Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Alchemy – A Powerful Developer Platform and API for Ethereum Apps

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

Alchemy is a powerful blockchain developer platform providing a suite of developer tools. Developers building apps which interact with Ethereum can use Alchemy's powerful APIs to supercharge their apps, and leverage features not available in vanilla nodes. They also provide services like analytics, monitoring, alerting, logging and debugging.Today, a number of the top Dapps in the Ethereum ecosystem use Alchemy, and the company recently made their API available to the general public. We chatted to Nikil Viswanathan, CEO & Co-founder about the platform, how it works and the problems it solves. We also addressed the concerns around centralization and ecosystem resiliency.Topics covered in this episode:Nikil's background and how he got into cryptoThe Blockchain infrastructureWhy Alchemy chose to focus EthereumOn building developer tools, and what Alchemy offersHow it works on a technical level and how it’s different from what else is available on the marketWhat can users do with supernodesPlans for expanding into validation and other services in the futureConcerns for user privacyAdoption of Alchemy among crypto projectsNikil’s views on centralization concerns and ecosystem resiliencyHow Jay-Z become an investor/advisor and other interesting partnerships with AlchemyWhere to learn more and join AlchemyEpisode links: Alchemy WebsiteGet started on AlchemyAlchemy SupernodeAlchemy on TwitterNikil on TwitterSponsors: Algorand: Learn how to start building on Algorand – Free webinar on November 17th - https://algorand.com/epicenterThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/364

This is Epicenter, episode 364 with Nikil Viswanatan. Hi, I'm Sebastian Quirjo and you're listening to Epicenter, the podcast where we interview crypto founders, builders, and thought leaders. On this show, we dive deep to learn how things work at a technical level and we fly high to understand visionary concepts and long-term trends. If you like Epicenter, the best way to support us is to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you're on a Mac or iOS device, you can do that by going to epicenter.rocks slash Apple. Today our guest is Nikiel Vishwanatan. He's the co-founder and CEO of Alchemy.

Alchemy is a platform that provides a suite of developer APIs and tools for Ethereum. So running and maintaining an Ethereum node, well, it's not that easy, especially if you're doing that in a production environment where you might have thousands of users depending on those nodes to use your app. And over the years, we've seen several services enter the space that provide APIs like these. In Fuera is probably the most notable example. Well, Alchemy came around about two years ago, and they just came out of stealth mode, so you can now go to their website, create an account, and start using the API right away.

And what they do is they obfuscate away node infrastructure, and they offer a suite of tools that make it super easy for developers to just start building. So their API provides all of the endpoints that you would expect from a vanilla Ethereum node, but there's also all these other things that they offer that you just don't get out of the box with a VARPyriam node. but there's also all these other things that they offer that you just don't get out of the box with a vanilla node. So, for example, you can make an API call that will pull up all of the tokens and balances available on an address. That's something that would take, you know, lots of time to build if you were doing that on top of a vanilla node. You'd have to build that infrastructure yourself. They also provide access to the trace module in the Open Ethereum client, or previously known as the parity client. and they have monitoring tools with usage analytics,

which is really useful for a developer. And another cool feature that I really like, which is a notification API for mobile app. So if you have, say, a wallet, for example, and that wallet has to send, you know, a notification to a user when a transaction completes or when they receive funds on an address, for example, well, they have the API that allows you to build that into your app really easily.

So I really like Alchemy because, I mean, generally I'm just a fan of developer tools, that make it easy for people to onboard and build on a platform. And if I was building an Ethereum app today, I don't know if I'd have the patience or the skills to set up, you know, the node infrastructure and the APIs for my app. So I can definitely see myself using something like this to build the prototype and even take an app into production.

So I think having more services like this is a really good sign for the ecosystem because it shows that there's a certain level of maturity in the space, and it just allows developers to come in and start, building apps on Ethereum without having to learn all of the intricacies of running and maintaining infrastructure. I do have some concerns, however, about services like these creating central points of failure in Ethereum. And this is a concern I have not only with alchemy, but other APIs, validation services,

node providers in general. So on one hand, I think there's a natural tendency to move towards more services like these because it creates a more robust infrastructure for the apps in the ecosystem, and it just takes away a lot of overhead for developers. But on the other hand, I think it would be undesirable to end up in a situation where, let's say, 80% or more of the apps in the ecosystem rely on one or two services like these. I think that in a situation such as this, it would be reasonable to then ask the question, what's the point if most of the apps and services. in Defi were relying on a handful of services that could potentially shut down or censor

transactions, for example. So I think this is something that should remain top of mind and should be part of the ongoing conversation in Ethereum when it comes to the ecosystem that we want to build. And I invite companies like Alchemy to also take part in that conversation. Before we go to our interview with Nikil, I'd like to tell you about a free webinar that will teach you how to get started and build sophisticated applications on the platform. This is suitable for both enterprise developers or independent blockchain developers. It's happening on November 17th. And I'll tell you a little bit more about it later on during the interview.

But for now, here's our conversation with Nikiel Vishwanata. We're here with Nikil Vishwanatan. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you for having me. We've been wanting to have you on for a little while now. Alchemy has been in the space for somewhere around three years, I want to say. And recently the company kind of came out of stealth mode. Like for a while, it was, I remember, you know, looking into alchemy like in 2018 and it seemed a bit selfie.

And, you know, like you had this, like, I remember there was still like this, you know, contact us to use the platform kind of thing. And now it's like a full-blown, you know, developer platform that you can create an account. Like I did that before joining this call and, like, you'd play around with the, with the tool. and everything. And so, yeah, tell us a bit of a bigger background and how you became involved in the blockchain space. Yeah, absolutely. So quick background. So I actually grew up in this small town in Texas that no one's ever heard of. You know, there's no building over four stories tall and everyone drove a pickup track. It was super fun. Came to Stanford, did my undergrad and grad in computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and had a really great time. Absolutely

loved it. Always knew I wanted to do small company startup stuff. Ironically, over the summers, I ended up doing the exact opposite, which was product management at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. And I had started a couple of companies in college, post-college. You know, I really thought about my life. And I realized, I was like, what do I want to do? Had one of those, you know, one-tenth or one-eighth life crises thing and thought about I said, you know, what do I want to do with my life?

And I think when I think about my life personally, the way I measure it is on two axes. Your x-axis is how many people's lives do you touch and your Y-axis is how deeply do you impact their life every day? and it's basically the number of people times the depth of impact. And for me, that kind of X-axis was always obvious. Never before in human history could you press buttons on this magic metal box and build something that every person across the planet used, right? And that is so crazy that we live in a day and age with computers, with software, with internet,

and blockchain, we can build products that affect everyone around the world. And this wasn't possible 20 years ago. When you think about the major shifts that happened in the world, you know, before 20 years ago, the major forces that governed our world were countries, government, religion, like, these kind of things. And today it's technology, right? Technology companies, the Facebook, the Google, the YouTube, Instagram have a bigger impact than essentially any country in the world. So for me, that was, you know, from a young age, I loved computers. I knew this is what I wanted to do. I had built a bunch of things, you know, at this point in my life probably built like 50, 60 different

products since I was in sixth grade. So that was just something I love doing. I love creating. I love making things. And the YXCs for me was really interesting. And we had, you know, how do you really have daily impact on daily positive impact on people's lives? And I'd come through this kind of rough period post-college where I missed all my friends. I was really lonely. I'd broken with my long-term girlfriend. We'd start this company, but it wasn't working out. And I really thought about it. I said, you know, what is the number one thing that determines your happiness on a daily basis? And for me, that was the people I was around, right? Imagine that time when you're surrounded to be all these incredible, amazing people.

And you're just like truly happy. And I said, you know, I really want to recreate that. And if I can do that for every person on the planet, that would be amazing. And everyone was like, you know, that's crazy. It's so impossible to do. But if you could do it, that would be the best thing ever. So we spent several years, my co-founder, actually my same co-founder with Alchemy, Joe, who we met at Stanford and TA in the database class.

It was funny because we tanned the database class. And normally it's an easy class to TA because you have like 100 students. It's really fun. It's really easy. That quarter, they decided to say, hey, what? if we turn it to open it up to anybody in the world can use do the class? Turns out 120,000 students signed up for the class. And I remember staying up the night before writing code to integrate PDF certificates and all these things. So the story is the next quarter that became Coursera.

So we were Joe and I were kind of like the first unpaid employees of Corsair. So we met there. We've been working on products to make you feel like you live with your friends. We built a bunch of different products. It was really hard. It took a long time and nothing was working. We built this one app. We thought no one we use it, and suddenly, like, it becomes a number one app in the app store and social, millions of people around the world from page generic times. It's kind of this crazy story, which I'm happy to go into. But during that time, we had seen, so this was around 2015 to 2017, and we had seen crypto for a really long time, and we actually really believed in it.

And it was interesting because a couple of the guys who lived in our apartment complex, a couple units below us, were Michael and Yanni, and they started this company called Wire. And we used to all hang out, and we played beer pond, and we played beer pond, and party together. And we'd have these like 3 a.m. conversations to how like Bitcoin was the future of the world. And, you know, Joe and I like totally believed in it and really excited about it. But I think there was a fundamental shift for us where, you know, we had this heart to heart in 2017.

And we were like, wow, like we've seen this happen for a long time. But there's a massive new shift happening with Ethereum. And Ethereum was really the game changer for us. And the reason it was the game changer for us was it was no longer digital currency, which we totally believed in. but we had said, hey, we're going to dedicate our lives this other thing. But suddenly we realized it was a new paradigm in terms of programming. It was a new fundamental building block. Like when you think about the big shifts in technology over the last, you know, 50 years,

you have the computer, the internet, and blockchain. And the computer, they fundamentally give you a new building block, each one of these. So computer says, hey, we're going to let you create programs. The internet says, we're going to give you a new building block of instant connectivity. You can connect with anyone, anytime, anywhere, right? And what can you create with that? right and what blockchain does is it gives you a new building block says you can have or what Ethereum does it says you can have programmable money and that was amazing to us we said wow like

this is going to change everything and you know when you think about a lot of our investors had founded a lot of these you know seminal companies in in for the internet age or the computer age you know where there's Yahoo or LinkedIn or Google like we we had seen we had seen them kind of be in the right place to the right time we said look this is another massive shift if blockchain plays out like we think it will be, this will be an internet-scale technology, and we can't miss this. So that's kind of the genesis of how we got really excited about it, and the rest is history. So talk about your Y-axis. So basically, alchemy, it gives us blockchain developer infrastructure. How do you figure blockchain developer infrastructure touches people this deeply?

Absolutely. That's a great question. So I think when I think about this, when you're going back to the three big shifts, I really, this is really like my mental framework. computer internet blockchain and they actually all formed in a similar way where at the fun let's just look at the computer it's a little hard to kind of visualize without a diagram which i usually use but just use your imagination for now so at the bottom layer the computer was a bunch of hardware right it was a set of protocol so it was your ram your hard drive your CPU all the fundamental components that made a computer but a computer was just a fancy typewriter until you had user applications right At the very top layer is Word, Excel, Chrome,

like these kind of things that enable computers for everyone around the world to be accessible, besides the people who know how to write code. So when you think about that, bottom layer, hardware, and protocol layer, and then the top layer of applications, the middle layer is the platform layer. And what the platform layer does,

so for the computer, that was Microsoft Windows and Apple MacOS, what it does is it abstracts away the hardware, and it makes it easy for developing, to build applications. So now what happens is developers can build things so normal users can use those. And then once it has this virtuous cycle

because now users come and they say, oh, wow, there's a lot of applications. Let me come use this cool thing called a computer. So then more developers come because now there's more applications and more users. And then they create more applications and so on and so forth. So when you look at the internet, you see exactly the same thing.

It's just three-layer stack. The bottom is HTTP, FTP, SMTP, like the protocols that run the internet. And we actually, there was an internet before the worldwide web, right? But what is the internet today to us? It's Facebook. It's YouTube. It's Google.

And that top layer is application layer. And the abstraction layer in the middle that was needed, the developer platform layer is actually the web browser, right? And that is what abstracts the way to underlying protocols and makes it easy for developers to build. So similarly in blockchain, what we see is you have Ethereum, you have Bitcoin, you have all these other chains, right? And that's the bottom layer.

And people are trying to build applications, you know, anything from a coinbase to, you know, Walmart doing stuff on the blockchain to a crypto kiddies to games, whatever it is. These applications, applications can be anything, right? And the challenge is we're kind of in the early days of a computer in the sense of in the early days, what happened? You know, IBM built their own operating system, a deck built their own operating system, and Altaire built their own operating system. Everyone had their own operating system. So, but then Windows came along and said, hey, we're going to make it easy. for developers, and we're going to standardize this. So the way we see ourselves, and, you know, obviously each technology is slightly different. The internet is slightly different from computer,

we're slightly different from blockchain, but fundamentally what we see ourselves as and what our mission here is to enable the builders to create applications and provide value to users. If you think about that chain of how blockchain adoption happens, it's developers, build applications, and users use those applications and get real value from it. And what we're seeing right now is it's kind of like the 1991 of the internet where it's so difficult to build. It's so hard to build. And our goal as a company is to enable builders by letting them have the tools they need to

build great applications. And so why focus on the developer infrastructure and more specifically why Ethereum, why this focus on Ethereum when there's so many other blockchains out there? Absolutely. That's a great question. So let me answer the first question first. So why develop our infrastructure? So going back to the, at the end of the day, what do we want out of blockchain?

What is the purpose of blockchain? The purpose of any new technology, well, I guess scientists think it's interesting just for the hell of it. But the reason that new technology exists is to provide value to people around the world and enable them to do new things that were never possible before. And this is a little bit of a sidetrack, but one of my main thoughts around adoption of blockchain is we will know that blockchain is successfully adopted once the word blockchain and crypto is no longer used, right? And let me explain that. So when you go to dinner, you don't say, oh, you know, I use this internet app to call a car to get me here and I'm using a computer app to swipe my credit card and pay,

right? You just say like, no, I called an Uber and then I, you know, just pay to Apple pay or swipe my card. And once there's utility that is provided, that is the technology is irrelevant. We have to get the point where if we were mentioning blockchain in the product name, then it's not valuable because it's not a new technology. So we need to get to a point where the technology and the product value from that is the value that the user gets. And it's not, I'm using this because it's blockchain. So the second question is, how do we actually get there? How do we get to a state where there's tremendous value provided by blockchain to people around the world? Which all of us obviously believe in because that's why we're here. And the answer to that is going to

Going back to that chain, developers, build applications, and those users use applications. And the challenge is that first link in that chain is a critical piece because it's almost today, imagine trying to build a skyscraper with a hammer and a shovel. That's the state of the ecosystem today where it's so difficult to build applications. And our goal is saying, hey, you know, instead of a hammer shovel, if you want to build the Empire State Building, and we give you a crane, we give you a bulldozer, we give you, I love construction. equipment, so I know a lot of these names, but we will give you the power tools and the construction equipment needed to create the applications. And the reason that we chose this is we said,

this is the single most important value add we can do to the ecosystem and help push the ecosystem forward. And then the second question is why Ethereum? And the answer is that's where the majority of developers are. And Alchemy will support and is in the process of supporting any chain that has a lot of developer adoption because our goal is to push for the entire ecosystem. We're not, we don't take alliances on certain chains. Our goal is saying, people want to create things with blockchain. How do we make that happen? And how do we help the ecosystem and the builders? Algarand is running a free webinar to teach developers how they can use the platform to build sophisticated applications for use cases like crowdfunding, asset tokenization, supply

chain management, and even gaming applications. You'll learn how to get started with the command line tools and use the SDK and Rest APIs. You'll also learn about the Al-Gran Foundation's grant program and additional funding opportunities that the Al-Grand ecosystem has to offer. So if you're building on a blockchain protocol that has unfeasibly high transaction fees and doesn't provide the speed you need, or if you work for a large enterprise or financial institution and are interested in learning how to build applications that could integrate in your current technology stack, or if you have no blockchain experience at all and just are looking to take that first step and there's something new, well, this webinar could be for you.

Visit Algarand.com slash epicenter to sign up. Once again, it's free and it's happening on November 17th. But if you're listening to this after that date, no worries, you can still go to that page and watch the replay. We'd like to thank Algarand for their support of the podcast. So let's talk about what Alchemy actually offers to devs. It's an Ethereum API. What does that mean as someone who's never built an app before. What does that mean to me? Absolutely. That's a great question.

So Alchemy has a suite of products that we offer. Let me talk about each one really quickly. So fundamentally, kind of backing up again, fundamentally, anything that's difficult for developers, we want to make that easy. Like that is our guiding vision. And that is we want to enable developers to build new applications. They couldn't build before because it was too difficult, period, full stop. And we will do whatever it takes to make that happen.

The actual product. line. So the first challenge we had, so we were builders. So Joe and I, you know, have coded every single day for a last call it like 17 years of our life. All of our team kind of very similar, very, very senior engineers who just built a lot of products and built, worked out a bunch of different companies. So we had seen firsthand what tools are in other industries. And when we started building blockchain, we were building other products. And it was just so difficult. And we had built this like hedge fund machine learning day science platform that powered, powered assets for, you know, $4 billion in assets for our customers. And we were like, wow, it is so difficult to build in this space.

And so what we did is we actually ended up talking to about, I think at the time, about 80 different customers. And we said, hey, we want, what are your challenges? Because we have this whole list of challenges. And we had built this crazy infrastructure in-house that no one else in the world had that enabled us to find out data and machine learning that basically was, was, was, proprietary to us. And we said, look, we can just open this up to everyone. But rather than just opening it up, how do we actually find out what's most valid to people? So the first challenge that

people had that unanimously, that every single, I think out of the 80 people we emailed and asked, I think about probably 77 of them said this was the number one problem. So it was very clear to us. And that number one problem was it's very difficult to run node infrastructure for blockchains, right? And I think, I think also the community, people don't actually realize, like, the Getham parity teams have contributed so much to Ethereum. And the community actually owes them a huge debt of gratitude because these people are single-handedly building the tools that power all the things behind the scenes. Right.

So I think that was the first thing. We were very impressed. And they're small teams. These are not big teams of, these are not, if you think of, like, the number of people who work on Apache or the number of people who work on MySQL, these are, like, order of magnitudes larger than the teams that work on Getham Parity. So I think first off, they've done like an incredible job of the resources they have. The second thing is it's very difficult to run blockchain infrastructure.

So let me give you like a quick example. And stop me if this is getting a little bit too technical. But let me give just one example. So in traditional web, let's say you're Facebook and you have one web server that is serving traffic for, let's say you have 100 users on Facebook. Suddenly now Facebook, you know, let's say Facebook takes off. and you have a million users. What do you do?

So you actually just spin up more web servers, more computers to handle that traffic, and then you split traffic across all of those, right? And the problem is you can't do that in blockchain. So let's go through the blockchain and same example. Let's say you're building Cryptokitties. And, you know, CryptoKitties has one web server, one node that's running. And Node is equivalent of blockchain server. So now, suddenly, imagine you get a bunch of traffic and a bunch of people joining.

So now you say, okay, let's just spin up 10 more nodes. the problem is you can't actually just split traffic across those. And let me explain why. So as a user, what will happen? I'll say, okay, I'm going to buy this crypto kitty. And now that transaction gets routed to Node A, right? But now you hit refresh and say, oh, I'm going to go view this other cat. This time, and you want to see all the cats you own.

This time, your request gets routed to Node B. And fundamentally, blockchains are a decentralized network, and they all don't have the same information at the same time. Eventually, everyone will agree on the same blocks that happen, but at any given point in time, the most recent information is actually not agreed upon by everyone at the network. So what happens is the user, to the user, they hit refresh and they go look at their cat list, and it looks to them like their cat's not there and their money's gone. So then they freak out and say, whoa, what just happened? Which is not actually the case. The thing is just the transaction hasn't propagated to the other node in the network. So the kind of high level of what that means is you can't

horizontally scale infrastructure and blockchain. And that is how it's done in every other industry. So what we did is we sat down and we said, look, nodes are great if you're serving kind of like a very light app. And for us, we said, look, we want to be able to scale to enterprise infrastructure and provide the scalability. And there's a whole suite of other challenges that that people have with nodes. So we said, look, we want to make this easy. So we actually sat down and built a new type of decentralized infrastructure from scratch. It took years of work for us to build this. And it was the product of us having to build this internally for ourselves first.

And so we call it Supernode. It is a completely new type of decentralized architecture that we have built that enables extreme reliability, infinite scalability. So it's almost like an AWS style thing now. Where before, if you had more traffic, you know, you need to spend. week spinning up a new node, depending on the type of node. So if you suddenly have a search of traffic, you're just hose. You can't just spin up a new node on demand.

So now you have eight of developers have an AWS like capacity where they can just infinitely scale it. It handles all the data correctness, and it handles a bunch of other things around that. Can you become a little bit more technical here? What exactly is this decentralized service that you've built? So basically, do you just run your own Geth and Open Ethereum nodes in the background? and kind of serve that to the person who calls the API. What exactly does your system entail?

Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So we have a little bit of the diagram on our website. You can check it out. But the short answer is no. So kind of conceptually, what we do is we had to build custom decentralized data stores for every specific type of data that is stored in a node. So for example, so for transactions, you can query transactions in a certain

on the node, and we take that data and design a custom data store for that data that allows you to say, right now, maybe on a node, you can say, hey, get me transactions in this block. But one thing in terms of super node, what it lets you do is now you can say, get me all the transactions for this address, which is not possible on an actual node, right? And by designing custom data structures for each specific type of data that's on a node, we basically, we interact with nodes to pull data on. off, but then our own decentralized infrastructure serves and provides that data to people and provides extended, it provides an additional query layer on top of Ethereum that's extended beyond what is normal.

Okay, so you built a generalized indexer, a set it? No, it's not an indexer in the sense that, you know, we're just storing this in a database and then we provide information, we provide access to it in different ways. It's truly that, let me give a good example. So basically, think about this, right? when you running, if you want to run a database on your own computer, let's say you're building a website, you want to run MySQL on your own computer, that's a database, right?

And then Google uses a database to store the entire web and to index the whole web, right? So, like, technically that's still a database, but the technology is like fundamentally very different and kind of similar here. You can run a node yourself, but the technology that we built is completely different. It's a new type of indexing and storing and serving method that's kind of akin to how a Google or Facebook would store and serve their data. Can you be a little bit more explicit about how it's different when you say it's completely different?

Yeah. Let me give one concrete example. When I say it's completely different, the reason it's completely different is the type of data structures that we use to store each type of data is completely different. So for example, on a node, you can query Ethereum logs. So you can get a certain range of logs. If you ask for more than that range, it'll crash. and you can only query it in the kind of like certain type of patterns.

So what we did is we said, look, we're going to use, so for this, for our logs in particular, we use a time series database, and then we also use another indexing method to store the actual information. So what that lets us do. And we basically like store it and serve it in a different way. And what that lets us do is now, you know, we can, so we built a whole system. So kind of like there's a node, right? We built a whole system just around storing and serving.

logs. And so now, on logs, you can query about, I'm not sure the exact numbers here, but roughly about 10 times the range of what you could query on an Ethereum node, you can query on Alchemy. So what it does is it gives developers extended functionality so that now, because we build this custom data source for logs, they can query things that they weren't possible before. Kind of back to the original question, Supernode is just one piece of the developer platform. So this was the core technology that we worked on for many, many years to kind of really perfect this and make it really, really good. And then on top of that, we have four other products.

So one is Alchemy Build. So Alchemy Build is a suite of developer tools that enable debugging, crash reporting, all of the tasks that you would do in traditional web development, all the tools that you need. Those don't exist in blockchain. And we built a suite of tools to enable developers to debug problems faster. So for example, one of our users who's in Hawaii, he had a rogue server that was just spinning and sending a bunch of transactions that he didn't even realize. So using these tools, these visualization tools, he was able to find that and shut it down, whereas it had been running for

weeks and he just didn't even realize. Or another example was there are certain kind of bugs that take days to debug. And with the correct insights, you can debug it in under 15 minutes. So that's the second piece. Then there's Alchemy Monitor. And what Alchemy Monitor does is provide detailed insights and analytics for the blockchain. And it captures things that are not possible through traditional Google analytics or, you know, those kind of tools because these are kind of blockchain specific. And then the last piece is Alchemy Notify, actually two more. Alchemy Notify right now when you think about a normal app, if you use Instagram or use Facebook, you get notifications when things happen, when someone likes your

photo, when someone comments on your wall. And blockchain, the challenges, these events are not exposed by nodes. So for example, when an address receives currency, like let's say an you send me Ethereum, that is not an event that the node sends and says, hey, you know, this wallet received $5 or $5 at Eath. So what we do is we built a notification system that watches the blockchain for all these types of events and stores them and it provides an API. And the end outcome is the user, now you can, when you use apps, you can get notifications on important events.

And that wasn't possible before. And the last thing we do is we actually think of our support as a product. So we do real-time global support for all of our customers 24-7 around the world. And it's not like you're talking to a support person. You actually talk to the core engineers that built the product. So that for us is a really key part of the Alcoop experience. So just to sum up, like the product lines, you have the super node, which is the Ethereum API, and we'll get a little bit more into that in the minute.

There's the developer tools that allows a developer to like prototype and debug and this sort of thing. There's the monitoring tools that allows you to understand sort of like your user's data, et cetera. And then there's this notification thing, I think is kind of cool where, like, let's say you have, you know, you're building a wallet, for example, you'd like for your users to receive notifications on, like, blockchain events, right? So, like, on transaction received or on transaction, like, complete or, like, some smart contract action or something like that, then the user can receive a notification. I'd like to spend more time on the super node thing. You know, let's suppose we have someone who's building Ethereum smart contracts and they've spun up their own node.

and they're using, you know, this one endpoint to build and deploy their DAP. Like, what specifically are the kinds of things that they're going to be able to do with the super node and what kinds of data are they going to be able to pull from that API that they're not, that they're currently not able to get with, you know, the RPC calls that they make to the GephNode? Absolutely. That's a great question. And that breaks down into kind of four key benefits that people, the reason that people use, super node. So the first one is on average, it depends on the size of your project and the size of your team, but on average, people spend about a quarter of an engineer's time to two engineers time

maintaining and basically caring for nodes. And typically to build out a reliable node infrastructure system that even if it doesn't have data correctness in these other properties that we talked about, you need three to six months to really make it hard. And that is what we've seen from a larger customers. So the number one reason that people use us is they don't have to think about it and it just works. Like, it's ultra-reliable and it's just, it's just always up. It's kind of like why you'd use AWS instead of running your own server. It just works, right? You don't have to upgrade the hard drive. You don't have the way if it crashes. It doesn't go down. So that's, you know, if your internet shuts down, you don't go down. Like, that's, that's the first thing. The second thing is the

scalability that we talked about. The scalability says, suddenly, you know, let's say our traffic doubles. What happens if you're running your own note? You need to sync a new node from scratch and you need to split traffic over it. And we already talked about the problems with loan balancing. But syncing that new node at minimum, minimum takes many, many, many, hours. And a lot of times it takes weeks, right, depending on the type of node you have. So that scalability is super important. The other thing is the query APIs. So right now, so we kind of have two options. Number one is you can just use the standard of Ethereum APIs. We give a little bit extended functionality on that. So you can query a broader range of logs. You can query

trims that things in certain ways, like kind of an extended capacity that you couldn't before. And then the second piece of that is we actually provide a suite of higher level APIs on top of Ethereum that are an extra query layer on top. So for example, let me talk to you through a couple of these. So one is, let's say you want to, you have an address and you want to get all the tokens in that address, all that token that address holds. That's actually not an Ethereum query you can make. You have to check. every smart contract that you, let's say, let's say there's roughly a thousand popular tokens that people might hold, right? You have to go to every single smart contract for each token

and say, hey, does Sebastian's address have zero X? No. Okay, does Sebastian's address have auger? No. Okay, does Sebastian's address have Kaver? Oh yeah, it has some Khyber. Okay, cool. So you have to make a thousand queries just to get the token balance for a single address, right? And what What we did is we said, okay, obviously this is not feasible for any kind of real-time waller or anything like that. So we need to build a system where they can give us an address and we'll give them all the tokens based on that address. So that's an example of one of the higher-level APIs. And like that, you know, the transaction history thing I was talking about. And there's several other APIs that we power.

But the goal here is take a thing that shouldn't be complicated and we will make that really easy for developers. So, Nicol, how does Alchemy kind of set itself apart from developer products that were out there when you guys started? So I'm thinking of Infura, Truffle, Aletheo, all of these products. How is Alchemy better? Yeah, it's a good question. I think, like, all of these are, like, fantastic products. And I really, like, one of our core philosophies is we don't really think about other people's competition because we're here to expand the space. The market as a whole is very small for crypto, right?

There's no $10 billion revenue or $100 billion revenue companies in, I guess there's not many $100 billion companies regardless. But, you know, our goal really is to help expand the space and we will do whatever we can to help push developers for it. And we love it when other people, you know, build great tools for the space. So that to us is, this is very collaborative and we are all here to expand the ecosystem. And I think all of the companies that you mentioned have served really great purposes for different parts. of the developer experience. Our core focus at Alchemy is we want to help people. And, you know, before we were mostly focused on enterprises and large companies,

and now recently, as you guys mentioned, we just opened up to self-serve. So anybody now can sign up and use Alchemy. And our goal is when you are building a product, we want to really provide the tools you need to get started. And then also the tools you need to really scale and have a stable service. So, for example, most of the tools we provide, we build things when they are not available in other places. And when they are available in other places, like a Truffle, I think it's a great example. We don't build, we don't build what Truffle does.

And when people ask us, we say, go to Truffle, we think they're great. So our tool set is complementary in that way. And we focus on the areas that we think are not served right now. So let's talk about the sort of note infrastructure business. because this is a business that I, some of the industry that I find kind of fascinating here, because I think there's a lot of implications for the broader ecosystem, but also maybe some, I think, some risks as well. If we look at sort of like the, you know, the ethos of crypto,

you talked earlier about AWS and, you know, how AWS scales the web. I think that in a lot of people's minds that work in the space, the way that we should scale crypto maybe shouldn't resemble that, you know, like one for one, but we'll get into a little bit of that in a second. As the ecosystem matures, like, there's already different layers in this infrastructure stack. So, you know, you have companies like Alchemy that are providing APIs for Ethereum. You have other companies in the space who are doing more, you know, node as a service where you spin up your own node and they provide you perhaps with some APIs on top as well. then there's some other layers in that stack that are more geared towards validation services.

So I'm talking about companies like bison trails, skills here in France that offer a validator as a service or nodes as a service. As the ecosystem matured as you see these types of companies further differentiating themselves or being more and more consolidated. I guess the question there is, do you see alchemy providing also validation as a service in the future with all the infrastructure that you've built? I'm sure it would be fairly easy, you know, set that up for, for customers. Is that a future towards which you're attending? That's a great question. So I think all of these different types of services provide really distinct pieces of value.

And I think at a glance, it can look like they're pretty similar. But when you say running a node as a service, running a validator, running a developer platform, they're actually per very different businesses at their core. and they serve very different markets. So like all the companies you named, we have zero overlap in terms of customer base with any of those companies. Like we've never had a company say,

oh, we're decided between you and this other company, right? So one of the really interesting things, like our, and actually many of those companies that you named actually do compete with each other, we're just a little bit separate. And for us, like our guiding North Star is how do we provide a great developer experience and how do we make it easier for people

to build blockchain products. And that is what we live, what we eat, what we sleep, what we breathe every single day. You know, we right now, we power, I think our public stats. We power about 70% of the top of Ethereum applications. We power the majority of defy, seven and a half billion a year of on-chain transactions in 99% of the countries of the world. And the only way we've been able to do that is by having laser focus. As of this point in time, developers don't need validation. Like that's not, you know, validation staking. That's not something that developers want. In the future, who knows? Like, at least as far as I can see, that doesn't seem to be something. Our focus is on the developer tooling. How do we build better

analytics? How do we build better debuggers? How do we build better kind of the fundamental construction equipment that developers need? And that's our laser focus. Will we never do it? I don't think I can say that because I can't predict the future. And if I could, I would definitely know which chain's going to win. But my focus, our focus at alchemy is just, just laser focused on the developer and say anything we can do to make that experience better, that's what we care about and that's what we want. And as of right now, it seems as far as we can see forward, it's very much on the same path that we're been and continue heads down working on that. I mean, do you think it's possible though? If I mean, like perhaps, you know, it's not on

your roadmap, but do you think that, you know, if you look at the way other industries have consolidated, you know, if you look at, say, a company like AWS or Azure and all the types of services that these companies offer within the web space, right? You know, as Alchemy grows and becomes hopefully like a massive player in the space and a very successful one, do you think that it's possible for Alchemy to start providing also those other building blocks that make up the infrastructure that powers defy, not just the knows themselves, but, you know, validating the services, you know, perhaps other types of services as well. Yeah, okay. So, that is a really good question.

You know, as we grow, do we expand into those areas? I think fundamentally it boils down to who's your target market and who's your customer. And right now, the customers for all the companies that you've described are kind of like funds and people who are staking and people who have assets that they want to earn interest on, right? And right now, our customer is the developer, the engineer, the people who are building things. As far as I can see. And you're right, a lot of those companies that you mentioned are in direct competition.

are going after the same market, and it's very lucrative market, so happy for them. For us, you know, our core focus is developer. As of the current present moment, we don't see developers, we don't see like a developer, a core action of the developers is not necessarily that they need a stake, maybe for their own personal assets, but that's not like a core thing that they need right now. If that is the case, let's say crypto evolves in a way that developers need mechanisms to be able to stake assets in order to build things. Sure, maybe we'll support it then. But I think the thing I can very confidently say right now is we are not trying to go and build tools for

a hedge fund to stake their assets. That's not like our core business. Our core business is whatever developers need. So in the sense of developers in the future crypto pivoting and enabling developers do that, we would definitely support that. If that's not the case, we're going to stick to helping developers. Okay, just for the listener. So currently, you are a subscription service. So basically I pay a flat fee and then I get to make, I mean it's a tiered subscription service, but I get to make a number of API calls.

What do you currently do with the data that the data trade that the user leaves? If I connect to your service and they make an API call, you can make the connection between my IP address and my contract keys I hold and the kind of interactions I engage in, which is potentially extremely valuable. information. So do you data mine that? Do you save that? What's your, what's your commitment to user data? So one of the really nice things of our business, which I'm very glad about, because we had, you know, like the legal diligence done on us is we, so fundamentally, we don't store any

private keys. We've actually, people have asked us a lot, like, can you optimize my transactions and can you store our private keys? We're like, nope, we're not going to touch that because that's a whole another issue when we start controlling users' funds. So in terms of funds, we have no access. I I think actually, let me give you a quick model of like a mental model of how you can think about this is we are a pipe to the blockchain. So there's a blockchain here and there's a user here. And the user needs to take a packaged piece of data and put it on the blockchain. And we're kind of like a pipe, very good, fast, reliable pipe. But ultimately, we're a pipe to the blockchain, right?

Exactly. But you're a pipe that kind of knows what traffic goes through it. I never thought that you guys kept private keys or whatever. I'm totally aware of that, but basically you being able to make the connection between my IP address and the information that I carry and the transactions I send, that is potentially super valuable, no? Yep. So that's a great question.

The question is, like, we have IP address and this package of data. So two parts that answer. So the first part is when the transactions are all public, so there's no kind of secret information there. We don't know in terms of broadcasting a transaction. in terms of the IP address, that is the only piece of data that we do have. It's like, okay, your IP address.

IP address can be spoofed. It can be faked. We don't even know if it's like a real IP address. We take user data very seriously. We, even though like no one's complained or no one's asked about this, we don't sell the data. Our business is not, we've had a lot of people ask, like, can you sell data at us? And it's like, that's just not our business.

Our business is providing customers with a great developer experience. So we, our answer is we do nothing with the data. We have systems. So we can't even. look at the data ourselves. And to be clear, we don't actually have any data. The only thing we have is an IP address of the user. That's all we have. We don't have their name. We don't have their email. We don't have anything else about that user. Right. But you might have, you might have transaction data. So if you have the IP address, and I suppose with the monitoring tools that

you do have, I mean, there must be some data about transactions that, you know, that it's available for the developers to use. Like, for example, what are the, you know, what transaction or what data are my clients or users of my of my of my of my client basically what API calls are being made and what transaction requests are being made into which smart contracts etc like this this kind of metadata not necessarily direct user data like names and email addresses but this kind of metadata must exist somewhere on your on your systems does it not yeah so you're right so we i mean we know which API calls are made but again like there's no like user identifiable information we don't store it.

I mean, we, to the needs we need of like, you know, we let the user debug their product, but we don't look at it. We don't dive into it. We definitely don't sell it. Not that, you know, I know there are companies that do that and nothing against that. We just chose for our core business to be providing the service. And it's really interesting because there are certain types of data that people are very

sensitive about, you know, whether it's private keys or identify. If we could identify which users had which addresses or which users. or which users were sending transactions or which users were doing this, that would be a whole other story. But Nicola, in effect, you can. So basically, if you look at how easy it is to actually identify addresses on the blockchain,

if you now also have the IP data that goes with it, becomes even easy. And I totally agree that IP data can be spoofed and so on. But being diligent about this 100% of the time is nigh impossible. So basically, I mean, that's the reason why whistleblowers have such a hard life and so on, because basically staying truly anonymous on the internet is really hard. Yeah, that's true.

I think, so two points of that. One is, again, literally the only piece of data we have is IP. And that is like, even for our own internal metrics, when we think about how many users you use your platform, it's actually really hard to tell because IPs are not correlated to actual users very clearly, right? Your phone, if you drive another mile on your phone, your phone picks up a new IP address. So it's very kind of, it's very unmappable to people.

The second thing is most of our traffic, actually the majority of our traffic, is back-end services. So most of the IPs we have are just from Amazon. So like people's own AWS clusters hitting us. I don't know the exact stat off top of my head, but I know it's about like 70% of that is actually back-end traffic from customers. So we don't see any IPs in that case. Okay, understood. As a user of DAPs, as someone who's privacy consent, forgive me, I'm just, So as someone who is privacy content, I kind of want to know if ADAP used a service like yours.

What are your thoughts as to this? Because basically, if I connect to DAP and in reality, I actually connect to you, that's something that the user should probably know, right? So when you connect to a DAP, you're connecting either to that company, if they run their own nodes or you're connecting to Alphabet, right? And kind of diving into a little bit of the technical architecture of ADAP here. So basically, there's two ways ADAP can be constructed. Either the company can say, we're going to route all the transactions through kind of our

own backend system and our own proprietary systems. And then that back end system queries alchemy for data and returns it. So in that case, we get zero information about, we don't even get the IP address, right? And then, you know, they can use the Web 3 on the front end, which means the query are made from that user's computer. So in that case, the user, the only information that has passed is the IP address. So in either case, in one thing that's interesting, and this goes to the, there's question about centralization, decentralization.

One thing that's interesting is when you're using a DAP, if there are, if the company runs the actual software and the node stuff, and the nodes, then all of the, it's essentially like you're using a centralized service that's hitting that individual company. But with alchemy, you know, the front end is served by the product and then the back end is served by Alchemy. So it's almost like in a way you're only depending partially on that individual company. So I'd like to turn it back to the sort of like ecosystem and the business of blockchain APIs. Do you have an idea today of how many nodes, you know, if you look at the entire Ethereum node landscape, do you have any idea today like in the approximation of how many.

I guess nodes is not the good way to look at it because you're not like really you're providing an API and you're not really increasing the number of nodes in the network but I guess one way to put it would be do you have any idea of how many DAPs in the

broader DAPE ecosystem use alchemy and perhaps also like I suppose one of your main competitors in Fura as you know their back end that's a great question I mean obviously I don't know in Fura's numbers but I know our numbers.

See, what can I say publicly? We have thousands of developers using us, so we have a lot. So we have, it got to the point. It's actually pretty cool over the last couple of years. You know, in the beginning, we would get so excited whenever we got a customer. I mean, we still get very excited when we get a customer. Ultimately, that's what we were here for is to help people build great applications. And now it's got to the point where the majority of time I use crypto stuff,

I would say a huge percentage of time. I find out I can look into our look and say like, oh, we have customer support chats with all our customers and telegram and I'll just search that company's name and we have a customer support chat with them. So I'm like, oh, cool, they're using alchemy. So I think in terms, one of the really cool things is as we've seen in terms of the growth of the ecosystem, we've seen as defy's been blowing up, we've seen a ton of really, really cool things. I was explaining this to a friend. I think one of the most interesting things about the defy ecosystem and what I think fuel the growth at the defy ecosystem is every company in crypto effectively, every defy

project effectively has an open read-write API for anybody to use, right? And imagine if like Facebook, Google, Amazon, they all had read-write APIs that anybody could build on. It would be more difficult for Facebook, right? But the innovation that would happen on top of that would be mind-blowing. I think that's one of the really cool things that you've seen in terms of speeding up defy. And for us, in terms of the growth of our user base, it's been really really cool to see that because we kind of like directly correlate to the number of number of projects in the space like we have a certain percentage and and with that it grows and that was the main reason for us spending months and months and months building out self-serve

where anybody can sign up and use it which is actually very tricky infrastructure and developer challenge to solve so we took us probably about five months to build this and our whole focus there was before we kind of only served the largest companies and now we said we want to make blockchain accessible to everybody. And that was always the goal, but it was very difficult technically to do. And now, you know, we start seeing people on our free tier who are very tiny companies and then suddenly they'll blow up and they'll be one of the largest people in the space. And they kind of started out from that, from that small free tier. I want to come back to this topic of AWS, which I was mentioning earlier. And that is,

I think to a lot of people in the space, scaling Ethereum and scaling blockchain systems in general translates to increasing decentralization, essentially, right? So having more nodes, having a diverse validator set or mining power. What do you say to developers or people in the ecosystem who fear that services like alchemy and other sort of like node aggregation services or... APIs, where essentially there's aggregation of or centralization of access, what do you say to those people who think that this is detrimental or somehow goes against this goal of bringing further decentralization? And I mean, I want to give you like a concrete example. Like if in five or ten years from now, 80% or more of DAPs on Ethereum are using one or two, to APIs. Do you think that that's a success for Ethereum?

Yeah. Do you see that as a success for Ethereum or do you see that as a risk potentially for powerful entities like governments, for example, to step in and like break Defi? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great question. It's something we thought about a lot, right? In the very beginning, before we built anything, we were convinced that we needed to build a pure decentralized solution for this.

And that's what we actually started building. So we actually built all the tech. It's actually very complicated technology problem to do a decentralized network to support this. And the reason is when you think, like, let's say you take something like Auger, we have betting market, something happens and you need to settle, you need to settle the results of a real world event. And you need to settle it within, you know, it's a couple days or whatever it's on Auger, right? For an API service, there's a real world event, someone sending someone a piece of data. And we need to settle that in like 20 milliseconds to know if that's correct or not.

And there's this thing where, you know, just having someone stake and then slash it they get wrong isn't actually going to work because the damage has been done. Like that incorrect data has been sent and that could have massive consequences. So it's this very complicated structure that we spent months thinking about. We had some of the kind of like math Olympiad type minds working on it to kind of figure out a really cool solution for it. And we actually ended up coming up a really good solution. And then we ended up talking to, you know, I'd go back to that about 80.

customers and we just asked them like, you know, how much do you care about this? How much do you want decentralized product? How much do you want whatever? And, you know, honestly, we were blown away. This is one of the things about user feedback where you do something and you think it's so obvious and everyone knows. And then users are like, oh, actually, you're an idiot. And the people who designed, like, we just didn't realize. So what we found was, number one, people didn't care. They said, we want something that works. Because when you think about this, there's two parts center. When you think about it, the first stage is getting a product that works. And then it's like having like a completely, truly decentralized product. Right. And right now when you think,

and then the second, the second piece, and everyone's just focused on that first piece now, making something that works. And the second thing that's super important to understand. And this was the crux of the of the reason that people said, we want this solution first. We actually have the decentralized version in our back pocket. And when the time is ready and when when we feel like we need it, people will will build it out. But, The thing is, there's a very big difference between us and AWS, right, in terms of, like, you know, the centralization aspect. And the answer goes back to that thing, where we're a pipe to the blockchain.

We don't store any blockchain data. The data we give, you can get from anywhere else, right? Which is why the super note is actually a small part of our business. The developer tools are a huge chunk of our business. And the reason for that is people can switch off at any time. Essentially, one of the things we provide is we provide a commodity service. Of course, we do a better, more reliable. There will always be the alternative.

And this is not so much a criticism on, I'm not directing this as a sort of criticism on alchemy, just in terms of, you know, the vision that I think a lot of us have envisioned, right, for what blockchain systems should look like. Right. Do you think that it would be a success if, you know, 80% or more, or, say, 90%, like some huge number of DAPs were pointing at two API URLs, basically, like two API endpoints, or one API endpoint, would you see that as potentially a risk for defy to get shut down? Or even, like, if your servers go down or if, like, your competitor's service go down,

and all of a sudden, like, there's 50% of the ecosystem that goes down with it, and defy by this time powers trillions of dollars in market cap, and, like, the entire economy goes down, well, the defy economy. What does that catastrophic scenario look like in your view? And is that desirable, given where we know, like, blockchain comes from? It comes from this desire to have things that are decentralized that are resilient, etc. Absolutely. I think first, to be clear, a success in blockchain means that we're providing new value,

new product that we couldn't do before, and that it cannot be shut down. Like the not being shut down is a really important piece. And I would say, like, if Alchemy was more of like an Amazon service that, you know, Amazon has all these companies data. And if Amazon goes down, like, they're not getting their data back, right? So I think a success case for us in alchemy would be actually that, you know, nodes just get a lot better. And they, you know, everybody can run their own node. And that works.

And we're just focusing on building the tooling around it. Like our goal is not to be, we don't want to be a node infrastructure company. We want, it's actually not a great business to be in. The developer tools is actually a much better business from the business side because nodes are very expensive to run. So for when we think about the defy case, let's say there's two, you know, two APIs providing or one API. providing, you know, the majority. So right now we do about 70% of the top apps. But let's say that, I think there's two cases here. There's a case where, you know, if God forbid, you know, something happened and the government comes and says, hey, we got to shut this down.

If the case was that these companies would be hosed, that would not be good. That would be a very bad thing. But if the case was the company could just, you know, just run their node point, like literally one of the nice things about alchemy, which is a great thing for the customer, not so great for us, but you can switch on and off alchemy in one line of code. Like literally, all you do is you take your line of code and you point it at your own server. It takes less than three minutes to switch on, less than three minutes to switch off, which is tough because what that means is we have to continually win users of business, our customer's business, because it could be anybody who switch off at any time.

So I think the way that it's going right now is we are providing a suite of tools on top of node functionality, which I think are very valuable, but people are not dependent on us. As much as for our business, our investors would love it to have people dependent on this. But the only way that we're able to do this is by providing continually good service. I get what you're saying. And like I get the argument that one can simply, you know, change the API URL, you know, like that. They just change the endpoint, basically. And, and then they can point somewhere else. And it's, and all their data is still there. Everything works out of the box. Of course, all the data is still there. I think it might be a bit harder because, because you offer also

this additional features, there's some lock-in there. And then, they might have to rejigger their app for it to work without those additional services and those additional API endpoints. I'm just thinking more in terms of like ecosystem resiliency. And what I would hope is that the ecosystem is spread out in such a way that, you know, there's 20 alchemies, right? There's like several companies like yours offering varying types of services and maybe even like niche services for certain types of DAPs that provide them like specific types of API. calls and so that we have a more resilient ecosystem that doesn't rely on like very large actors that can easily, you know, take down the entire, the entire space in an instant.

Absolutely. I think that's, again, I think that's super important. And realistically, what would happen if a company switches off alchemy, the transition would be easy, but kind of continuing development on your product would just be slower. And I think, I think the tradeoff here is, we thought about this internally. Like, do we build a decentralized system, right? And the question for us was, let's say we can push the space two years ahead by building the centralized version first because it's easier to build and we're able to provide better tooling and better developer experiences on top of it versus taking two years longer to build a decentralized version. Right.

So for us, when we think about this, because nothing in life is free, right? So when you think about building a decentralized version of product versus kind of developer tooling that's more, that is more of a centralized pipe. the trade-off there is the time to market and how fast do you accelerate the ecosystem, right? So if we felt like it was a case where people would be stuck on us and you couldn't switch off and it would be shut down, then we wouldn't have done it, right? But in the case, we said, hey, we can push the ecosystem two years ahead by providing developers the tools they need to build things, you know, in one-fifth the time, then that and that, and they can switch off at any time.

I think that's a trade-off you have to make. And I think for us, we fully believe that there should not be any kind of like single point of failure or even a few points of failure in the ecosystem. And right now, we don't think that's the case. Maybe let's switch gears and kind of get to the last section. So I'd like to talk about your investors. So you actually have a very eclectic suite of investors. And Sebastio made me not start with this. But how did you meet Jayce?

It's actually really funny. I get that question. We get that question a lot. So first off, I think, let me preface this with a story. So the first time that Joe and I, my co-friend and I started working at it, literally the very first day, I remember we were rocking up the stairs. We're in this, the Stanford incubator. And I asked Joe, like, what kind of music do you like? His girlfriend Sarah was there. And Sarah says, he loves teenage girl pop. And my answer was perfect. That's exactly what I love. We're going to get along super well. So I have actually like never really listened to Jay music like I've never really hit play on it I don't really listen to the rap it's just not it's just

not my thing so jZ and a bunch of other investors have been kind of like inbounded us we we were always like look we just want to build product we've been a very fortunate position where you know we ran our company super lean and we never needed cash it was always kind of inbound interest so one investor was like hey jZ really wants to meet you guys and we were you know we were like we're sorry we're like heads down working and during this time the company's going really crazy and we're working really hard And there were days we hadn't left our apartment like six days a row. So, you know, he got this call. JJ really wants me.

You know, we really got to focus. We have, we need folks in our company. And it's like, no, he really wants to talk to you. And I was like, all right. Like, we had just wrapped up doing a fundraising round. And he and there. And I just honestly just didn't want to do any more investor calls. I want to get back to work.

So we said, look, okay, he has. The way relationship we have with our investors is we really want coaches and mentors. We don't need, we didn't need cash. We said, look, we want a personal ownership, we want to text, do you want to call you, email you want to learn from you. You guys are like, you know, whether it's, you know, the Reed Hoffman or Charles Schwab or the chairman of order to Google, it's like, we've been very lucky to learn from all these, like, incredible people. So what the semester said, hey, you know, Jay-Z, you don't have any media entertainment people and they're really smart. You should meet them.

I'm like, all right, cool, let's jump on the phone tomorrow. And then they said, oh, I can't because Beyonce had just launched her album that day and they were going on tour. And I was like, all right, well, I guess like, you know, just, it's fine. it was not going to work out, it's totally fine. So we get this call from Jay-Z the next day, and he calls us. He's like, oh, I had to eat my dinner really fast to talk to you guys. And so we ended up having this really great conversation. We kind of interviewed him, asked about his life and, you know, what he was looking for

and like why he wanted to work with us and was he excited to mentor and coach us. And honestly, I have to say, I was blown away. Again, I listened to like One Direction and Joe and I listened to One Direction and Taylor. So it's like, I literally knew nothing about Jay-Z. And he's super smart guy, very kind, very charismatic. Yeah, we really liked him. We're like, all right, welcome to the family. So what are Jay-Z's thoughts on Ethereum and, you know, Ethereum deaf-tuning?

We talk more about the business side around how to run a company, how to run a business, how to think about your team and brand and stuff. So there's other things that we like talk to about. We don't necessarily need every investor to be. deepened developer tooling. We're also wondering about this earlier before we got on the show. Eulis Stanford as one of your investors. We didn't know that Stanford had like a VC arm or an investment arm.

What is that about? There's a couple different venture arms out of Stanford. There's a Stanford endowment. There is the Stanford Stardex Fund. There's the president's fund. So, yeah, we Stanford directly invested and we have a really close relationship with them. And this was also when John Hennessy, the chairman of board of Google, was president at the time. So he also personally invested.

So we've been like very, very tight. And in the CS department, computer science department, multiple of this computer science professors are investors. And so just really, really close. I mean, I spent six years there undergrad and grad. Joe did the same. So a lot of love for our school. Great. So where can people go to find you and start building on Alchemy?

Yeah, absolutely. So our website is Alchemy API.io. And you can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Nick Hilster. So it's at N-I-K-I-L-S-T-E-R. Feel free to shoot me an email, DM. Would I happy to help. And if there's anything I can do, feel free to reach out. Cool.

Thank you. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, You can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast.

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