Stanford Funds Blockchain Startup Touted as ‘the Microsoft for Blockchain’

Blockchain infrastructure startup Alchemy has garnered investments from multiple notable mainstream entities, including Stanford University, as well as leaders from other top businesses. 

“Our vision is to push the entire ecosystem forward by providing core infrastructure and developer tools,” Alchemy co-founder and Stanford alum Joe Lau told Cointelegraph in a Dec. 17 email. 

Alchemy has amassed $15 million in contributions from influential mainstream business leaders, such as Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang and LinkedIn’s co-founder Reid Hoffman, Bloomberg reported on Dec. 17. 

Bloomberg also noted financial powerhouse Charles Schwab’s place on the list of entities investing in Alchemy as part of its Series A financing. 

Alchemy joins a number of other brick and mortar companies looking to help outfit interested parties with blockchain technology, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle. 

Responding to a question about the differences between Alchemy and other blockchain infrastructure businesses, Lau explained to Cointelegraph via email:

“Alchemy's platform is an order of magnitude more reliable and performant than alternatives that simply offer blockchain nodes. This is because its infrastructure is radically different. Instead of using nodes, Alchemy has built large distributed systems in-house that are designed specifically to support scalable enterprise and production blockchain use cases.”

Additionally, Lau touched on Alchemy’s efficiency in comparison to the competition. “Alchemy also provides more advanced developer tools such as alerting, monitoring and debugging that save engineering organizations thousands of hours,” Lau said. “Many of Alchemy's customers actually came from AWS to Alchemy for its higher performance, reliability and time savings,” he added. 

Some of Alchemy’s clients include Augur, 0x and Opera, among others. 

Lau and fellow Stanford alum Nikil Viswanathan, Alchemy’s other co-founder, both have high hopes for their blockchain project in terms of adoption. 

Viswanathan told Bloomberg:

“We want to be the Microsoft for blockchain.”

Pointing back several decades, Lau mentioned the lack of computer usage seen during the technology’s early days, comparing the situation to that of blockchain technology at present.

“In the ’70s and ’80s only researchers used computers and today everyone uses a computer,” Lau explained to Bloomberg. 

Several months ago, Cointelegraph also reported on a separate gathering of Stanford alumni who built a crypto network harnessing smartphones. The network had rallied over 500,000 participants as of the Sept. 17 brief.