Alchemy

Alchemy is a blockchain infrastructure platform that gives developers low-level and enhanced API access to over 100 blockchains without the overhead of running and maintaining their own nodes. Founded in 2017 by Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau — who discovered while building a blockchain analytics tool that developer infrastructure was 10–100x harder to stand up than equivalent web2 tooling — Alchemy has grown into one of the largest blockchain middleware businesses, with $563.9M in total funding, a $10.2B valuation, and $447M in annual revenue as of 2025.

Core Platform

Alchemy's platform is organized around four product layers:

Chain APIs provide standard JSON-RPC access to read and write blockchain data. These are the foundational connection layer used by most dapps and wallets to submit transactions and query state.

Data APIs deliver structured, indexed blockchain data including Portfolio APIs (cross-chain asset balances), Token APIs (prices and metadata), Transfers APIs (transaction history), and NFT APIs. These abstract the raw chain data into query-friendly endpoints developers can use without building their own indexers.

Wallets handles smart-contract account infrastructure, including gas sponsorship (gasless transactions where the application covers user fees) across both EVM chains and Solana. This layer supports account abstraction patterns — bundling multiple actions into a single transaction, automating gas payment, and simplifying onboarding for non-crypto-native users.

AI and Agent tooling is a newer product category offering a CLI and MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets AI agents read on-chain state and execute transactions programmatically. This positions Alchemy as infrastructure for the emerging onchain AI-agent use case.

All of these layers run on Cortex, Alchemy's internal routing engine that selects the fastest healthy node per request, claiming 13x more throughput and 5x more reliability than comparable providers, with a reported 99.99% uptime SLA.

Solana Infrastructure

Alchemy rebuilt its Solana stack from scratch, the result of two years of collaboration with engineers from DexterLab and Bware Labs — both of which Alchemy acquired and whose teams had previously supported Google, Chainstack, and the Solana Foundation. The rebuilt stack is a purpose-built implementation, not a generic multi-chain adapter.

Key Solana-specific capabilities include:

• RPC and gRPC APIs: Standard JSON-RPC endpoints alongside gRPC streaming, which Alchemy reports delivers an average 5-15ms faster delivery time than conventional websocket methods for latency-sensitive applications such as trading bots and real-time dashboards.
• Heavy method performance: 10x faster on high-cost RPC calls like getProgramAccounts, which are frequently used by DeFi protocols and indexers but known to be slow or rate-limited on other providers.
• Archival data: 20x faster archival access, plus a historical Solana Account Archive that lets developers query account state at any arbitrary past slot. Historical token balance endpoints were added in July 2026.
• Staked connections: Dedicated staked connections for optimized transaction landing, reducing dropped-transaction rates.
• Fault tolerance: 3-5 layers of autonomous failover, 48-hour block replay capability, and smart websockets that reconnect automatically on drop.
• Gasless transactions: Sponsorship of Solana transaction fees so end-user applications can absorb costs and simplify UX.

Named Solana customers include Phantom, Solflare, Robinhood, OpenSea, and Circle. Mastercard, Worldpay, and Western Union adopted Alchemy's Solana infrastructure through the Solana Developer Platform (SDP), a Solana Foundation enterprise API platform focused on issuance, payments, and trading. Alchemy is a founding node infrastructure partner of SDP.

Ecosystem Commitments

In April 2026, Alchemy launched the Alchemy Solana Fund, a $20M initiative to support builders developing on Solana. In June 2026, Alchemy joined the Solana Research Institute as a founding member. The blog shows continued Solana-specific product releases through August 2026, including the Account Archive, historical token balances, and gRPC enhancements.

Business Model and Scale

Alchemy offers a free tier to get started, with paid plans scaled by compute units — effectively API request throughput — and add-on capacity for dedicated clusters and enterprise SLAs. The platform processes over $1T in annual transactions and has handled over $1B in gasless transactions. The company employs approximately 322 people.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Alchemy occupies the infrastructure layer that most Solana applications depend on but rarely build themselves: reliable, high-throughput node access, enriched chain data, and account tooling. Its focus on institutional adoption — evidenced by the SDP partnership and the Mastercard, Worldpay, and Western Union relationships — differentiates it from providers focused primarily on consumer-scale dapps. For the Solana ecosystem, Alchemy's continued investment (acquisitions, the $20M fund, Research Institute membership) reflects a strategic long-term commitment rather than incidental chain support.