Your guide to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Web 3.0

The goal of mass adoption is a common refrain for the blockchain industry, but there is a steep learning curve when it comes to getting the masses on board with Web3. Alchemy hopes the 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, chief product officer at Alchemy, told Decrypt in an interview. “The way we’re really seeing that happen is by empowering developers.”

For Halpern, bringing Web3 to the masses begins with getting developers excited about creating the products that people will use.

“It’s kind of this flywheel life cycle where, if you want my grandmother to be able to use a Web3 application, it has to be a product that she’s actually excited to use,” Halpern said. “And for that 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 multiple chains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, with plans for Solana integration coming in the future.

Alkymi, often described as the AWS of the blockchain, raised $250 million in Series C funding in October 2021, and in August 2022, Alchemy bought the Ethereum code platform, Chainshot.

Alchemy says the Create Web3 Dapp tool is open source, which Halpern said was intentional.

“We want people to contribute to it,” she said. “The idea here is that 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 knack for making bold statements, Alchemy routinely says its products will work within a certain amount of time. In November, Alchemy launched an NFT approval list platform, Spearmint, for Ethereum layer-2 projects. Alchemy said users could create an approval list in under 10 minutes, and with CW3D it takes four minutes to build a dapp.

Halpern acknowledged that these 4 minutes may depend on a few factors such as 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 absolutely essential packages and libraries you need to start a dapp,” Halpern said. “We’re not going to make this very heavy, it’s not going to be super bloated, it’s going to be light.”

Other projects building platforms for launching decentralized applications include Algorand, Cosmosand 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 much like building a website in the ’90s — it’s like a hot spot, there’s a ton of opportunity, but the infrastructure tools and support you get as a developer is next to nothing,” Halpern said. “If you really want to build the next generation of mainstream applications, the tools and infrastructure have to be able to support you through it.”