Nikil Viswanathan is the co-founder and CEO of Alchemy — the blockchain developer platform that provides the API infrastructure enabling thousands of blockchain applications including OpenSea, Aave, and MakerDAO to read and write to Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and other networks — which reached a $10.2 billion valuation in February 2022 after raising $250 million in a Series C round co-led by a16z and Coatue, and which became the dominant third-party node infrastructure provider during the 2020-2022 crypto boom by providing developer experience improvements that lowered the barrier to building blockchain applications.
Background
Nikil Viswanathan studied computer science at Stanford University, where he met his Alchemy co-founder Joe Lau (CTO). Both worked in technology prior to founding Alchemy — Viswanathan at companies including Microsoft and LinkedIn. They co-founded Alchemy in 2017, initially as a project in a different domain before pivoting to blockchain infrastructure after recognizing that building on Ethereum was technically difficult due to unreliable node infrastructure and poor developer tooling.
Alchemy
Alchemy operates as an “AWS for blockchain” — a cloud infrastructure layer that developers use instead of running their own Ethereum nodes. Prior to services like Alchemy and Infura, blockchain applications had to run their own nodes to query the blockchain and submit transactions, which was expensive, complex, and unreliable at scale.
Core Products
Alchemy Supernode — A node infrastructure service that provides reliable, scalable access to blockchain data across Ethereum mainnet, Ethereum L2s, Polygon, Solana, and other chains. Applications like OpenSea use Alchemy’s nodes rather than running their own.
Alchemy NFT API — Specialized API endpoints for querying NFT ownership, metadata, transfers, and events — which became heavily used during the 2021-2022 NFT boom when OpenSea and other NFT platforms needed to handle millions of NFT-related queries efficiently.
Notify / Webhooks — Real-time transaction notification system enabling applications to respond to on-chain events without constant polling.
Alchemy University — Free educational resources for developers learning Web3 development, expanding the ecosystem by training more blockchain developers.
Scale and Customers
Alchemy processed hundreds of billions of compute units (Alchemy’s usage metric) per month at peak. Major customers included:
- OpenSea — The largest NFT marketplace.
- Aave — The leading DeFi lending protocol.
- MakerDAO — The DAI stablecoin protocol.
- 0x — The decentralized exchange protocol.
- Crypto.com, Dapper Labs, NBA Top Shot — Consumer crypto applications.
Funding
| Round | Date | Amount | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed / Series A | 2019–2020 | — | — |
| Series B | October 2021 | $80M | $505M |
| Series C | February 2022 | $250M | $10.2B |
The Series C round was co-led by a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) and Coatue Management and was announced in February 2022 near crypto market peak.
Infrastructure Risk and Centralization
Alchemy’s dominance raised concerns about centralization risk in nominally decentralized applications — if a large percentage of Ethereum applications use Alchemy as backend infrastructure, an Alchemy outage could simultaneously affect many ostensibly decentralized protocols. This is a genuine architectural tension in Web3 development: using cloud infrastructure to power decentralized applications.
In 2020, an Alchemy service disruption affected a significant number of Ethereum applications simultaneously, illustrating this risk.
Key Dates
- 2017 — Alchemy founded by Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau at Stanford.
- 2020 — Launches public blockchain API services; gains traction during DeFi Summer.
- 2021 — NFT boom drives massive demand for NFT API services; Alchemy’s scale increases dramatically.
- October 2021 — $80M Series B at $505M valuation.
- February 2022 — $250M Series C at $10.2B valuation (co-led by a16z and Coatue).
- 2022 — Crypto and NFT market downturn; Alchemy team reduced in size.
- 2023–2024 — Layer 2 expansion drives new developer demand.
Common Misconceptions
- “Alchemy controls the blockchains it provides access to.” — Alchemy provides read/write access to blockchains; it does not control or operate those blockchains. Consensus, block production, and network security are entirely separate from Alchemy’s infrastructure layer.
- “Using Alchemy makes an application centralized.” — It introduces an infrastructure dependency, but the blockchain state itself remains decentralized. The concern is about infrastructure fragility, not blockchain protocol centralization.
Last updated: 2026-04