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Blockchain development firm Alchemy has strengthened its team with the addition of Guillaume Poncin, the former head of Web3 at Stripe.
At Stripe, which provides online payment processing and commerce solutions for online businesses, Poncin spent three years, first running engineering for banking and financial products, and then building out its crypto team.
Notably, he shipped a fiat-to-crypto onramp and a cross-border payouts product using stablecoins. Before joining Stripe, Poncin spent 12 years at Google, where he was the tech lead at Google Books and Google Cloud, and ran both engineering and product at an educational games startup.
In his new role as head of engineering, Ponchin will be responsible for the engineering and technical management of Alchemy's existing and new products, scaling the services.
“I am excited about the promise of blockchains to become the foundation for value exchange at Internet scale–global, fast, inexpensive, programmable,” Poncin told Decrypt. “In particular, 'blockchain inside' applications that hide the technical details from users, and take advantage of blockchains under the hood.”
Some use cases that could leverage this kind of solution, according to Poncin, include facilitating stablecoin payments to creators or freelancers around the globe, as well as rebuilding ticketing systems by representing ownership digitally on-chain.
He also sees huge advancements in the adoption of such cutting-edge technologies as account abstraction and in the emergence of layer-2 chains like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon.
“We are still early in Web3,” said Ponchin. “Right now, most things are difficult. Things break. There’s friction across most of the tech stack, both for developers and for users.”
Still, he added, despite all the challenges, which also include continued macro-market headwinds, developers are building at record pace these days, thus offering hope for long-term Web3 growth—the evolution in which he sees Alchemy playing a pivotal role.
Unpacking Alchemy's value-add
Launched in 2017, Alchemy builds applications across several chains, including Ethereum, Flow, Polygon, Solana, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
Billed as the AWS of blockchain, the San Francisco-based company raised $250 million in Series C funding in October 2021, which was extended with a $200 million fundraise in February 2022, taking the firm’s market valuation to a staggering $10 billion.
In August 2022, Alchemy made its first acquisition, striking a deal with the Ethereum coding platform Chainshot—a move that allowed the company to offer free Web3 educational courses.
“Alchemy has rapidly grown our product suite and customer base. Attracting world-class leaders like Guillaume is a testament to the traction we've seen so far, and is exactly what we need to make the most of our opportunity ahead,” Jason Shah, Alchemy's head of growth told Decrypt.