In brief
- Alchemy, best known for its Ethereum tools, now supports Solana development.
- The Solana kit is being released today in "gated beta" with wide availability promised soon.
Alchemy, a company that styles itself as the Amazon Web Services of Web3, announced on Thursday that it is launching a suite of development tools for Solana—a move that could spur further growth on the upstart blockchain.
Founded in 2020 by two Stanford grads, Alchemy made its name building tools that simplify common Web3 tasks like writing transactions and hosting nodes. The company's core offerings revolve around Ethereum, but in the last year it has began tailoring its services for other blockchains such as Flow and Polygon.
The upshot is that Alchemy's toolkit is likely to accelerate the development of the Solana eco-system by making it faster and easier to build new applications. The blockchain already hosts some Web3 hits—including NFT marketplace Magic Eden and fitness app Step'n—and more could follow.
"Alchemy coming in will significantly level up the capability of people building in Solana," the company's co-founder Nikil Viswanathan told Decrypt.
Alchemy describes the arrangement with Solana as an "official partnership" and said Thursday's launch is a "public gated beta," meaning only certain vetted developers will be able to use it first. But a company spokesperson said the Solana toolkit will be available to all comers in a matter of weeks.
The Solana launch comes during the first significant bear market for crypto in years, and is the first time Alchemy has had to navigate a major industry downturn.
The company may be better poised to weather the downturn than others, however, given its role as a "pick-and-shovel" provider to the rest of the industry. According to Viswanathan, Alchemy's business model is different than that of exchanges—which are taking a beating as prices and trading activity decline—since it gets paid based on others using its services, and since that usage continues to increase.
The Alchemy spokesperson says the number of developers using its services has tripled since February, and that the company continues to be profitable despite this year's bear market. Alchemy has raised over half a billion dollars in funding, and in February announced that it had reached a valuation of $10.2 billion.