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Alkimi × Sui: Powering Onchain Advertising with the Sui Stack
Recorded: Feb. 19, 2026 Duration: 0:35:07Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Welcome everyone. Thanks for joining. Today we're going to dive into Alchemy and really a true case study in the full SWE stack and how they've utilized it to address a real world business problem. So we'll start out with a few quick introductions. I'm here with my coworker and colleague Abhinav, one of my favorite people to work with.
If you could do a quick introduction, sir.
Hey, everyone.
I'm part of the Misten product team focused on privacy, voters, and our data RPCs.
I'm glad to be here.
and then we have ben and chandru co-founders of alchemy um ben why don't you kick it off
And then we have Ben and Chandru, co-founders of Alchemy.
Ben, why don't you kick it off?
everyone i am ben ceo at alchemy which is a proud user of the full sweet stack
chandru
hi everyone my name is chandru and i'm the CTO at Alchemy, closely with Ben and a big fan of everything at Missed and Labs.
So can we just start out just for our guests?
Let's start out with what the problem was that you set out to solve, right?
And then essentially why you decided that distributed ledger technology was a critical piece of solving that problem.
So myself, Chandru and Chorley, the three founders at Alchemy, have worked in digital advertising more or less our entire careers
and really worked at companies that facilitated the real time buying and selling of ads on the internet.
In that experience, we saw a lot of the issues
which are predominantly around high fees.
So very little of the advertiser dollar
makes it to the seller of the ad.
And also the lack of transparency involved
in where those fees are taken and how they're
taken.
Given the ability for a blockchain to share a record of everything that's taking place
within any marketplace, it felt like a very good fit to solve the issues and just generally
make online marketplaces more efficient and provide more value back to the
people that generate value and the advertisers that fund content and then the the websites the
broadcasters the apps that capture the attention of people that they effectively sell to anyone
looking to promote a product service brand you name it and maybe it would be helpful also to just share with our guests, like what a few of
the different brands you work with and, you know, on both sides.
Yeah.
So we work with many buyers.
We work with brands directly.
We work with their media agencies.
So we've worked with crypto brands like Kraken, Coinbase, Uphold.
We work with Coca-Cola.
We work with TikTok, Cafe Pacific, Meta, Samsung, Visa.
Really any brand that's spending money online, I think we've been able to provide them with a better solution than what they were buying, using historically.
And the key for that is to
then have good eyeballs. So we have worked with and do work with large broadcasters. So any
connected TV providers, people like Tubi and Paramount, and then also regular content providers.
So they can be news publications. They can be magazines.
They can be blockchain-specific publications. So we have a lot of those in the network itself.
Really just places where you still go to find information about things that you're interested in.
We help those providers generate revenue.
And then we help the brands access the eyeballs that are on those various platforms. So I don't think we can really get into the Swiss SAC without
telling the story of where you started building, right? You started building on Ethereum.
What were the constraints that you ran into when you were trying to build Alchemy and me and had originally founded this the the market is billions and billions and billions of
transactions and they are what you would consider kind of micro transactions so thousandth of a cent
we typically bail those up into groups of a thousand that is what we refer to as a cpm
That is what we refer to as a CPM.
We ended up with our own network of validators to just try and solve the issue of notarizing
all of those transactions onto Ethereum.
It was expensive to do that.
I mean, the CPMs that we deal with are between $3 to $20, let's say, with gas fees what they were notarizing that many transactions on chain we
currently do anywhere between 50 to 25 million at the moment 15 to 25 i should say it's quite a good
way to go out of business in an afternoon on ethereum so we had our own layer two. Ultimately, we ran into issues of kind of both maintaining
the underlying infrastructure as well as the application layer. So when we were looking at
more effective solutions, we spoke to you, Roberto, as we kind of understood the entire stack. And I
think around that time, Ab and Ab and Co were talking about seal and that
was like the rest of the stack is important, but privacy, at least configurable privacy is
essential, particularly in Europe. There is the GDPR, which means that you can't go around writing
IP addresses, email addresses on chain forever. Because again, that is a very good way to go out of business.
Probably not in an afternoon, maybe after a month or so, when the ICO says, hey, you
can't now delete any information.
People have the right to have their data forgotten.
So being able to make it private from the outset was really important for us.
On top of the ability for us to store bails of transactions with walrus notarize those on
sui and then kind of have the ability for north list to take care of any financial reconciliation
that happens and then prove that's what took place on chain kind of that combination of those four
products really made sui fit for what is an enterprise application with a web two business model.
Although we are now seeing what you would consider web three businesses start to
advertise in more traditional channels.
So it has been able to straddle the gap quite nicely and really deliver value for
the people that are buying and selling ads online.
And I guess we'll get into this at a deeper level later, but what would you say has changed
since moving on to the SweetStack and from a commercial perspective?
How has it prepared you in your mind to evolve with, let's say, the developments in agentic
commerce and how that's impacting advertising?
I think one of the things that we've always been talking about is that with a blockchain, you are now able to combine not only the data that
passes between a buyer and a seller, so who, what, what, where, over which ad impressions,
and so on, kind of like the things that you need
to reconcile this after the fact.
Now, when you use a blockchain,
you're able to move not only data, but also value,
which presents quite a nice opportunity
to not only make the marketplace more efficient
in terms of fees, but also the access to liquidity
using pools that you can see on chain to facilitate real-time
transactions, which when you consider the efficiencies and speed gains of agentic media
buying, if you don't have that, really what is the point of using them in the first place
because you're still stuck reconciling campaigns for weeks if not months after the fact
so you may as well have not bothered because you've created you may have saved some time on
the front end in like negotiating the deal and having the agents buy media from each other
but you've added weeks to the end of it so you haven't it's kind of a straw man in the okay yeah
it was quicker for us to set up the deal but now it's longer for us to reconcile the deal. And then you're dealing with hallucinations without any shared
databases that you get by design on a blockchain. It would just become spaghetti very quickly and
kind of leave you in a reconciliation nightmare. I mean, really in a lot of the simulations
that we've done over longer periods of time at scale,
siloed databases really just fail quite spectacularly,
at least in our opinion as a company
that is using the SWE stack.
So it's pretty compelling, I think,
when you think about how difficult it would be for
an agent to get the access to a bank account and the programmability involved in accessing
that for an ad transaction in comparison to what you could do with objects in SWE smart contracts and how it's able to build programmable transaction blocks
to deliver specific information
and then send the value along exactly the same rails,
control and configure the privacy through seal
and then have a really cost efficient way
of storing data on Warrus that is persistent
and accessible by different
parties.
So it's been great that, whilst I would love to say we saw this coming four years ago,
that would be a lie.
It's now nice that the market is kind of, we're in the way of it, you know, like it
was going to go in one direction, it turned other way. And we're like, in the path of it, which is like a really cool place to be,
given that it solves for problems that people haven't yet run into, which is like quite a nice,
nice position to be in. Chandru, maybe you can speak a little bit to like, you obviously led
the technical integration and implementation here. Like, how did you approach the different
components of the SWE stack
from a system design perspective? You had to rethink how Alchemy worked, knowing what tools
you had available to you. How did you approach this? I know that you went through extensive,
extensive work with our team, but just walk our listeners through the approach, if you would.
Yeah, just walk our listeners through the approach, if you would.
Absolutely.
Thanks, Sarabato.
It's great to be here.
So when we started thinking about the constraints that we were having at the point where we made a decision to move to the SWE stack, we were facing issues with scaling out our infrastructure.
infrastructure and what we realized when we were speaking to the team at Niston Labs
was that it was a stack that in my opinion was built for advertising because advertising is a
unique kind of a beast where we are dealing not only with a scale that is unseen in any other
ecosystem for example we have billions of transactions of ads that are actually shown to people on an everyday basis.
These results in humongous amounts of data.
We are dealing with enterprise clients on the one side, the suppliers, which is the publishers that we work with.
On the other side, expectations from advertisers.
So there's the enterprise balance that we need to achieve.
And to top it all, each of these transactions
is of a micro value.
So all of this put together
is a very, very complicated problem to solve.
So when we looked at the Miston Labs product,
it was not just a, oh, we've got a blockchain
and we're gonna post our transactions there
and it is going to become immutable, is just one way to look at it.
The on-chain component is just one aspect of an enterprise solution.
And what I found the most impressive about the Miston Labs products is that it provided us with the Lego blocks that we could piece together in order
to build an enterprise product. And when we looked at ZK Login, which provided the ability
for us to have identity verification and tie them to wallets, that was a start because
that would provide us with the ability to have a financial reconciliation system that
could be tied to wallets using DeFi concepts.
That was unique in its own way. Secondly, when I was talking about the amounts of data, we needed
a data storage solution that would give us the ability to the confidence that the data would
persist and it would not be lost. It provided the kind of auditability and the
transparency which centralized databases would not provide us with. That provided at a low cost
because of the number of transactions was a game changer for us. Also, as Ben was talking,
he spoke about privacy regulations, which is huge in terms of advertising, because there is a lot of confidential and PII data that is
collected in order to enable targeting of ads,
in order to make sure that the ads are relevant to
the users who are seeing them and so on and so forth.
So SEAL provided us with the right kind of infrastructure and the capabilities to
encrypt and provide authorized encryption and decryption,
where only parties which are authorized to view the blobs
that we store on Walrus are able to do so.
And that in itself was that combined with Walrus,
where we could encrypt based on authorization
and store the encrypted data on Walrus was a big value addition for us.
What actually stole the show for me was Nautilus, where the biggest issue, one of the biggest issues,
there are many in the advertising ecosystem, is the lack of assurance. How do I trust the data
that you say is the single source of truth and is stored on a decentralized storage system?
The data can inherently be fault and decisions could be made based on falsified data.
Agents could then be asked to work on data that is not true.
So how do we assure all of the stakeholders in the ecosystem that the data that we are providing on the decentralized storage
is actually true and you can trust that data. That is exactly what Nautilus gave us, where we are
able to provide that trust, that assurance that the data is validated in a trustless manner and
that would then find its way onto Walrus, which serves as the single source of truth. So all of this put together,
I think is what changed the game for us.
So it's not just,
oh, I'm storing my data and it's notarized on a chain.
It's not just that,
it's just one component of an enterprise solution.
And all of this put together is what makes that enterprise product,
which we can take to publishers and
to advertisers and confidently say, here is a product that would solve the majority of
the problems that we're seeing in advertising ecosystem.
That's really helpful.
So Abhinav, maybe you can, to take a step back, you can help us understand what, like, what
in your view makes digital advertising such a demanding workload for a blockchain system?
I think Ben and Chandru have already spoken a lot about that. I'll probably just add on to what they have mentioned while trying to zoom out a bit.
In my opinion and the opinion of product leadership at Mistin,
I think Alchemy is a super important case study in general,
especially what it teaches us about like enterprise workloads on blockchain in general.
Right. Because digital advertising is one of the hardest workloads you can imagine
or toward any distributed system.
So on the surface, it sort of looks simple that, you know, you serve ads, you count impressions,
and you pay publishers. But I'm sure like Chandru and Ben know
it a lot better. It's incredibly demanding. So I feel
like there are three vectors, I think a couple of those are all
of those have been mentioned by Chandru and Ben as well. Chandru
mentioned scalability.
I see it as like volume.
That's the first thing.
So, you know, they are delivering like multi-millions to billions of ad impressions sort of every day.
So every one of those impressions can affect billing performance metrics or, you know, fraud detection
or let's say verification verification as Ben had mentioned. So there's that constant
stream of events that sort of need to be tracked and reconciled reliably. Second thing Chandru
sort of alluded to was sort of the data layer. So that's the second aspect, like there's a large data footprint. So each impression carries that metadata,
you know, including campaign details, there is a targeting info,
there are creative assets, device signals probably, or fraud indicators.
So overall, that data is large-ish and sensitive, you know, at the same time.
So it needs to be auditable without being exposed.
So there is that problem.
And lastly, there is the meta-trust problem, I feel.
Obviously privacy is a part of it,
but there's the meta-trust problem.
So I think Ben alluded to it a bit
that advertisers don't trust publishers, publishers don't trust
advertising exchanges, and the agencies don't trust measurement vendors, for example.
So you end up with these sort of weeks of reconciliation, disputes over delivery and
finance teams sort of trying to align spreadsheets.
So it isn't just a payment sort of compute problem.
It's sort of a coordination problem across execution, data, and verification, in my opinion.
It's also like the verification issue has kind of created a wedge for someone else to layer in another fee.
So that in and of itself makes the marketplace less efficient. And
verification is a feature of a blockchain that you don't have to pay for so it's like already there's a value back and that can be
20 cents to a dollar cpm to have that verification which is still like a black how did you verify
it we can't tell you because then people could reverse engineer it so the verification side
of things is something that people need and like begrudgingly have to pay for
without there being any kind of public means to prove that this is what it says it is and this
is how we arrived at that answer. I think the other thing that's also really neat about
building an ad exchange
on a blockchain, and particularly when you think about
kind of SWE, Walrus, even Deepbook as kind of
the liquidity that sits alongside it, those,
you can use SWE and Walrus for what we do in advertising,
but also there's a very large DeFi ecosystem where you can
provide liquidity in markets and effectively start to kind of guarantee the sustainability
of the system that we're running by being able to generate yield from a token that can be used
both in DeFi and then also for the maintenance of an enterprise-grade
product. So you can generate the means to continue to pay for storage and notarized transactions on
Suite through using the entire, not just our view of the advertising ecosystem part of the Suite
stack, but also the broader DeFi ecosystem as well. It's like something that is very, very unique. And I think that
it's a different way to look at it when you look at kind of a cross
cross application of what is facilitated by a blockchain. It's just, it's cool to be able to
do something to do one thing and then use something to be able to pay for the thing
that you've using it for. It's pretty sweet.
On the topic, what is your plan? Or can you touch on your plans for the AdFi pool?
Just to share that with our guests a little bit, because I know that's coming in the following months. Yeah, so to really solve the delta between an ad is booked and paid for. It's often the supply side of the business that
takes that burden. With now transactions, ad transactions taking place and being verified
on chain, you can source liquidity to allow for drawdowns at zero days in exchange for a fee for accessing expedited liquidity. But that solves two purposes.
Like one, if you are a smaller publisher with a lean balance sheet, it can mean
paying salaries, growing into a new region, generating more content. If you're a large
enterprise publisher, it can mean kind of increasing the free cash flow on your balance
sheet to do much bigger things so kind of expediting payments in general is
great it's not possible without a efficient book in the middle to ensure that reconciliation is
fast there's not a big back and forwards and you can kind of access that liquidity at any time
There's not a big back and forwards and you can kind of access that liquidity at any time.
So yeah, being able to bring that to allow people to, I guess we talk about yield farming
the internet in a way that invites a third party into that marketplace, because at the
moment you have to be an advertiser or be a publisher or build an ad exchange.
And I can tell you that those three things take quite a long
time to establish. But if you're looking to generate yield in the way that you do on DeFi,
this is a nice way for you to access a market that is effectively funded by people that buy and sell
ads every day. And I can tell you that that number nearly always goes up. And people spend,
regardless of what's happening anywhere right
there was there was a blip during covid people stopped spending money there but then it rebounded
quite quickly and now it's kind of continuing up into the right and the market's about
700 odd billion dollars at the moment but kind of forecasted to top out over a trillion i think that
as a a means for funding yield is quite an
exciting thing to bring on chain and invite people in to do that for the first time.
I still credit Adni with the tagging the line yield farming the internet. I'm going to give
him credit for that till the day I die. So Abhinav, do you think you can share like,
one of the things I love about Alchemy is just like it's such a fascinating use case and because of the way that it uses the stack.
Like when enterprises are considering, you know, where to build and how to address unique problems to their respective industry, like what are the signals that they should be looking out for?
And like what do you think makes a particular use cases especially
well-suited for this?
I think there are probably two or three or four things.
One is, I think the first signal would
be whether a particular industry, not just advertising and our industry has a
reconciliation problem so if your teams you know spend weeks like lying invoices or verifying
delivery or auditing reports you know that's a sign that verifiable infrastructure can help
um secondly would be like uh you know whether the architecture sort of separates the control
plane from the data plane.
So what that basically means is if your workload produces huge data volumes, you need a way
to store and prove that data efficiently.
So and that's basically what Alchemy does with both Walrus and Sui, as both of them
mentioned.
Third is look at the overall ecosystem.
So blockchain works when multiple parties
benefit from sharing a source of truth.
So Alchemy onboarded advertisers, publishers,
and exchanges together, like obviously not directly,
but as an overall ecosystem through their product.
So you don't have to look at it internally, but across your overall ecosystem through their product. So you don't have to look at it internally,
but across your overall ecosystem.
I think one probably, so those are the signals,
how you go about it is you would start
with some sort of a narrow workflow.
So that would be my sort of CTA that,
Alchemy focused on verification and settlement to begin with.
Right. So so that part was probably the biggest friction.
Correct me if I'm wrong and build from there.
So so so you have to pick that one particular workflow and then build on from there.
So like as Ben mentioned, there have been now focusing on AppFi and now focusing on agentic
commerce and now that sort of integrates with the ecosystem. So in a system. So start with that one thing. So the thing
to note is that, you know, advertising, it's not just that advertising can run on blockchain,
is that enterprise workloads sort of can become viable when there's a combination of great
execution, storage in terms of all
risk, verification and privacy. You know, all of the things that sort of Ben and Chandru have mentioned.
Chandru, you have the opportunity now. Is there like, what is the thing you have, Abhinav, present, right?
What are the gaps here? Like, what do you want to see from your infrastructure partner in the coming year?
Well, that's a difficult question, really, because, you know, when we started off integrating with SWE,
I'm going to be very, very honest here.
We did not foresee the fact that we would be building an agentic advertising marketplace.
We started with problems that were pain points everywhere in the ad ecosystem.
And ones that we knew could be solved using a decentralized, a low cost,
a cost effective storage mechanism. Some tools that would enable us to resolve the problems of compliance and
provide us with the ability to provide the assurance. And those are the building blocks
that are now enabling us to build an agentic marketplace. And I think this landscape is only
going to get more interesting as we move on on because there's still a little bit of friction
that I see where people are like, oh, should I allow an agent to take control of my wallet?
But it is coming. We are not too far away from that point in time where they will need
a larger amount of assurance, a greater amount of confidence in the infrastructure that powers the systems.
And I see that this concept that we are using in the advertising ecosystem is going to overflow
into many, many ecosystems as well, because the problems that we are dealing with
are common problems that are everywhere. Problems of trust affect multiple ecosystems. They're not
just limited to advertising. Problems of assurance,
problems of low-cost transactions, these are problems that exist everywhere. And I see that
the agentic marketplace or allowing agents to take actions on behalf of humans will become a norm in
the coming months, if not a few weeks, at the base of which we're moving. So I think having a robust infrastructure with the assurance that we currently have,
but I think where it gets challenging is not just the infrastructure, but our creativity
on what we do with the infrastructure.
Of course, the infrastructure is something that is uh the
fundamental tenet for anything to be built on top of it that needs to be robust secure scalable
extensible feature rich in order to allow for multiple use cases and we've seen that happen
because we did not start off with an agentic marketplace and we've seen that the infrastructure
and the tools that have been provided to us have been very, very robust.
So as to enable us to think outside the box and say, oh, yeah, now I can do this from the tools that I have instead of, oh, my God, how do I do this with the tools that I've currently chosen?
So having that, oh, wow moment is what changed the game for us.
change the game for us. And I think this is going to be the norm. It is only going to come down to
And I think this is going to be the norm.
how creative are we in building the application layer using the tools that have been provided to
us. And there are some things cooking already. And, you know, we have chatted with Danu and Ben
as well. Like when you think about agent, multi-agent coordination, that's a huge thing
at this point. We can already do multi-agent coordination with the existing pieces of the SUI stack,
you know, Walrus SUI seal, where you can store your durable sort
of memory of different agents in the workflow
or their step state on Walrus.
And you can protect that with seal,
but you can store all the coordination steps via SUI.
So all of that is already possible uh some of our teams are
internally building tools like that and we are we are just sort of interested to see what the product
ecosystem builds uh in that landscape and glad that the alchemy team is doing stuff there i think
just um i was just thinking while you were both talking and the the the undoubtable killer use case for agents so far
has been the development what developing applications having agents write code and i
think one of the reasons that has scaled so efficiently is because you have a system like
github right which is each commit is effectively a block on a repo, which has a clear record of like,
this happened before, I've changed this,
this is where we are today.
And within a development team,
you can make a repo private,
so you can share it within certain people
that allows you to work across teams quite effectively.
In my mind, the way that you can configure the SWE stack you can like github pretty much anything
you can think of because you can control the access you can allow people that may not know
each other to access certain parts of information at certain times and be able to reference back
what just happened so they don't come in and hey, the example I've been giving in the office
is a stupid one, but it's like,
someone books some holiday,
they say they have five days,
and then they get their agent to say,
actually, I'm gonna take six months off.
There will be some parameters that stop that happening.
It's like, hey, you can't do that
because our policy is X.
You can't have six months off anyway
because that's ridiculous.
And three, you have a human in the end,
he's gonna disappear for six months,
like what the hell's happening?
This didn't actually happen by the way it's
just an example i've been using but it's like that that's why coding's done so well and i think
with sw you have the building blocks to apply that kind of level of persistence auditability
tracing what took place with any marketplace that you can think of really. So that is where we feel very good about the fact that agents are now kind of running at
blockchains in a way that wasn't really happening prior to the advances we've seen across the
board with what LLMs can do and how they can do it.
Did I say that Alchemy is an important case study because it's a great use case for enterprise workloads?
It's not just that, but because also the wavelength of how Alchemy team thinks and how Liston, Sui, and Boris team think,
it's such an amazing sort of compatibility there.
So that's exactly how we are thinking about it.
Yeah, it's one of the things that I think has made this a great partnership from the beginning,
right? And it's like why every time your team comes up with a new innovation, Abhinav, like
they're the first team to integrate it. And it's like, it's just been very much in lockstep from
the beginning. Well, we are over time. For our listeners, I just wanted to let you know the full
Alchemy case study is live on SWE.io.
And I would really encourage anyone here that's building and or considering how to implement different aspects of the SWE stack or how to go about system design, reach out.
Like these are great ecosystem partners.
And Ben and Chandra are very generous with their time.
So I would really encourage you to reach out because we're all working through this together, right?
We're learning every day and figuring out what the optimal setup is
and how to iterate.
So thank you very much for joining.
I will speak to all of you probably again tomorrow.
But for our listeners, thanks again.
I really appreciate it.
And yeah, GM GM.
Thanks, everyone.
Bye-bye. Have a great day.
