The goal of mass adoption is a common refrain for the blockchain industry, but there’s a steep learning curve in onboarding the masses to Web3. Alchemy hopes its new Create Web3 Dapp or CW3D platform will help bring more people into decentralized technologies.
“Our overall mission and vision is to bring blockchain or Web3 to a billion people,” Elan Halpern, Product Manager at Alchemy, told Decrypt in an interview. “The way we really see that happening is by empowering developers.”
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For Halpern, bringing Web3 to the masses starts with getting developers excited about creating the products that people will use.
“There’s kind of this flywheel lifecycle where, if you want my grandmother to be able to use a Web3 application, there has to be a product that she’s actually excited about using,” Halpern said. “And in order for there to be the product, a developer has to be excited about building that product.”
Launched in 2017, Alchemy is a blockchain software development company that builds applications across several chains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, with plans for Solana integration coming in the future.
Alchemy, often described as the AWS of blockchain, raised $250 million in Series C funding in October 2021, and in August 2022, Alchemy acquired the Ethereum coding platform, Chainshot.
Alchemy says the Create Web3 Dapp tool is open source, something Halpern said was intentional.
“We want people to contribute to it,” she said. “The idea here is you can build your own templates, components, and find features and things that you want,” adding that the CW3D tool aims to make developers’ lives easier. “That means involving a lot of other ecosystems, involving a lot of other developer advocates, and people to be able to contribute there.”
With a flair for bold statements, Alchemy routinely says its products will work within a certain amount of time. In November, Alchemy launched an NFT allowlist platform, Spearmint, for Ethereum layer-2 projects. Alchemy said users could create an allowlist in under 10 minutes, and with CW3D, it takes four minutes to build a dapp.
Halpern did acknowledge that those 4 minutes can depend on a few factors like connectivity, but added that the CW3D tool comes with the essential tools needed to create a decentralized application, so the time required should still be far less than alternative methods.
“What we did was boil down what are the absolute essential packages and libraries that you need to start a dapp,” Halpern said. “We’re not going to make this really heavy, it’s not going to be super bloated, it’s going to be lightweight.”
Other projects building platforms for launching decentralized applications include Algorand, Cosmos, and Infura.
On Thursday, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced the launch of its Ethereum layer-2 network for decentralized applications, Base.
“Building in Web3 right now is pretty similar to building a website in the 90s—it’s like a hot space, there’s a ton of opportunity, but the infrastructure tooling and support that you get as a developer is like close to nothing,” Halpern said. “If you really want to build the next generation of mainstream applications, the tooling and the infrastructure has to be able to support you through that.”
