Recently, I’ve been researching the Web3 infrastructure sector and found this company, Alchemy, quite interesting. Speaking of which, this is like the AWS of the crypto world—a company providing blockchain development platforms for developers, founded in 2017.

First, let’s talk about funding. Alchemy has been hot since 2021. In just over a year, its valuation skyrocketed from $500 million to $3.5 billion, then it raised another $200 million, pushing its valuation to $10.2 billion. The investor lineup is impressive, including a16z, Lightspeed, Silver Lake, and many star investors. The speed of growth is truly astonishing.

Why was Alchemy able to become a unicorn so quickly? The core reason is that it solved a real pain point. In blockchain development, companies usually spend tens of thousands of dollars to set up and operate nodes—slow, costly, and resource-intensive. Alchemy uses a decentralized architecture, separating different types of data into specialized storage, greatly improving speed and reliability. Simply put, it allows developers to build applications on-chain with fewer resources.

Founders Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau are both alumni of Stanford and have entrepreneurial experience. These two are known in the startup scene for being frugal—rumor has it that employees once worked on cardboard boxes. They even emailed Apple CEO Tim Cook for help, and it actually solved the problem. Their execution and determination are indeed extraordinary.

2020 was a turning point for Alchemy. They launched the Alchemy Notify feature, a seemingly small but very important function—allowing users to receive real-time updates on blockchain events, such as transaction statuses and NFT bids. Data shows that user retention rates increase by over 300% after receiving notifications. In August of the same year, Alchemy released the Build developer toolkit to help reduce debugging time and improve development efficiency.

By the end of 2021, the total transaction volume of applications built on Alchemy had reached $30 billion, with millions of users. Leading projects like OpenSea, MakerDAO, and Axie Infinity are all using Alchemy’s services. It’s said that over 70% of well-known Ethereum applications rely on Alchemy for blockchain data access.

From an investor’s perspective, a16z’s Ali Yahya believes Alchemy is building an operating system and developer platform for the Web3 era—similar to what Apple, Google, and Amazon did during the PC, mobile, and cloud computing eras. If this logic holds, Alchemy’s potential is indeed huge.

Of course, Alchemy also faces challenges. The biggest uncertainty remains the development speed of the crypto sector itself. Additionally, as a company with a strong engineering culture, convincing large enterprises to outsource their infrastructure isn’t easy. However, based on user feedback, Alchemy is genuinely solving practical problems, which is a clear advantage.

Founder Nikil once said that their vision isn’t just about raising funds or hiring people, but about empowering the entire blockchain industry and making technology accessible to users worldwide. This kind of vision and sense of mission may be the internal driving force behind Alchemy’s rapid growth.