Allium Raises $21.5M - Theory Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Amplify Partners

It has been a long and fun journey since 2021 and we’re excited to announce we have raised $21.5M total after our $16.5M Series A led by Theory Ventures, with participation from our lead seed investors Kleiner Perkins and Amplify Partners.

Blockchain data is hard, messy, and chaotic

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.

Accessing data is hard because blockchains are optimized for Writes and not Reads

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.

Parsing and interpreting blockchain data requires both deep domain expertise and data manipulation

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 abstracts the complexity with a simple way to query blockchain data

Allium tames the chaos by ingesting, sanitizing, and standardizing all this data. As of this post, the data we’ve archived across 40+ 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:

Uncovering the rise of stablecoins

Stablecoins have had a meteoric rise. In less than 5 years, the supply of USDT and USDC alone grew from under $500M to $145B+. Allium supported Brevan Howard's Digital’s Relentless Rise of Stablecoins report that uncovered this explosive growth. Massive institutions like Visa, Stripe and PayPal have also started to support stablecoin payments or even launch their own stablecoins. Here, we partnered with Visa to develop the Visa Onchain Analytics Dashboard, providing transparency into stablecoin activity and separating organic vs. inorganic transaction volume.

Deciphering tokenization and ETFs

Financial institutions like Blackrock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Grayscale, J.P. Morgan and Citi have made major strides in tokenization, enabling new ways to utilize assets and instantly settle global transactions. Digital asset ETFs from such institutions have also made investing in blockchain easier and safer. We played a small role here supporting Grayscale in their State of Ethereum report, providing granular data to help characterize the liquidity of ETH supply and its potential impact on Ethereum ETFs.

Fighting fraud and bot farms

With increased blockchain adoption, there is now more focus on fighting fraud, protecting users, and combating bad actors. Here, Allium serves enterprises like Stripe with onchain data for payments fraud detection. Allium has also saved projects like Wormhole and Jupiter hundreds of millions of dollars by using advanced graph clustering to detect fake accounts and bot farms that were attacking their airdrops and token issuances .

Keeping blockchain apps running at scale

The biggest moments in blockchain involve massive spikes in activity, putting significant strain on the network and other infrastructure. One of these moments was the 2024 Jupiter Airdrop, one of the largest ever token issuances that distributed nearly $700M to almost 1M wallets. For this, Allium partnered with Phantom, helping them serve nearly 100K queries per second as users refreshed to check their Phantom wallet balances and confirm receipt of their JUP tokens.

Peeling the next Allium layer

To our Alliumites, we are thankful for the countless weekends of joy you’ve put in to get us where we are today. To our partners, we are always grateful you chose to work with us as we all weathered the deepest crypto winter.

We are still so early in this industry and have a ways to go. This Series A, led by Theory Ventures (Tomasz Tunguz) with participation from our lead seed investors Kleiner Perkins (Bucky Moore) and Amplify Partners (David Beyer), allows Allium to build out the team and scale to the next level.

‍

Ethan & Chenghan
Chief Data Plumbers

P.S. we’re hiring