When we started out in late 2021 our thesis was simple blockchain data, despite it being public and free, was difficult to understand, clunky to access and troublesome to maintain. Answering a simple question like “Who are the biggest Ethereum token holders over time?” requires an engineering team to run their own RPC nodes, ingest the full history of the blockchain, clean the data, transform the data and finally summon a wizard to cast a complex SQL query.
Why is it so hard? Blockchains have historically been optimized for Writes (getting data onto the blockchain) and less for Reads (getting data OUT of the blockchain). This is because optimization efforts were focused on increasing transaction throughput and building fault tolerant and scalable consensus algorithms. This neglect makes it hard to get data out efficiently and reliably at scale.
To quote Tim Roughgarden, Columbia Professor, “Blockchains are (virtual) computers, not databases.” They are Turing machines that support general computations, and anyone can write and deploy their own smart contract for their own use case. This nearly infinite number of use cases leads to the fragmentation of data schemas for different purposes. Standardizing these schemas requires deep domain expertise to turn esoteric technical outputs into clear information for specific concepts like tokens, NFTs, stablecoins and DEXs.
Allium tames the chaos by ingesting, sanitizing, and standardizing all this data. As of this post, the data we’ve archived across 100+ blockchains is in the petabytes and growing exponentially.
This is one of the rare times in history where indexing a giant public dataset is sorely needed by all similar to what Bloomberg did for financial data and what Google organized for public webpage data. With this indexed data, we are fortunate to support trailblazers in this industry and play some role the industry’s most exciting trends:
We serve 2 groups of customers today with the same data but different platform. Analysts who need to answer data questions about the blockchain (think BI) and Engineers who need highly reliable data queryable in near realtime (think Application backends). Our customers include the biggest institutions Visa, Stripe, Grayscale and also the biggest crypto companies such as Phantom, Uniswap. Allium is one of the unique companies in the industry that bridge blockchain and non blockchain worlds.
We love engineers who love solving new problems every single day.
Data Egress How does one transport 100s of TBs of data around the world without breaking the piggybank? (https:www.databricks.comblogannouncingpublicpreviewdeltasharingcloudflarer2integration)
Handle high traffic How can we support the biggest applications in this industry and allow handle 100,000 QPS at peak traffic and not go down? (https:www.allium.soposttheinsidestoryofthejupairdropatphantom)
Botnets This industry is in its early days, how does one catch botnets based on their behavioral patterns? (https:www.allium.sopostinitialreportforthe106kbotnet)
Fraud (Sybil) Detection Is it possible to transfer the same fraud detection heuristics into this blockchain world? (https:www.allium.sopostfromeligibilitytosybildetectionadeepdiveintowormholesmultichainairdrop)
Who is real? What constitutes meaningful and organic transactions on the blockchain? (https:www.allium.sopostvisaxalliummakingsenseofstablecoins)
Bring Your Own Transformation How do we let our customers design their own APIs and transform their own realtime data streams? (https:docs.allium.soalliumappexplorerapiquickstart)
AI and LLMs How does one design the LLM and AI experience on top of our data to lower the barrier of entry to crypto data? (https:docs.allium.soalliumappalliumexploreralliumaiassistant)
If any of those bore you, we have many many more problems we have to solve!
You will make mistakes, costly mistakes, but at Alliums expense. We have an internal leaderboard of the costliest infrastructure mistakes made, and we (try to) learn from them. We dont have fancy Michelinstarred meal budgets, but we have a huge infrastructure budget for one to get better at your craft. Why? We leverage every tool (no prereqs) out there because we meet our enterprise customers where they are at:
Every OLAP: Snowflake, Databricks, Bigquery, Clickhouse*
Every OLTP: Postgres, Aurora
Every Event bus: Kafka, SNS, PubSub
Every Cloud Provider: AWS, GCP, Azure (one day)
A copy of data in every region: US East, Central, West, Europe, Asia
Every data transformation and orchestration tool: Apache Beam, Materialize, TinyBird, DBT, SQLMesh, Temporal
Data governance tools: DataFold
(if any of the names above sound like foreign Pokemon names, fret not, you can come here and catch them all, we are here to teach and make you successful.)
Mario Gabriele from The Generalists Future 50 Startup List: https:www.allium.sopostalliumnamedawardeeofthegeneralistsinauguralfuture50startups
Tomasz Tungus from Theory Ventures:https:tomtunguz.comallium
Bucky Moore from Kleiner Perkins: https:www.kleinerperkins.comperspectivesalliumseriesa
Pro Athlete Mindset Consistency. Day in and day out, in pursuit of excellence. A win yesterday does not guarantee (or even imply!) a win tomorrow. I hope anyone who supports a failing sports team will feel the pain (cough Man United fans) of inconsistency
Figure It Out & Extreme Ownership Every day is unexplored territory. There are new engineering frameworks, new legal docs, new compliance, new sales, new regulations, and new operational procedures every single day. If you don’t know it, learn it. If you can’t learn it, find someone or a product that does it. If you can’t find someone, find someone who can find someone. It is never lack of resources, but lack of resourcefulness.
High Agency (One of) the highest commonality between all successful people is their responsiveness, most successful billionaire CEOs still reply to emails within minutes (within working hours). And when you reply, respond fast with effective solutions and even better, resolutions. If you’re looking for a superpower, you can’t go wrong with responsiveness. Well of course this doesnt make sense when youre an engineer coding in flow, but in general high agency of problem solving gets one very far in life
Leading from the Front No one is going to listen (and adopt) your suggestion unless you lead by example. It’s one thing to say We need to do XYZ this better & it’s another thing to build an MVP and say “This is the way we should do things”. The proof of work and momentum goes a long way.
Strong Opinions On the Future (loosely held) It is okay to be wrong, but what is not okay is not to have an idea of how a better future should be. Alliumites take pride in trying to improving everything about the company all the time.
Sense of (allium) business smell There are number of folks who live to eat at Allium, but the Allium smell we are talking about is that we love folks who naturally want to know why and how the work they are doing builds leverage for their teammates and also relates to the business goals
We invite people of all backgrounds (https:www.allium.soabout). We have engineers who learnt coding much later in life, who learnt coding on the side, we have engineers who are still in school and we also have engineers who went to the top schools (CMU, Stanford, UIUC, UPenn, Oxford, NUS, Cornell), all are welcome if one comes in with a curious mind and an infectious work ethic.
Medical, Dental, Vision, Life and AD&D insurance US folks get 100% coverage for Gold plans, 80% for dependents
Note: The sun never sets on Allium we hire from any geographical location as long as you are willing to overlap 2 hours overlap on NYC mornings MonThurs from 10am12pm ET. We have people based in New York, Seattle, Singapore and Australia
All applicants have to answer this pop quiz: What is an Allium? What is your favorite Allium?. Bonus points for the right pronunciation.
Cambridge Mobile Telematics
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8th Light
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