The $15 million funding round was reportedly led by Pantera Capital and has seen participation from the Stanford University – as Cointelegraph reported yesterday – crypto exchange Coinbas, tech giant Samsung, Alphabet chairman John Hennessy, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Yahoo founder Jerry Yang. The company intends to use the funds to expand into international markets.
San Francisco-based blockchain firm Alchemy announced the launch of its public application programming interface (API) after having raised $15 million in its Series A funding round.
According to a press release published by the firm on Dec. 17, Alchemy’s platform allows enterprises to build blockchain-based applications.
The firm was founded by Stanford classmates Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau along with a team of industry veterans from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Stanford, and MIT, and entrepreneurs.
Developer tools are essential to adoption
The firm claims that its offering is more scalable, performant and reliable than existing alternatives and is accompanied by dedicated developer tools. Furthermore, Alchemy claims that developing on its platform is faster and costs less. Viswanathan explained that he and Lau believe developer infrastructure is the key to driving mainstream adoption of new technologies. Lau also said:
“We realized blockchain technology would develop in the same way, so we’re working to enable mainstream adoption by providing the industry with the high quality infrastructure and developer tools that it needs.”
Hennessy pointed out that he gained experience during his work at Google – now part of Alphabet – about how the early internet, which is often compared to the current blockchain, matured. He then commented on Alchemy’s initiative:
“What Alchemy is doing in blockchain has the potential to be similarly transformational, and Nikil and Joe have the deep technical background and proven entrepreneurial track record to make it happen.”
As the blockchain industry matures, ever more effort is being put into simplifying the development of applications based on this technology. Earlier this week, multinational IT services giant Tata Consultancy Services launched a blockchain app development kit that the firm claims speeds up smart contract development by 40%.
Alibaba Patents Would Secure, Accelerate Its Consortium Blockchain
Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group has won two U.S. patents designed to make its blockchain network safer and faster.
One patent aims to reduce the time to verify block data, while the other is designed to help participants set a validity period for a transaction in a blockchain network.
Both of the patents were approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) this week.
The approvals comes at a time with Ant Financial, the fintech arm of Alibaba, announced the launch of its Ant Open Blockchain Alliance, a consortium that aims to finance small and medium-sized businesses on its blockchain-based platform.
According to the patent filing, when data are added to a node the new technology will determine the update verification value of the node by using just the newly added data, not all the data in the block.
“The application will alleviate a problem in the existing technology, that much time is consumed because a verification value is calculated by using all data in a block”, the filing said.
The other patent will be used to set up a validity period for a transaction, meaning participants of a blockchain network can only process the transaction during a certain period of time via either a physical clock or a logical clock, according to Alibaba’s filing.
For example, the blockchain can be a consortium blockchain consisting of a third-party payment platform server, a domestic bank server, a foreign bank server and several user node devices serving as member devices.
The operator of the blockchain can set up a validity period and deploy online services such as cross-border payment and asset transfers, the filing said.
According to a November report from Chinese blockchain analytics firm Block Data on Chinese blockchain patents, Alibaba is one of the top three companies in developing blockchain patents, along with China Telecom and OneConnect, a subsidiary of one of China’s largest insurers, Ping An Insurance.
Alibaba applied for the most blockchain patents in 2018 with 90 blockchain-related technologies, followed by IBM and Bank of America.
