Original Source: Alpha Rabbit Research Notes

Original Author: Alpha Rabbit

Editor's note:Original Source: Alpha Rabbit Research Notes

Original Author: Alpha Rabbit

In the era of Web 1.0, IBM underestimated the personal PC market, and Microsoft quickly entered this track through Windows. Web 2.0, browsers and mobile OSs shine, and Apple and Google conquer the market. If Web3 really comes, as an infrastructure in the encryption ecosystem, Alchemy is a company worth studying. The founder is a serial entrepreneur with a background in Stanford. His valuation soared from US$100 million to US$3.5 billion within one year. Investors include stars Jay Z and Will Smith, and users include OpenSea.

Structure of this article

What is the story about Alchemy's entrepreneurship and development? What enlightenment does the development of Alchemy bring us? How do investors perceive the company? What are the potential problems with such companies? These are the questions that this article attempts to explore.

• Structure of this article

• financing history

• 1. Company Profile

founder background

• Alchemy user

• what needs are met

2. Overview and business model

• Business model: Alchemy - the AWS of encryption track

• 3. The development history of Alchemy

• a set of data

• It's all about user experience

• Why launch Alchemy Notify? Where are the pain points in the market

• a set of data

Problems in the current blockchain development environment

• A16Z

Application of Alchemy in the field of DeFi

• voice from user

Possible potential problems with Alchemy

Company Profile

5. The Founder's Vision

—Alchemy

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Company Profile

• Alchemy's goal is to become AWS (Amazon Web Service) in the Web3 world

Founded in 2017, Alchemy is a blockchain infrastructure company whose main business is to provide blockchain development platform services for blockchain developers and improve user experience. It is currently operating in 197 countries around the world, with millions of users.

Nikil Viswanathan CEO

By building development tools and computing infrastructure, Alchemy aims to enable the future of MultiChain. Developers and engineers can build applications on various blockchains by using Alchemy's tools and computing-type infrastructure, and Alchemy can help developers on many different chains. In 2021, Alchemy will provide tens of millions of users around the world with a cross-chain approach, laying technical support for Web3 transactions of more than 45 billion US dollars.

founder background

Joe Lau CTO

Co-Founder and CEO

Serial entrepreneur, graduated from Stanford University with a master's degree in computer science, and is also the co-founder of the well-known social application Down To Lunch. NIKIL previously worked on products at Google, Microsoft, and Facebook."Co-founder and CTO"The two founders are both founders of the social platform Down to Lunch. They are both aggressive and frugal. It once happened that due to the influx of tens of thousands of text messages from Down to Lunch users, NIKIL's iMessage could not work. Then NIKIL boldly issued a message to Apple CEO Cook

financing history

you are our only hope

email, and Cook helped them resolve the issue. These two entrepreneurs are known for their frugality in the entrepreneurial circle. JOE LAU once stayed in the office for six consecutive days. Before that, many employees of the company worked on cardboard boxes.

financing history

In April 2019, Alchemy received its first round of financing;

In December 2019, Alchemy raised US$15 million in Series A financing, led by Aditya Agarwal and other institutions;

On October 28, 2021, Alchemy raised $250 million in Series C financing, with a valuation of $3.5 billion;

Alchemy users

user

image description

Alchemy's main customers: pictures from the official website

user

Alchemy's enterprise-level users include Binance Wallet, OpenSea, CryptoKitties, Kyber, 0x, Binance Wallet, Gods Unchained, Opera, Maker, etc. According to estimates, 70% of the top blockchain applications in the future will be developed using Alchemy author tools, which could represent a significant advance in quality and time-to-market for application developers.

Overview and Business Model

Business model: Alchemy - the AWS of encryption track

To further explain, Alchemy is similar to a B2B software development stack that can help developers easily build applications that run on the blockchain. Blockchain networks and DApps need to find a way to interact. Alchemy provides an out-of-the-box solution. Through Alchemy, developers can focus on building applications for users.

What needs are met?

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ImageFrom Alchemy

Alchemy applies a completely different decentralized architecture, separating different types of data into special data storage, improving speed and reliability, that is, applications can be built on the chain with fewer engineering resources, Very similar to Amazon's AWS.

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The History of Alchemy

When Alchemy first started its business, the market size was only 5 million, and it entered this industry relatively early. In 2018, Alchemy joined the Google Launchpad Studio accelerator.

In 2020, it's all about user experience

In 2020, Alchemy will launch a new feature: Alchemy Notify, a push notification for developers, which aims to replace the nodes used by enterprises to read and write on the blockchain with a convenient and scalable infrastructure. Hope to coexist with a developer platform, providing a tool that can monitor, alert and debug cryptocurrency software.

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ImageFrom Alchemy

Why launch Alchemy Notify?

Where are the pain points in the market"This notification function greatly improves the convenience of interaction between developers and blockchain programs. Users can know their real-time events about their own blockchain at any time, such as earning interest, which Tokens are no longer available, someone bids for their NFT in real time, transaction status, etc., which saves users a lot of time."

a set of data

The CEO of Alchemy believes that solving user pain points is always the first priority.

For the blockchain industry to be truly successful, it needs to create simple and understandable products that are accessible to ordinary users. Alchemy focuses on giving developers the functionality they need to create these intuitive user experiences.

a set of data

In productivity apps, the retention rate of notification push users is 460% higher than the retention rate of users who do not receive notifications.

Alchemy CTO Joe Lau thinks. The Alchemy Notify function was launched to make blockchain products as easy to use as traditional web/mobile applications. If you refer to the huge impact and changes that notification push has brought to the mobile application ecosystem and App in the Web 2.0 era, you can understand the significance of Notify.

image description

image description

ImageFrom Alchemy

In July 2020, Alchemy plans to launch Alchemy Build, which aims to change the current problems in the blockchain development industry through new construction tools. The new development tools are expected to make blockchain development engineers more friendly.

Problems in the current blockchain development environment

Alchemy internal research shows that blockchain engineers spend up to 12 hours per week on work related to debugging, customer issues and release cycles, which is time-costly and stifles innovation."The Alchemy Build tool works out of the box and requires no configuration. The toolkit includes a resource manager that searches historical requests to identify errors and optimization opportunities. Also included are Mempool Visualizer, through which developers can view real-time transaction status on-chain; Composer, which can be used for prototyping and modeling; and Debug Toolkit, a real-time visualizer that can inspect code.

"For the blockchain industry, since it involves key positions such as decentralized finance, internal operations of enterprises, and public chains, the reliability of blockchain deployment is extremely important. Some blockchain companies offer bug bounties to white-hat hackers who look for flaws and loopholes in their own code, while some blockchain companies often delay project releases when they find weak and potentially vulnerable bugs."

But in the future, through the application developer tool Alchemy Build, it can help blockchain developers solve some problems.

"Many blockchain developers will repeatedly invent the wheel on the same problem. Through Alchemy Build, the development steps can be simplified.

Web 2.0 has industry standard tools like DataDog that make prototyping and debugging more efficient, but within the blockchain industry, we still have people doing basic tasks like decoding hexadecimal instead of focusing on creating the next breakthrough Applications.

In August 2020, Alchemy released the official version.

Alchemy's mission is to make blockchain accessible to all developers, and to spread the magic of blockchain to the world, aiming to continuously empower blockchain developers."Application of Alchemy in the field of DeFi"In the field of DeFi, Alchemy provides solutions for MakerDAO, 0x and other DeFi projects. In August 2020, CEO Nikil stated that more than 70% of well-known Ethereum applications, with a total value of more than 2.8 billion US dollars in assets running in DeFi, use Alchemy to access blockchain data."Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs, one of Alchemy's users, believes that startups use Alchemy to"management infrastructure

, plus

Enterprise-grade development tools and support

, which improves the efficiency. Developers pay startups like Alchemy to obtain infrastructure and hardware tools to facilitate the use of blockchain data, making it easier for blockchain startups to focus on C-end users."voice from user

Alchemy has seen a 10-fold increase in revenue from April 2021 to August 2021, and its clients include OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, UNICEF, and the Big Four accounting firms."According to Kent Barton, Head of Research and Development at ShapeShift:"

By applying Alchemy Build's development tool suite, it helps us gain more convenience in developing Web3 infrastructure. As we launch our blockchain product Microtick, it is important to focus on development.

Audius veteran engineer Sid Sethi said:

With Alchemy Build, our monthly user base has grown to over 200,000 listeners, and these dev tool suites have saved us many sleepless nights debugging code.

In April 2021, Alchemy raised US$80 million in Series B financing, with a valuation of US$500 million.

The application scope of blockchain is getting wider and wider. More and more users are participating in the encryption track, using various blockchain applications to buy and sell assets, play games, store data, etc. All these businesses must run securely, elastically and efficiently on software. Through Alchemy, developers can build applications on the blockchain, which is one of the cornerstones of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Investor's point of view

Ali Yahya From A16Z

The continued popularization of the overall application of the encrypted track and ecology will further lead to an increase in the company's valuation. By the end of 2021, through various applications built by Alchemy, transactions will reach 30 billion U.S. dollars, with tens of millions of users. Most of the NFT companies in the world are using Alchemy.

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Investor's point of view

Modern blockchains are programmable blockchains, just like a personal computer or a smartphone. Blockchains can be seen as a new type of computer with unique capabilities: allowing programmers to write code and make changes to how it works. promise. For example, Bitcoin promises that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins.

The founders are dedicated and have a sense of mission, with a grand pattern and vision. With strong execution ability and excellent team building ability, he quickly convened the world's top-level entrepreneurial team.

other comments

In terms of business metrics, Alchemy's growth over the past year has been phenomenal, quickly outpacing their competitors. The Alchemy platform can currently provide support for most leading companies and protocols in the web3 field, including Aave, Axie Infinity, Dapper Labs, Flow, OpenSea, etc. are Alchemy users. Based on the Alchemy infrastructure, more than $45 billion in web3-based transactions occur on Alchemy every year, and this number is growing rapidly.

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What are the potential problems with Alchemy?

The biggest threat to the company is how quickly the crypto racetrack will become a huge market, even though Alchemy makes a lot of money selling tens of thousands of dollars in tools and service packages. But starting the flywheel of blockchain developers and truly moving towards a business that serves mainstream users is considered a breakthrough success.

As a development and engineering-focused company, it will be relatively difficult to convince companies to outsource critical parts of their infrastructure to Alchemy if they are sales-oriented. Alchemy just hired its first salesperson a while ago to pitch business tycoons interested in blockchain. However, since Alchemy does help industry companies solve problems and meet their needs, it's not so bad.

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The Vision of the Founders of Alchemy

"In the next few years, we really hope to empower the growth of the entire blockchain industry and strive to popularize this technology to everyone on the planet. The blockchain industry has so far faced various challenges."