If the crypto enthusiasts are right, the next decade will see billions of people start using applications built on distributed, user-owned blockchains. The new paradigm has been called Web 3. But Web 3 still has some significant challenges to overcome if it is to replace the digital world as we know it.
Blockchain networks, for example, will need an efficient way to detect and resolve performance issues. Current analytics tools are designed for businesses to monitor their websites and apps. Such services need only be designed for one user. In the decentralized world of blockchains, however, the users are the owners, turning the traditional model of maintenance and bug fixes on its head.
MIT alumnus-founded company Metrika has developed a suite of tools to help the distributed communities of the blockchain world monitor and improve their networks. The company allows users to create alerts, access reports and view real-time community dashboards that visualize network performance, issues and trends over time.
“Metrika is a community-based monitoring and collaboration platform,” says founder and CEO Nikos Andrikogiannopoulos SM ’06, MBA ’11. “We make [blockchain network] telemetry a public good for all. These applications have billions of dollars in assets, so it’s unthinkable that we wouldn’t want service assurance and deep visibility into what’s happening in real time.”
Metrika currently provides services for popular blockchain protocols including Ethereum, Algorand, Flow and Solana. The company plans to expand this list as other networks grow in popularity in hopes of enabling the much-hyped shift to Web 3.
“Our vision at Metrika is to become a critical layer of the Web 3 world,” says Andrikogiannopoulos. “Ten years from now, children will be interacting with assets on their mobile phone. The idea of a bank account will be foreign to them. There will be no corner banks. The whole idea of finances won’t go through brick-and-mortar stores and bank accounts – you’ll have assets on every application you use. In that world, where everything happens on a blockchain, how can Metrika help provide the observability, reliability and visibility of the blockchain network?”
Bouncing ideas from MIT
Andrikogiannopoulos first came to MIT as a graduate student in 2004, and he likes to say he never really left. To this day, he lives in Cambridge with his wife, who works at MIT, and often returns to campus.
After earning his second MIT degree, an MBA from the Sloan School of Management, Andrikogiannopoulos began a telecommunications consulting job. During lunch breaks, he would return to MIT to work with Venture Mentoring Services (VMS), where entrepreneurs from the MIT community can connect with mentors and get advice. While kicking around telecom startup ideas, a VMS mentor connected him to internet entrepreneur Rubin Gruber, who suggested he explore the blockchain space instead.
It was mid-2018 – what many remember as the “crypto winter” for the lull in blockchain hype and the corresponding crash in crypto prices. But Andrikogiannopoulos began researching the industry and networking with people in the blockchain space, including an MIT alumnus who worked at the blockchain company Algorand, which was founded by Silvio Micali, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering at MIT.
A few months after their first conversation, Andrikogiannopoulos returned to Gruber’s office and told him that blockchains lacked monitoring and operational intelligence.
The problem stems from the decentralized structure of blockchains. Each user acts as a node in the system by creating, receiving and moving data through their server. When users encounter a problem, they need to determine whether the problem lies with their node or involves the network as a whole.
“They can go on Twitter and Discord and ask other users what they’re experiencing,” says Andrikogiannopoulos. “They try to triangulate the problem and it takes them several hours to figure out the problem, coordinate a response and solve it.”
To build Metrika, Andrikogiannopoulos set up open-source nodes around the globe that pull data from the nodes and networks, then aggregate that data into easy-to-understand reports and other tools.
“We act as public infrastructure, so users get visibility through dashboards, alerts and reports, and then we add collaboration tools on top of that,” explains Andrikogiannopoulos.
By 2019, Metrika had begun to detect issues with node performance, effort, network latency, and errors such as blocks not being produced at the correct rate. Andrikogiannopoulos showed his progress to Algorand employees, who expressed interest, so he continued to build out Metrika’s suite of tools.
“You can see the idea of Metrika bouncing all over the MIT ecosystem,” says Andrikogiannopoulos. “It’s critical when starting companies that you have this kind of insight and resource-rich environments like MIT, where you can iterate on your ideas and find team members who want to join you.”
Enables Web 3
Blockchains are no longer a niche technology. Around the world, companies in finance and logistics, as well as gamers and other creatives are using the technology.
“The world of blockchain until today has been a big experiment,” says Andrikogiannopoulos. “A lot of this infrastructure just hasn’t been built. But Bitcoin proved that this can work outside of the traditional financial world, and Ethereum takes it to another level with applications, smart contracts and by essentially creating a decentralized, smart computer. We think on enabling the world we see coming.”
As Metrika continues to build out solutions to monitor blockchains, it also wants to provide services for the many applications that are built on top of that infrastructure.
“In the future, if a blockchain transaction doesn’t go through and you’re Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, you need to know why that transaction didn’t go through and what happened,” Andrikogiannopoulos says. “Or if you’re an application that’s playing a game or buying assets and the transactions hang, you need to understand why the user experience is affected. In Web 3, these things are very important because of the scale and value flow we’re talking about.”
For Nikos, improving blockchain performance is not just about network optimization. It’s also about helping usher in the world of open finance and open applications that Web 3 promises.
“We’ve reached 17 hours of outages on blockchain networks in some cases, but what’s even more important to me is not the outages themselves, but the infrastructure needed to avoid them as the industry continues to mature,” says Nikos. “These issues can compromise trust as we bring users into the Web 3 world. Metrika’s mission is to enable a compelling Web 3 ecosystem.”
