Job Description
Allium makes blockchain data accurate, simple and fast. \n\nBlockchain data is hard, messy, and chaotic. \nWhen 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.\n\nAccessing data is hard because blockchains are optimized for Writes and not Reads\nWhy 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.\n\nParsing and interpreting blockchain data requires both deep domain expertise and data manipulation\nTo quote Tim Roughgarden, Columbia Professor, [_“Blockchains are (virtual) computers, not databases.”_](https://twitter.com/Tim_Roughgarden/status/1512847113599729668) 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.\n\nAllium abstracts the complexity with a simple way to query blockchain data\nAllium 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.\n\nGoogle and Bloomberg had to organize the world's public financial and webpage data, Allium is on a mission to do the same for blockchain data\nThis 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:\n\nAbout our customers\nWe 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](https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/07/18/visas-data-partner-allium-labs-raises-165m-as-their-new-findings-show-stablecoin-activity-is-back-up/), 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.\n\nWe love to empower our interns as full time engineers and treat them with the highest standards and expectations.\n\nIf you want to get a front row seat into a startup, go for it!