Our Investment in Allium

In the history of technology, there's a recurring pattern: a new paradigm emerges, creates a flood of raw data, and then someone builds a layer to make sense of it all. Google did this for the web. Bloomberg did it for financial data. Now, Allium is doing it for the blockchain.

Blockchain technology is powerful because it's permissionless: Anyone can write to it, create new types of transactions, or build new applications on top of it. This flexibility explains the industry's dynamism, but it comes at a cost. The data is a mess. 

Allium cleans up this mess. They continuously ingest data from over 40 blockchains, standardize it, and make it queryable. In doing so, Allium turns a wild west of schemas and chains into something akin to a traditional (and giant) database. 

The timing couldn't be better, as crypto matures from its earlier, wilder days into broader institutional and enterprise adoption. A recent report from Coinbase revealed that 56% of Fortune 500 companies are currently working on on-chain projects. At the same time, stablecoins settlements are rivaling Visa (notably, Allium powers Visa's own dashboard tracking stablecoin movements). BlackRock and WisdomTree have tokenized treasuries and Fidelity has tokenized money-market funds. Heavyweights in payments, like PayPal and Stripe have made serious investments into the space as well, bellwethers for increased consumer access. 

As crypto attracts more capital and developer interest, the need for structured data to power analytics will only grow. We've already seen the impact of Allium's work in high-profile projects like the Visa dashboard, Grayscale's State of Ethereum report, and Brevan Howard's Digital's Relentless Rise of Stablecoins analysis. But analytics is only half of the story.

Allium's database, spanning over 40 chains, isn't just for analysts—by providing a standardized, real-time view across multiple blockchains, Allium can serve as a backend to power production workloads. Stripe, for example, uses Allium to fight fraud and Phantom, a leading wallet, recently used Allium to scale hundreds of thousands of queries per second. These are just early examples of the role we believe Allium will play as foundational infrastructure across the crypto ecosystem for both data and compute. 

We originally backed Allium in their seed round and are thrilled to invest in their Series A with Theory Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.