In brief
- Alchemy released the Alchemy Build suite, which includes debugging and search tools.
- Major blockchain products already build on top of Alchemy’s platform.
- Alchemy is a startup that received $15 million in funding in a 2019 Series A.
You may have never heard of Alchemy, but you have it to thank for CryptoKitties. The most-famous Ethereum dapp leaned on the Alchemy platform to build the infrastructure that makes its kittens purr.
Now, Alchemy, the company that counts cultural lions like Jay Z and Will Smith among its investors, says it’s going to make blockchain development even easier.
Alchemy Build, announced today, is a new suite of tools on top of Alchemy’s existing platform. It’s designed to reduce the amount of time blockchain developers spend on issues not related to the product itself.
Build consists of four main tools: an explorer to more easily find bugs and errors, a visualizer to find transactions that aren’t going through, a composer to help with prototyping, and a debugger.
Augur, Kyber Network, Gods Unchained, Binance Wallet, and even the Opera web platform have previously relied on Alchemy’s platform to do the heavy lifting so they can focus on their core offerings.
Alchemy co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan thinks Build will supercharge what’s possible with the platform. “Ultimately this means that…developers [can] build products faster, which means that the users get more products, and more innovation in the blockchain space happens overall,” he told Decrypt.
Moreover, said Viswanathan, those products will be better and less buggy.
OpenSea, an Ethereum-based digital asset marketplace that has already gotten a taste of the new product suite, attested to that. CEO Devin Finzer told Decrypt, “Alchemy Build has been crucial in helping us build and debug our global marketplace.”
Viswanathan and his co-founder, Joseph Lau, started the company in 2017 with the goal of removing the technical hurdles that stop developers from making blockchain applications.
“Making blockchain development as easy as web development is crucial to mainstream adoption,” Lau told Decrypt.
Its efforts have thus far paid off. Last December, Alchemy lined up $15 million in funding in a Series A round that included just about every name inside (and outside) Silicon Valley: Coinbase and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman lined up alongside Stanford University and Charles Schwab.
Pantera Capital led the funding round, and partner Paul Veradittakit seemed happy with the progress the company is making. Said Veradittakit: “Alchemy Build is improving the lives of Ethereum developers by leaps and bounds, helping drive the ecosystem towards its potential."