Allium makes blockchain data accurate, simple and fast

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 100+ blockchains is in the petabytes and growing exponentially.

Google 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

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:

About our customers

We 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, 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.

The Role

Allium is seeking a Research Analyst to transform blockchain data into actionable insights. You will work closely with our team of data scientists, engineers, and business stakeholders to develop, build, and maintain dashboards, reports, and content that drive strategic decision-making and conversations across the largest institutions & companies in the industry. Shape how the crypto community and institutions interpret on-chain activity, while learning from leading blockchain data engineers and analysts.

What You’ll Do

• Develop blockchain analytics - Build, maintain, & optimize queries (SQL) and insights from massive multi-chain datasets

• Build research dashboards & reports - Design and maintain dashboards and visual reports that drive strategic decision-making

• Produce concise market updates and research - Analyze institutional trends (e.g. stablecoins, tokenized assets, onchain finance), protocol mechanics, market structure, and major crypto events.

• Shape the narrative for the industry - Write compelling data-driven content (blogs, social media posts, research reports) to build Allium’s brand and your personal brand to become an authoritative voice to the largest industry players

• Cross-functional scaling - Collaborate with sales, marketing, and product/engineering to distribute insights, provide product feedback, and highlight Allium’s data stack
  

About You

• Crypto-native - You deeply understand crypto concepts and are always tracking emerging trends

• Strong proficiency in SQL and data - Able to write complex queries (joins, grouping, CTEs, window functions) and optimize for performance / UX

• Natural data storyteller - You use the numbers to build a compelling narrative vs. having numbers for their own sake. You turn complex data into clear, shareable insights. You have an opinionated view backed by data, and tie back to why people should care

• You are an owner - You are proactive, responsible and adaptable. You take pride in your work and take responsibility for your decisions, and also respect others with theirs. You have excellent attention to detail, organizational skills, and meet deadlines all while operating in a highly ambiguous and fast-changing environment. You want to build your personal brand and are confident staking your reputation on the quality of your work

• You are a doer - You get stuff done, and move with unusual urgency, take pride in continual improvement, and iteratively integrate feedback.

• You have high integrity - You uphold the highest standards of discretion and integrity. You'll be entrusted with a range of confidential information, from customer information to company financial details.

• Institutional background / understanding is a major plus

More specific past work Allium has done:

• Visa's stablecoin dashboard: https://visaonchainanalytics.com/

• Visa x Allium stablecoin lending whitepaper: https://corporate.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/corporate/solutions/documents/stablecoins-beyond-payments-onchain-lending-opportunity.pdf

• Diving deep into the guts of Ordinals data to power research like this: https://x.com/0xren_cf/status/1813606266553446596

• Sybil Detection (https://www.allium.so/post/from-eligibility-to-sybil-detection-a-deep-dive-into-wormholes-multichain-airdrop)

• Powering Brevan Howard Digital's stablecoin industry reports

• Designing the most intuitive DEX schemas for ALL DeFi researchers to use easily (https://www.allium.so/post/announcing-v3-polars-the-dex-analytics-portal-sponsored-by-the-uniswap-foundation)

• Ensure Grayscale's State of Ethereum Report had the right staking and fees data: (https://www.grayscale.com/research/reports/the-state-of-ethereum)

• Design chain level metrics (Fees, Activity..) for all chains: (https://docs.allium.so/historical-data/chain-metrics)

• Hunt down and curate wallet entities and labels (https://docs.allium.so/historical-data/identity)

• Account abstraction - Ensure we have all the right decoded logs to power https://www.bundlebear.com/overview/all

Don't take our word for it, what our customers say about us (https://www.allium.so/blog#love)

What some ~cool people have to say about us:

• Mario Gabriele from The Generalist's Future 50 Startup List: https://www.allium.so/post/allium-named-awardee-of-the-generalists-inaugural-future-50-startups

• Tomasz Tungus from Theory Ventures: https://tomtunguz.com/allium/

• Bucky Moore from Kleiner Perkins: https://www.kleinerperkins.com/perspectives/allium-series-a/

Ok.. now for some tough love, here are the values we strive for at Allium:

• Pro Athlete Mindset - Consistency. Day in and day out, in pursuit of excellence. A win yesterday does not guarantee (or even imply!) a win tomorrow. I hope anyone who supports a failing sports team will feel the pain (cough Man United fans) of inconsistency

• Figure It Out & Extreme Ownership - Every day is unexplored territory. There are new engineering frameworks, new legal docs, new compliance, new sales, new regulations, and new operational procedures every single day. If you don’t know it, learn it. If you can’t learn it, find someone or a product that does it. If you can’t find someone, find someone who can find someone. It is never lack of resources, but lack of resourcefulness.

• High Agency - (One of) the highest commonality between all successful people is their responsiveness, most successful billionaire CEOs still reply to emails within minutes (within working hours). And when you reply, respond fast with effective solutions - and even better, resolutions. If you’re looking for a superpower, you can’t go wrong with responsiveness. Well of course this doesn't make sense when you're an engineer coding in flow, but in general high agency of problem solving gets one very far in life

• Leading from the Front - No one is going to listen (and adopt) your suggestion unless you lead by example. It’s one thing to say We need to do XYZ this better & it’s another thing to build an MVP and say “This is the way we should do things”. The proof of work and momentum goes a long way.

• Strong Opinions On the Future (loosely held) It is okay to be wrong, but what is not okay is not to have an idea of how a better future should be. Alliumites take pride in trying to improving everything about the company all the time.

• Sense of (allium) business smell - There are number of folks who live to eat at Allium, but the Allium smell we are talking about is that we love folks who naturally want to know why and how the work they are doing builds leverage for their teammates and also relates to the business goals

About the team

We invite people of all backgrounds (https://www.allium.so/about). We have engineers who learnt coding much later in life, who learnt coding on the side, we have engineers who are still in school and we also have engineers who went to the top schools (CMU, Stanford, UIUC, UPenn, Oxford, NUS, Cornell), all are welcome if one comes in with a curious mind and an infectious work ethic.

Administrative Benefits

Medical, Dental, Vision, Life and AD&D insurance - US folks get 100% coverage for Gold plans, 80% for dependents

Note: The sun never sets on Allium - we hire from any geographical location as long as you are willing to overlap 2 hours overlap on NYC mornings Mon-Thurs from 10am-12pm ET. We have people based in New York, Seattle, Singapore and Australia

All applicants have to answer this pop quiz: "What is an Allium? What is your favorite Allium?". Bonus points for the right pronunciation.