% Data Correctness.

-Dynamic Scalability.

2.Extended Capabilities:

-Instant On (no setup or sync times)

-Instant Testnets.

-Enhanced API.

-Real-time state consistency.

3.Easy to Use:

-One-line infrastructure API.

-1000+ engineering hours saved per year.

Nodes are hard:

The traditional Web 2.0 approach to scaling infrastructure uses multiple, indistinguishable servers managed by a load balancer, but with blockchain, applications can’t treat nodes indistinguishably because each node syncs and stores data from the blockchain asynchronously.

- Running nodes behind a load balancer may result in inconsistent data since the latest block on each node might be different.

- Data inconsistencies force developers to introduce tons of complicated workarounds and lead to inevitable errors that crash applications and ruin user experience.

- Apps that run directly on nodes suffer high latency and downtime because nodes are general-purpose and not designed to be highly available.

- Without a new approach to infrastructure design, developers are forced to choose between state consistency and scale.

Alchemy Supernode:

Alchemy Supernode is a new kind of infrastructure for decentralized applications with the following benefits:

- Ensures data is always correct, real-time and in sync thanks to a proprietary coordinator service.

- Powers each piece of node functionality with a dedicated, distributed system — the same systems used by Facebook and Amazon for achieving massive scale.

- Scales quickly and seamlessly so you can spend more time shipping products and delighting users.

- Includes enhanced API methods and upgraded WebSockets to continuously listen for changes and automatically handle reconnection and backfilling missed events.

- One-line infrastructure API that not only does all the jobs of a single node, but also comes with the uptime, availability, and necessities to run a production application.

Architecture:

Alchemy Supernode’s innovative architecture for web3 scales every piece of node functionality with dedicated distributed systems, and maintains real-time data correctness with a proprietary coordinator service.

Features:

Data Correctness:

Eliminate unexpected crashes by ensuring data is always correct, real-time, and in sync thanks to a proprietary coordinator service.

Peak Reliability:

Achieve best-in-class uptime, protected by highly available infrastructure, instead of suffering from high latency and downtime by using nodes directly.

Infinite Scalability:

Scale your infrastructure quickly and seamlessly so that you can spend more time shipping products and delighting users.

Alchemy Notify:

Benefits:

- Increase User Engagement: Increases user engagement and retention by improving overall UX dramatically.

- Easy Integration: No crazy infrastructure or complicated processes, engage your users in less than 15 minutes. Create a new hook in 1-click, configure, then start notifying.

- Rich Developer Insights: Get access to all of the events your users care about, like mined and dropped transactions, plus powerful webhooks to instantly notify when these events happen.

Notifications don’t exist in blockchain:

- UX and lack of relevant notifications is one of the biggest inhibitors to the growth of blockchain apps.

- Getting the information required to notify users about web3 events is complicated and requires large amounts of dev time and extra infrastructure.

- It’s impossible for developers to trigger notifications for important events like dropped transactions.

Alchemy Notify:

Alchemy Notify enables you to send relevant, timely notifications on the most important Web3 events with the following benefits:
Starts working with a two-click creation process, doing all the hard work for you.
Has built in notifications for mined transactions, dropped transactions and smart contract events.

Features:

Mined Transactions: Let your users know exactly when their deposits, purchases, in-game actions or other on-chain activity has officially occurred — the perfect time to re-engage and keep using your application.
Dropped Transactions: Let your users respond immediately when transactions fail, eliminating the most frustrating part of blockchain UX. No more missed trades, lost auctions, or disappearing tokens.
Address Activity: Let your users know when transaction activity occurs on their address. No more refreshing the page or having to watch each new block and create custom filters to track user’s data. The Address Activity webhooks include notifications for:External Transfers. Internal Transfers. Token Transfers.
Gas Price: The Gas Price Webhook allows you to receive a notification every minute when the Mainnet gas price rises above or drops below a certain threshold that you can select.

Alchemy Build:

Benefits:

- Build Faster: Release products faster and save engineering time.

- Debug: Debug new things that were not possible before.

- Enhanced Customer Experience: Resolve Customer issues faster, creating a better experience for end users.

Debugging is difficult:

Good tools for debugging customer issues in blockchain do not exist like they do for modern web and mobile development.
Blockchain developers spend days of engineering time to debug simple problems.
Much of the data that is necessary for debugging is not accessible by developers, and if it is, there are no tools to search or filter results.
Debugging issues inevitably results in product downtime for users when they run into bugs.

Alchemy Build:

Alchemy Build lets you easily investigate bugs in your blockchain product with the following benefits:

Search through millions of your historical requests in milliseconds.
Gives you clear, filterable, human-readable access to all of your product’s activity.
Provides specific tools for diagnosing and solving super complex issues like Mempool errors.
Lets you quickly prototype and fix failing requests with immediate UI feedback, so you can ship fixes to your customers faster.

Features:

Explorer: Instantly search through millions of historical requests to find specific bugs, performance optimizations, or patterns of errors.

Mempool Visualizer: View the real-time state of transactions in the Mempool in order to identify delayed, stuck, or dropped transactions.

Composer: Make JSON-RPC calls directly from the dashboard in order to prototype and fix failing requests or explore the behavior of new methods.

Debug Toolkit: Quickly scan recent requests and recent errors, plus a real-time query visualizer to help you debug faster than ever.

Alchemy Monitor:

- Prevent not React: Improve developer experience by allowing your team to prevent issues before they happen.

- Increase Performance and Efficiency: Understand and increase the performance and efficiency of your app.

- Gain Developer Insights: Gain insights about user behavior and growth trends that are currently unavailable.

- Easy Integration: No code, no configuration-works out of the box.

Monitoring tools don’t exist:

Developers spend more time reacting to active issues than preventing them from happening in the first place, sacrificing nights of sleep in the process.
Because Web3 monitoring tools are non-existent, developers learn about errors at the same time as their users.
Traditional analytics fail Web3 developers, as they don’t capture all the data they need.
Developers don’t have time to spend on deep integrations with new products.

Alchemy Monitor benefit:

Alchemy monitor provides you with the data you need, and has the following benefits:

Collects and surfaces critical information about overall application health, making it easy to catch and solve issues before they balloon.

Enables real time error monitoring and alerting, so your team will be the first to know about issues.

Gives developers deep and rich analytics to understand application performance and usage, and see in real time how optimizations are affecting these stats.

Lets you see where in the world your product is being used, and how adoption is growing in different markets.

Works out of the box with Alchemy Supernode, no additional effort required.

Features:

Command Center: Instantly check on the high-level health of all your apps in one place, including requests per second, response time, and error rates.

Usage Analytics: Review specific app usage over time, compare and contrast production and staging, or two different apps completely, and even deep dive into app usage by method.

User Insights: Gain invaluable insights on your user behavior with aggregated geographic, traffic, and activity data without compromising privacy or security.

Alers and Digests: Receive automated alerts whenever your app hits errors and needs your attention. Plus, get a daily report of key health metrics so you never lose touch with performance