"You didn't say, 'I took a computer application on the internet and used it to go to dinner, and then I paid with an Internet application.' You actually say, 'I took an Uber to the restaurant, and then paid with Apple Pay.' So when you stop hearing the word blockchain, and you just you just talk about the utility you get from it, that's when it'll be really successful." - Nikil Viswanathan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy_1TwTJA-w&t=1667s
Guest: Nikil Viswanathan | @nikilster
- Co-founder & CEO, Alchemy (2017-Present)
- Co-founder & CEO "Down to Lunch" (2016-2017)
About Alchemy
- Alchemy is a blockchain infrastructure company (a platform for devlopers).
- Alchemy helps developers read or write data from the blockchain.
- Nikil compared Alchemy to AWS (Amazon’s Web Services division responsible for 2/3 of Amazon’s profits).
- Alchemy powers about $30 billion in transactions annually (for companies including Dapper Labs, Sushi, OpenSea, PWC, Nifty & more)
- “Pretty much every NFT platform uses alchemy under the hood.”
- Alchemy operate infrastructure, “but it's also in a distributed sense.”
- Alchemy built “a new tech stack from the ground up.” This is different from how AWS started, which was mostly assembling commodity hardware and open source software (now Amazon runs their own tech stack).
- Alchemy is not a blockchain, customers use Alchemy to access the blockchain.
- The alchemy.com domain name costed north of $250,000 to acquire (no exact range given).
The Case for Blockchain
Why developers would choose to use the blockchain instead of a normal database: