What does Alchemy do in Web3?
Alchemy has been in the spotlight recently for receiving a $10.2 Billion valuation, but WTF does Alchemy even do? At its core, Alchemy saves developers time and money while building Web3 applications.
Let me tell you how.
Alchemy solves 3 primary challenges:
1. Reliably connecting to the blockchain
2. Scaling your application
3. Developer tooling
Let’s start with the first two.
Reliability & Scalability
To talk to the blockchain (ex: Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, etc.) you need a communication channel. You can imagine this as a phone provider. When I call my mom, AT&T transmits data between us. As users, we don’t have to think about this process, it just works!
In blockchain, this channel is called a node.
So if you want to make a transaction on Ethereum, you have to go through a node. Similarly, if you want to check a previous transaction that happened, that also goes through a node.
Nodes are a crucial layer for all Web3 applications.
Turns out, maintaining nodes is extremely difficult to do at scale. If a bunch of people are using a single node at the same time, it can crash. And if it crashes, spinning up another can take days. It can also send false data, but we’ll save that for another post.
So Web3 developers choose to use platforms like Alchemy that provide access to reliable nodes, so they can focus on building apps like:
👩🎨 NFT marketplaces (ex: Opensea)
💸 Decentralized exchanges (ex: SushiSwap)
🤝 DAOs (ex: MakerDAO)
Rather than maintaining node infrastructure themselves.
You might be thinking, huh, this sounds an awful like a centralized service (similar to AWS). This is where I’ll invite you to read this thread:
So anyways, node infrastructure isn’t the only challenge Web3 developers are facing. They also have to deal with complex and time-consuming requests to get simple information, which is where developer tooling comes in.
Developer Tooling
If I want to look up all the NFTs that Randi Zuckerberg owns, I’d have to go through every block to see if there are any NFT transactions associated with her address.
Not only is this extremely inefficient, it’s also extremely costly.
So how do we make this easier? This is where Alchemy comes in. We created an NFT API where you can get all the NFTs owned by Randi in ONE request. Yes, I literally mean one request, try it here.
TLDR; Alchemy’s sole purpose is to make Web3 developers’ lives easier, so you can focus on creating great products.
And a smooth developer experience is pivotal to the success of the entire Web3 movement.
This post explains more details if you’re curious.
Oh and BTW, yes — we are hiring.
