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Building Infrastructure That Just Works — Uniblock
Recorded: Feb. 4, 2026 Duration: 1:14:12Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, Kevin Callahan, co-founder of Uniblock, shared insights on the company's strategic partnership with Anchor, the importance of reliability in crypto infrastructure, and his vision for Uniblock as a unified API layer for the blockchain ecosystem. He emphasized the growing trend of crypto becoming integral to fintech, highlighting the need for robust solutions that support developers and enhance user experiences.
Full Transcription
I Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Thank you. . well i think we are good to go now already hi kevin hey sergio how are you doing
hey how are you doing all good today we have a we have a storm over here but it looks like we are standing
up okay what about you uh we've had a storm about a week ago um life is good otherwise and um yeah
it's just cold every day now and that's it that's just the world we live in yeah it is definitely is i hate cold weathers but well at least over here um it's not that bad
it's mild and um it's just two months two and a half months per year so it's bearable at least
for now um just good until we all get to retire in like the south of france or something like that
or all the people calling in through dubai or singapore i mean they've already kind of figured
this out maybe that's a little too hot for me i am yeah i i can be a little special when it comes to weather um but yeah i don't complain i don't complain well um it looks like i can hear
you perfectly and we have given everyone a couple of minutes already to to join us um well in case
you are late to the party or you couldn't join us live today uh this episode is
being recorded so you know i'll feel free to tune in at any time um so i'll just officially get it
started then um so hey again everyone and welcome back to the Anchor Partners Spotlight Series, where we sit down with founders and
builders across the Web3 ecosystem.
And today's guest is Kevin Callahan, co-founder and CEO of Uniblock.
Kevin's background is a bit special and before starting uni block he spent several
years at twitter now x and later on work at coinbase and uh well i think these two names
do ring a bell to uh each one of us here in listening in and yeah which gives him i believe a pretty unique perspective on
scale reliability and trust and so we will hear a lot from him um later on and yeah we are um
going to talk about that journey of course what uni blog is building how infra companies think about reliability and well of
course how uni blog works with anchor behind the scenes so sir welcome great to have you here
sergio thank you for having me anchor thank you for hosting and everybody thank you for listening
really appreciate it thank you so much sir um before we Before we get started with the actual questions, what do you think about introducing yourself for our audience? startups, had some exits. I ended up, as you mentioned, well, actually before Twitter,
I was at a company called Wattpad and Wattpad is the largest social network for writers.
There's about a hundred million users. It was bought by Naver out of Korea for
three quarters of a billion a couple of years ago. After that, went to Twitter, as you mentioned,
really enjoyed my time there. I'm sure we'll talk about it a little bit.
And then I had the opportunity to join either Stripe or Coinbase, and I was recruited by Fred
Wilson from USV to go over to Coinbase pre-IPO. Most of my role was to look for ways to diversify
away from trading fees. And one of the items that was on my docket was Coinbase Cloud, which kind of gave us some of
the idea for what we're building here at Uniblock, which we'll talk about. I'm an angel investor.
One of my angel investments just went public. They're a psychedelics company. I love investing
in founders really early, people that'll just get punched in the face over and over and over again
until they figure something out. And I'm an LP and some funds, again, really early stage stuff.
And yeah, and then we're building out Uniblock in partnership with Anchor.
That's definitely a question I'm going to ask you later on, which is how do you keep up with,
you know, so many things simultaneously yeah thank
you so much Kevin for the introduction and actually I would love to start with your personal
path actually I had no idea what path was bought by neighbor and just for the listeners for a bit bit of context neighbor is actually um well please correct me if i'm wrong kevin but um in my um how
how i how i get it from my korean friends neighbor is kind of like the google of korea they own
everything and internet wise um they are the default right um search engine in Korea if I remember correctly and
It's huge. Yeah. Yeah. I think of neighbor as being a kind of a marriage between
Google and uber and you know, I don't know like a bunch do everything right do they do everything
Yeah, exactly. So and then currently now they do social networks and they actually have like a movie studio based out of Wattpad. But yes, they do everything.
Yeah, there's a bit of context for everyone.
And whoa, sorry about that.
Now moving back to my original question,
I tend to just fly around different topics
and hop on and off uh really
sorry about that and yeah you've worked at twitter and coinbase right which is uh the two that i
that i know best from your um well i checked your linkedin uh if you notice a stalker that was
actually me and there was um two actually well at least from the outside right um it feels like they are very
different companies right but both of course operate at a massive scale and yeah i just
wonder what did those experiences teach you that really stayed with you yeah yeah i mean so i think
a few things one i you know life is too short to work on things that you don't give a shit about. And I just absolutely love the X slash Twitter product, which is now SpaceX, which I would love to shoot rockets into space. So maybe I should have stuck around. But yeah, I mean, I just love the product. And that is just makes your day better and makes your life better when you care about what you're working on.
makes your day better and makes your life better when you care about what you're working on.
And obviously, you know, at the time, X slash Twitter was the place for kind of crypto conversation.
And so it was always kind of fun to be that home for the space that I cared a lot about.
And, you know, frankly, I write about this quite a bit on like LinkedIn and just in general, where I feel like most of the world is completely screwed.
I just think that the entire system is extracting from them.
And so I think having, you know, crypto in general, I think is really important.
Investing in general and having sovereignty is extremely important.
sovereignty is extremely important. So that was this theme that was going through. And obviously,
So that was this theme that was going through.
you know, there's other conversations on Twitter around politics, which are intertwined with people's
sovereignty and finance in general. So yeah, and then obviously, crypto is a piece of that that's
really near and dear to me. And so when that opportunity kind of came about, you know, I jumped at it.
That said, though, you know, there's a couple threads through all these companies.
So in my intro, I kind of mentioned like USV.
So Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson, you know, he was the one he was early into Twitter.
He was actually one of the guys that kicked Jack Dorsey out of the company.
He was early in.
They were early into Wattpad where I was,
and then he's on the board of Coinbase.
And so there's all of these threads and it's something in life
when you start to notice how all these things happen.
It's like, how do you get on the inside of these threads
is part of what I've learned.
But yeah, I think like just caring about the product
and caring about what you're doing brings a lot're doing brings a lot of meaning to my life and I'm sure the other people.
Interesting. Yeah, sounds fair.
And well, I wonder, because you mentioned starting UniBlog after, well, because, you know, you wanted to start something
of your own. And, yeah, also something that, you know, probably you can manage better and care
about. But at what point did you, you know, realize like, oh, okay, you know, I'm, I'm going
to build something on my own, you know, get punched in the face as, you know, in a startup,
as you said, like, what was the motivation yeah so i think um
there's a few things one and i actually just wrote about this on linkedin but um there were
uh if i were to die if i were on my deathbed um in a few years hopefully a long time for now
and i hadn't had at least one really big successful startup, and I've had some other successful startups, but I think blog far and away is going to be a bigger one. I would
really regret that. So people always say they regret the things they didn't do. So that's one
of it. It's like, okay, there will be a point in my life where we go hard and build a billion
dollar company. That's absolutely happening. And so in order to
make those decisions, there were kind of like three things that I looked towards. One was,
okay, is this an industry or an area, a problem worth solving that you're willing to get your,
you know, get your face beat in for many years and get up every day and say, this needs to get
solved. I need to make this work. And I think, um, and I can't highlight, like, I can't like underline this enough. I firmly
believe that the entire system is against most people. You know, you're getting inflated away.
Most people are not getting a raise at work. And so you really have to take it upon yourself to take care of your finances for you
and your loved ones. So anyway, so blockchain, crypto specifically, or one. The second one is
having the team, the people around you that you know can execute. And honestly, and I see some
of the people on the call here, the people at Uniblock, my co-founder, the team are just the best.
S tier, incredible people, just brainiacs and willing to, again, get beat up every single day and come harder every single day after that.
Because when you're a startup, everybody has more money than you.
Everybody has more people than you.
Everybody has everything more than you.
So you just have to make sure that you're a grinder and pushing through.
And yeah, the team at Uniblock is S tier.
And just I love coming to work every day and seeing their shining faces.
And then the third one, frankly, was am I financially and mentally in a position to
be able to, like, you know, cut my, like not pay myself and keep going.
And I think like this one, you know, again, very fortunate because of investing and everything
we had money, but not having income actually, and just putting the stress of things on my
wife.
I think I had misjudged this one.
I'm actually going to write a little bit more about where you think everything's fine, but
actually there's just a lot of, you know intersecreties around how that works but in any event those are kind of the three things so it's
like okay this is a problem that you get solved these are the people that can solve it and yes
i'm in a position in my life where i can go and do it so um and if i don't have the success i'm
going to regret my life so there we go go. Wow, that's inspiring.
Well, out of curiosity, Kevin, what do you think of,
cause I don't know, I feel like you felt pretty prepared,
right, for this new adventure.
Do you think, you know, when people start something
or as a general advice for life advice for for
you know those who are looking to start something of their own um is it better to be like fully
prepared or do you think one can never be like fully prepared yeah i think there's a couple
things one is that um you're never really 100% ready, right?
Like it's like anything in life, you know, best laid plans and, you know, Tyson punched
in the mouth and all that sort of stuff.
But I actually think like, you're never going to be 100% the right time.
That said, like, you can tip the scales in your favor.
And entrepreneurship is tough.
Startups should, you know, should all fail.
And if you really think about it, there's really no reason why they don't other than the fact that people are beating against the odds and pushing against gravity.
So, yeah, I think like for me personally, there was always this, this will happen. I'm definitely going to do this and I have to decide who we're going to work with and what we're going to work on and when we're going to do it.
we're going to work with and what we're going to work on and when we're going to do it.
But it was never a question of if, it was a question of like when.
And so, yeah, like, I mean, getting to know the VCs, understanding the space, getting
our money in position, like all these things were just leading up to, okay, let's go build
a billion dollar company.
So I do think you can prepare yourself.
I do think like setting yourself up for success is in your hands.
And if you're an entrepreneur, you're choosing, or even if you're working in a startup, there's a
high level of agency. If you work at, let's say, like Wells Fargo or something, you know,
it doesn't really matter if you wake up the next day, the company will still exist. There's really
very little that
you could possibly do that matters really in those bigger companies. But if you're in a small company,
five people, you know, to 50 people, everything you do really matters. And so this, this level
of agency means you don't want to get up in the morning, get up in the morning, you don't want to
make that call, you make that call, you don't want to, you know, do that paperwork, you do the paperwork. And so I really like that because, you know, some days I have a bad day and I'm like, fuck it,
let's go. Gotta like, you know, jump on this, jump on this work and do harder. But yeah, my point is
you definitely can prepare and you should, especially if you're going to go and do something like uh try to build a billion dollar company oh it looks like um our friends well your team at uni blog you know they
perfectly re-assonate with that i see them sharing this 100% emoji all the time and yeah thank you
so much kevin for you know the level the level of detail in in your answers and you know I think it's going to
help a lot of people that you're speaking and yeah again thank you so much for that now before before
UniBlock existed right there was well I believe obviously a problem waiting for a solution right
so what was that like specific frustration or gap that you kept running into that eventually you know
pushed you to just say hey you know what i'm i'm gonna actually do this yeah so um if you go to Web2, the tech stack is very hardened.
And the tech stack has redundancies.
It has routing.
It has all these tools that make sure that your app, like Uber or whatever, doesn't go down or that your payment goes through.
It's very rare that you open up PayPal and it doesn't work or like Instagram doesn't work. And a lot of that is, yeah, a lot of that is because we've created
these redundancies and things like Cloudflare or Kong and Apogee and GCP. So it's very normal in Web2. And up until, frankly, the last year or so,
it was fine if your app went down in crypto.
It's like, oh, it goes down.
That's fine.
If the wrong data, that's okay.
We were kind of at that point circa 2005
when you got a lot of traffic and your website went down.
Everybody's like, oh, that's great.
That's a good sign.
Things are down.
That's just normal.
But now we're kind of like thinking, well that's not fine anymore you know all these
professional um companies are coming to the space and everybody just has to bring their game up like
10 times like it's not okay if your data is incorrect or if your app is down. That's just not okay anymore. And so the reality is, if you go to pretty much all
of the projects, and I can tell there's, you know, lots of builders on this call, but in general,
they have to build redundancy in their own, for their own platform. So what that means is,
they're getting one or two or three, you know, fallbacks to their
APIs so that when invariably something goes wrong or breaks or goes down or whatever,
that they will just route to the next one.
And so we've put the pressure and the weight of it on all the builders to build this redundancy
internally.
And that's not acceptable. And that's
not where things are going to go. And again, in web two, eventually it didn't, right? At first,
you were kind of building everything yourself and building your own redundancy. And then eventually
all these apps came, all these like, SaaS players came to create that redundancy. So that's
essentially what we've built. We've built a
routing layer, a redundancy layer, a unified API for crypto, so that we as Uniblock are working
with all the best players like Anchor, so that we can make certain that our customers will always
have the right data, will never go down, and just they can kind of focus
on that. One other thing is we just had a call yesterday with a great customer, and they had
said, hey, like, you know, we actually, like, they had built a mini version of Uniblock internally,
but their front end is like a completely different product. So that means that the guy has to spend
half his time keeping all the lights on,
instead of just plugging in Uniblock with our partners.
So that's the problem we're trying to solve.
That's what we've been solving.
And yeah, that's kind of what we built.
Great.
Yeah, thank you.
That makes a lot sense, Kevin.
Thank you for the detailed replies, as always.
And maybe let's talk a bit about what came of that,
like moving from kind of this big tech to founder mode.
And well, you mentioned you had already
you started an array of different things
right before UniBlock. but I just wonder like going from
It's a big tag, you know to being a founder
It feels like a big shift, right? I mean at least from from the outside, right? I've never not an entrepreneur yet
For me, it's definitely an explorer ground and just wonder what surprised you the most
about that transition yeah so i think when you're working for a company like coinbase or twitter or
whatever um the shine of that company um shines on you if you want to get into a meeting it's not a
problem like everybody wants to meet with you um you know if you want to jump on a plane you can because you've got the company mx um you know
they they feed you well they've got nice swag um you also like frankly like and you know this is
going to sound a little bit weird but you don't actually really necessarily have to work that hard
yeah you have to like send
nice emails and show your okayers and stuff like that but like honestly if you just want to coast
you can kind of coast in these bigger companies for the most part um nothing could be further
from the truth when you're you know a startup you know it's like hey you're trying to get people to
take your call you're trying to make all these partnerships you're trying to do sales and it's
really on you and the startup,
there's no like big corporation that you work at, whether that be Google or Facebook or whatever,
where people are like actually meeting with the brand, they're not really meeting with you.
And there's all these resources, there's not really the resources in a startup.
So I think that's kind of probably a lot to do with it. I think like, having that,
I think that's kind of probably a lot to do with it.
I think having that, again, that respect and that brand is probably the main thing that I think a lot of people that are coming from Google start to notice.
They're like, oh, wait a minute, not everybody wants to meet with me anymore.
not invites the good parties anymore and that kind of thing right I think that
Not invites the good parties anymore and that kind of thing.
kind of resonates you know with a lot of the founders and you know see levels
of startups that well I had I've had the honor and pleasure to talk to thanks to
the partner spotlight series right and uh yeah um it just feels like responsibility tends to
hit in very differently once it's fully on you right something maybe something like that right
yeah yeah exactly like people are meeting with you you're selling yourself and you're selling
the fact that you can solve something rather than the person's meeting with you know whatever uber or whatever company you work for yeah that makes a lot of sense and of course you have to make a lot of decisions right
and how did your definition of like what is a good decision change you know once you were
kind of fully accountable for the outcome right um so uh you know when you're early days everything you're
kind of fully accountable for the outcome you know whether you're recruiting team you're trying to
raise money you're trying to sell things you're trying to build stuff like everything there's a
lot of accountability i think like yeah i mean um yeah i think that's the the right thing to think about
like if you are that person where you um enjoy accountability and you want to be able to prove
people wrong and you have a chip on your shoulder i think like having a little chip on your shoulder
and having like very competitive attitude is is very helpful um when you. When you're kind of working for a startup or you're a founder,
I think like, I really, I will not lose. I would rather die than lose. And so I think like that
kind of helps when, you know, you're pitching your 100th VC and they're like ghosting you,
or you're trying to get that sale and, you know, the sale isn't going through.
You know, are you the kind of person that's
gonna say oh well fuck it I don't I don't want to wake up again or is it the person that's like
all right well I gotta wake up and get this deal done or get this thing closed um that's kind of
the the bear bear of it I would say all right thoughtful thoughtful answer and well at the
same time um I assume you know from previous experiences get thrown away.
And are there any habits, principles, ways of working that you've intentionally carried into Uniblock from your previous experiences?
Yeah, I mean, I think one piece that all of us here are thinking about a lot is this idea of like being human.
So, yeah.
So with regards to, you know, APIs and data, it's very abstract.
And you start thinking about like infrastructure.
It's very like, you know, inhuman.
It's just like, you know.
Abstract.
Abstract again.
But a lot of what we're doing is powering founders and startups.
And, you know, they're trusting us to show up every day and to work on the weekends and
to work at night and to like actually do what needs to get done.
So that's, that's one thing.
Like we, you know, we're all obviously like doxxed people.
We, you can find us on LinkedIn. You can like, you can chat with us anytime. We'll show up to
every meeting with our camera on. So I think there's a level of like, Hey, like you are trusting
the team here to show up and make sure that your product and your like project has the biggest
chance of being successful so
um yeah i think like just being a human and i think like um whether you know did we get did
i get that from previous companies i guess so but i think like just like that's one thing i've
noticed in the space is that you know there's a there's a little bit of coldness and you know
everybody's kind of um you know not levels levels of levels of, of being docs based on,
I understand we're dealing with money and like there's permissionless and
such and self custody. So I totally understand that.
But I think there's definitely of like a, Hey, like your project needs help.
Our team is here.
We're going to get on a call and we're going to make sure that you're sorted.
I think that's one thing we really care about.
I appreciate the perspective.
I think that's definitely shifted from the early days,
where everyone was just using some random pick out of nowhere.
You don't know who is who.
I see more and more people people being well maybe not fully doxed um but yeah definitely you know you you see people's faces
you have actual profile pics and and whatnot even if it's just a chadu petite version of uh of your
actual profile pic but yeah it's looking nicer and attracting more people so
that's great and um yeah i think uh would you say make a lot a lot sense um yeah again thank you so
much kevin for sharing all that with us you know um i think uh well what you said about trust is
also very important i have actually uh more questions on that regard
for you uh later on and i would like to now uh maybe zoom out a little bit now that we know
more about you more about your press experience more about what you have done what you're doing
and talk about uni block itself um so what is Uniblock, you know, as a section.
And for someone who's hearing about Uniblock
for the first time, right?
So imagine anyone in our audience who,
well, it's their first time hearing about it.
What does it do?
Who is it for, you know what is uniplot yeah
so think of us as again like a unified api uh for crypto and what that means in practice is that we
work with you know um dozens of amazing providers like Anchor, but also companies like Polymarket
for prediction data or Zerion for wallet data.
And we have something like 300 different blockchains and about 2500 different APIs.
And so the fact that we...
Oh, wow. Yeah.
So the idea is that most of those APIs will have redundancy.
So if one of them goes down, then the next one will kind of like take its place.
If there's any issues for rate limiting or maybe the data is stale or maybe the data is incorrect
or maybe there's some sort of latency,
we just make sure that we're routing to the next one. So we're constantly adding new great
providers like Anchor, we're constantly adding new great blockchains, you know, like MegaEther,
Monad, or whatever's coming out and new categories like i said prediction markets
and stable coins and wallets are three of our newer categories um but yeah the concept is as
a developer instead of having to build um this backup fallback redundancy layer internally
you can trust us to kind of manage it for you and so so that's who we are. You can sign up and get a free account
and scale all the way up to, you know,
hundreds of thousands of calls, no problem.
You don't need to go and worry about, you know,
key management or you don't need to worry
about the API's changing, kind of we abstract all that away
and just make it super simple.
Well, thanks, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a super clear way to put it and well to all the
listeners if you if you have any follow-up question for Kevin feel free
to drop a comment and but yeah we will you know introduce you if well if the question is not covered by by the list of
questions that i have for kevin and yeah which naturally kind of leads us into who gets the
most value from it right kevin um what kind of teams tend to benefit the most from uniblock and
also i saw you have a free tier is that like more for for the end users
yeah so yeah so the free tier is generally going to be projects that are like either smaller
or they haven't launched yet and they're just kind of sending everything oh okay um and then
you know you can kind of again scale very easily so if you want to add more chains, you want to add more data, add more endpoints, like, we'll just keep adding to our platform.
So we'll scale ahead of you.
You don't need to worry about it.
But, yeah, there's a free tier.
So you can kind of play with it and get started.
But the people that get the most value of it, I think there's a few kind of areas.
One is, yeah, they want like
lots of different chains. So maybe they are a wallet, or maybe they are like a tax product or
some sort of tracking product. So they're like, oh, we want all different types of chains.
I think the second one is, yeah, just people that have big, you know, important data that just has to be there properly. So, you know, they should be
leveraging our backend instead of having to build itself, like they can kind of trust us to make
sure that they're done. So again, we power companies like Abstract and Plume, we power
some of the largest like wallets and trading platforms in the space.
So if you have like very sophisticated needs,
that's where you get a lot of value because everything's kind of there.
You don't need to worry about it rather than managing it all yourself.
We'll take it for you. So yeah, if you,
if you have sophisticated needs, like we're the place to go.
It just works. It just works, right?
It just works.
Yeah, that's the plan.
Thank you so much, Kevin.
That's a really helpful context.
And well, infrastructure, I've always found it interesting.
After joining Anchor, I kind of noticed that when it works,
people sort of barely notice it, right?
Because it's just obvious for them, right?
It just has to work.
And how do you personally think about success, right?
When users, well, how do I put it?
When users, well, I think, you know,
we both know what we are talking about in this case.
They don't really see, right, what we are building and what we are doing.
Yeah.
So I think you're right where when the product works, people don't need to worry about it.
Like people are not.
It's basically like the less it less it shows up the better it is
and so I think that's great I think like for us we're always
still there talk to the customers help them out but yeah I mean
again like the customer I was referencing last week but there's like dozens
and dozens and hundreds of examples where
you know either an entire dev or like a dev team
is like stitching together all this, like all these data sources and all the followbacks for
RPCs and APIs, because, you know, it's also APIs. It's like, you know, we have like Covalent and
Morales. We have got like CoinGecko if you want like token data. So yeah, the concept is instead of you having to manage all this and keep it working
and, you know, fix it every time it breaks, which is all the time, you can kind of redeploy that
person to the front end or somewhere else in your tech stack. So yeah, that is, people love it when
they don't need to worry about it which is nice true true
and I think our our tech teams also love it when people don't have to worry
about it because yeah whenever there's a tiny little you know downtime or
whatever service disruptions right we do get well so many pinks everywhere in the community, in the customer support portal.
And yeah, it can be quite distressing for the user as well,
which is bad.
But yeah, thank you so much.
And I think that's a great way to put it.
Now talking about trust and reliability, right?
Because I think those ideas kind of connect closely.
You're a, Kevin, you're a CEO, co-founder of Uniblog.
You're building infrastructure, right?
That works and needs to work.
Question, what does trust actually mean to you?
trust actually mean to you? So I have been taught growing up that my word is extremely important
and, uh, you know, showing up every day, uh, is really important. And if I say something,
I'm going to try to get it done. Um, so I think like, um, yeah, I think like taking that
ethic, like ethics and the, you know, bringing it into
business, I think is important. So that is with our investors, you know, they, you know, hey,
like, I can't, you know, every startup is hard, everything is difficult, but you know that we're
going to show up every day and work our ass off. Same with the employees. It's like, hey, like,
we're going to try to take care of everybody.
We're going to do our best to make this a great place to work.
We're going to have everybody have, you know, a mission.
And there's a level of trust that, like, we're actually going to do the things we say.
And then with regards to our customers, and I think this is, like, a missing piece for,
I think that we can do a really good job because the missing piece in the space, it's like, hey, like, you've got the best team that's here to make you and your startup successful.
And we're going to be straightforward with you and direct with you with like, here's what's going on.
here's why things are happening here's why things aren't happening um so yeah i mean it's not always
Here's why things are happening.
Here's why things aren't happening.
easy um but we try to um say what we uh what we mean and mean what we say and actually like
do things properly um yeah so anyway that's like very important to us and it's something that we're
really hanging our hat on around when people work with us they know they're going to have a team that really cares a lot about their success well yeah thanks for breaking that down and i think
makes a lot of sense um thank you so much kevin and next question is regarding a trilemma that
i i kind of see here and there you know which is uh in an infra of course which is speed coast
and reliability do you think it's a it's an actual dilemma is it fair to to say um so i think that
what we've started to realize is that there's actually um the customers have different needs
so um you know we were on, again,
we were on another call and the customer was like,
well, like I actually, speed is, you know,
it has to hit a certain level,
but I don't need it to be like instantaneous.
But they were, you know,
they were not super worried about that.
They just really cared about availability.
They basically just worried about the quality.
They're like, the quality has to be high.
Price, like for the reason, we're not, like, super price sensitive.
But, you know, the actual speed is not as important.
And so other customers will have different, you know, needs and goals.
So, for example, we talked to another customer, and they're like, oh, like,
actually, you know, we care about price, but everything else doesn't matter. So what we've
done is we actually allow our customers to kind of think about what matters to them. And based on
our extensive network of providers, we're able to kind of route towards that and say, Hey, like,
if you care about this, you care about that. So at the end of the day, it's like putting the, you know, the putting the
the wheel in the hands of our customers, because, yeah, that way you can as a customer say, well,
I care about one of those things or two of those things. And this is what I'm building for. So
we've actually, we've patented our AI and our routing
and it's getting smarter and it's getting better. And we are just allowing our customers to kind of
decide what matters to them. And as the AI gets smarter, it'll be able to kind of route even,
you know, even better into those particular things. So yeah, that's how we've kind of tackled it.
There's different providers for different needs. there are different genes or different methods, and that way you can
kind of choose. So, you know, a company like Anchor is amazing. And you don't try to be the
cheapest, you know, like, oh, our quality is great. And we're really great. So yeah, so that's like
the way we solved it
and the partners that we make
are based on the needs of our customers.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, thanks for the honest and detailed answer.
Once again, Kevin,
actually my follow-up question was going to be,
you know, how do you decide what matters most?
But it's a great design
that you actually let the customer choose what matters most, but it's a great design that you actually let the customer choose
what matters to them.
But one thing that caught my attention was,
you mentioned your AI is actually patented.
And I wonder what kind of AI is that?
Is it like working in the background
or is it like kind of an AI assistant that you talk to and you let
it know like hey what my needs are and kind of crafts like a plan for you yeah it's mostly
working in the background the concept is that it actually gets fairly complicated when you're
talking about all different providers you're talking about all different providers. You're talking about all different chains. You're talking about all different methods.
Your location matters.
Your time of day matters.
Again, if you care about the price or you care about the latency,
you care about the freshness of the data,
you care about the quality.
So our AI, we're on version 2.1, 2.2 right now.
And basically it's getting smarter.
It's starting to think about, okay, like, do I route to this particular provider,
this particular method based on where the customer is or what time of day it is?
So we're becoming very smart, having some predictive abilities as well.
But yeah, so basically it's in the background.
And the concept is that, again,
making sure that our customers
just never need to worry about any of this.
They just plug in and we just kind of like
take the wheel and manage everything for them,
which is nice.
Right.
Sounds pretty interesting.
Thank you so much, Kevin, for sharing that with us.
And yeah, before we hop to the next section, I had one more question for you, Kevin,
which is regarding lessons you have learned throughout the way.
And when designing your product and when working with the infrastructure that needs to scale, right?
What's the one lesson that you learned
kind of the hard way, right?
That you would warn others about.
For infrastructure specifically?
Yeah.
Or, well, if you would like to share, you know,
in general as well, i'm more than happy to
share that sure so i'll give you i'll give you two i think with regards to infrastructure
i think that um we are in a space right now that is becoming more and more professional
and the needs of the customers are growing exponentially um And so, you know, making sure that we do what we say we're going to do, I think is very important.
So it's like, yes, you trust us and we're going to make sure you have the best, you know, let's say Solana RPC or let's say like, I don't know, price API wallet, wallet transaction data possible. And you don't need to worry about it.
So I think that's part of it is just the needs of the customers are becoming more and more
sophisticated.
And yeah, the space is becoming more professional every day.
And then on just more of a startup personal note i think like anybody can go and raise money
um i actually did a little talk at super team about this um i think if you ever want to be an
entrepreneur like you can you know you can definitely do it i think that at the end of the
day it's just it's just like it's not complicated but it is a shitty experience you're
basically going to spend six months um hating your life and getting you know told that you're a loser
and your idea sucks by hundreds of vcs um and then you just got to go out and prove them all wrong
you got to basically prove all the haters wrong and then you got to go and make people that believe in you right and make
them money so everybody can raise money it's not complicated it is difficult and you basically just
have to prove everybody wrong thanks for sharing that and uh i think well i really appreciate that
i think our listeners uh also surely really appreciate the transparency and straightforwardness uh coming
from you kevin uh yeah it's uh definitely you know uh fun to to hear talking it's i mean it's
so real right um you share you share your your experiences and i hear about them i'm like damn i don't know how i would hold up to be
to be really honest with you um but yeah so definitely things i i need to note down uh
should i well ever start something of my own um it just i don't know it just sounds like
it's for tough people and i don't feel like i'm that tough yet
i'm sure you could do it like i said it's not complicated you just have to get up every day
and say okay well i'm gonna go and accomplish all these things and then you just gotta find
people that are better than you like the uh the uniblock team and attract killers to
help you go out and do this mission so yeah that's a lot to do with it man
sounds like so um again thank you so much kevin for you know for for being well so transparent
and straightforward um and now well uh you've talked briefly about anchor right this uh
the next question sort of comes uh from the anchor community lately we have been getting it lesser
and lesser because uh well we have uh spoken with so many partners in the spotlight series already
right but um yeah we used to we used to get this kind of question like hey
are your partnerships just logo x logo you know or do they entail something real right and yeah so
how has working with anchor um you know been has have we helped you stay you know um how have we helped um building uni blog yeah absolutely so i think the space
there tends to be two types of um like partners i think one part or one type of partner are like
frankly like their product sucks and they're not really, they're not really serious people. Um, and then the other
is, um, good people that give a shit that want to like actually create something special and like
help their customers. And I, I find like the, the, uh, the anchor guys to be, um, very professional.
Um, they're all very like open to chatting with us and like working with us very, easy that yeah very great to work with you know we just kind of pinged you guys out of
the blue and your team kind of jumped on and yeah and then you know you never really know right you're
like okay well this is what we're doing and they said okay great here's what we can help and we
just had a very like direct transparent conversation about like here's what we do. It's different than anything
else you've seen. So we need a little help thinking about like the business model. And
your team nodded immediately. They let us test everything. We put Anchor through a hardcore
testing suite. So we knew, so AI would know kind of like how to do everything. And that
worked out really well. Yeah.
So anyway, I think suffice to say the people are really great anchor.
The product is great.
And you understand like how to like make unique business models work.
I think the unique business model part is like important.
Like if it's just like very transactional, that's like some big corpo thing.
that's like some big corpo thing.
It's just not gonna, it's not gonna work.
It's just not gonna, it's not gonna work.
I think generally.
I think generally.
Yeah, anyway, I really want to double down
on good people like the anchor team
and want us all to win
because when we all win,
then the space gets bigger
and it's, you know, pretty successful.
It's not a zero sum game.
So yeah, I'm really enjoying the anchor team.
It's definitely not just a logo conversation. If you come on Uniblock now, we're sending
a significant amount of traffic to Anchor. We have a really great partnership
that includes not only money, but also things like
this call. And yeah, we're excited to do more.
Yeah, thank you so much, Kevin, for the nice word
and for the insights as well it was uh
kind of tense you know when when you were describing the first the first kind of uh
kind of team and well I had my finger on the on the end session button just in case
it's just kidding of course but uh yeah a pleasure and honor, you know, to be able to support such a great team who's
trying to do something different, right?
And well, hopefully also we are able to assist growth and day-to-day operations, of course.
And yeah, with initiatives like this one. and well i see david um david
liu your cdo right he's also a co-founder yeah i see him in the listeners so hi david um yeah
hopefully you you hop on in a second episode or something with uniplug yeah and yeah thank you so much again Kevin and yeah now I'm moving to a sort of
lighter session sorry section of of the session from my list of questions I would like to talk
about a bit about lessons and mindset right which well I think you have a lot of interesting things to say and that we
will probably learn a lot from you. Looking back right at the years of
experience and your journey right was the one belief that you had early on
especially you know being a serial founder that you've kind of you know
changed your mind about um
something that i've changed my mind about well i don't know if it's something i've necessarily
changed my mind about but i definitely or a belief that yeah i know i was gonna say like
i think definitely the belief really is it's about the people at the end of the day. Like I mean, I don't Yeah, I don't really know how other people look at other founders or other, you know, but for me, it's kind of like, all right, you know, try to work with great people, you know, try to attract great talent, you referenced, David, my co founder, David david's a great guy extremely intelligent works you know
teaches blockchain the university of toronto kind of like on the side to to give back to
you know he's had some startups as well that he's exited um so yeah and honestly like a grinder as
well right like nobody's giving him anything and i have a lot of respect for david and everybody
that works here at Uniblock.
But I think like, again, like find good people and double down on these good people.
It's like, okay, like how do we work together and build something great?
Life is too short to work with shitty people.
Life is too short to try to also screw over people.
It's just not worth it.
And so, yeah, I think like, I think it's like a very
greedy algorithm. If you like help people, they help you. And I think like that helps with Uniblock
specifically, but outside of Uniblock to look at like anchor, I have a feeling we're gonna have a
really great partnership with you all. I think like doing things like these, you know, spaces,
but also our thought pieces and everything i think just like
builds a relationship um and just like built on trust so yeah i think like in life and in
entrepreneurship it's really about the people thanks for sharing that with us kevin and uh
well thanks for being so nice uh honestly yeah you know i i mean it's very different when you text people
uh than when you talk to people right and yeah i mean uh you you can get a get a sense of how
the person is but you know you never fully know and yeah i mean um talking to you today it was
i was like wow you know kevin sounds like someone. Yeah, it was really calm, you know, and yeah, it was really nice.
I don't know, just the kind of feeling I get.
I really appreciate that.
Yeah, so thank you, actually, you know, for, I mean, also the kind of detail that, you know, you go on when, yeah, when I ask you ask you a question like oh what would you say to someone
or what do you think about this and that you know um yeah i think you you're taking it very seriously
and yeah i really appreciate that as well um and actually uh kind of uh well introduces the next
question which is what advice would you give to engineers operators you know who are
thinking about moving into startups or web3 um of course um yeah or um people who are non-techie
yeah um so i think so sorry um just in case it was confusing like the question was like what
advice would you give to engineers at first but then i was sort of i thought hey maybe
non-techie people as well yeah that makes sense yeah yeah i mean i think like if you're if you're
looking to join a startup um i think that it's it's similar to any other investment in your life
and you're looking at and i mean obviously everybody's in a
different position based on their socioeconomic financial situation etc but if you have the
option to look at the startup and say okay you know are these the you know is it does this startup
seem like it's going in the right direction these people seem like they're doing their best
is it probably a net benefit to my life to spend the next couple of years with this team?
So, you know, frankly, that is some of the math I've always done when I'm getting involved with something.
So definitely Wattpad, I was doing the math.
At Twitter, I was doing the math.
Coinbase was doing the math.
And, yeah, I think, like, if you, no matter what you're're looking to do if you're trying to be an engineer
you're trying to be a founder you're trying to be you know working in sales whatever it might be
just say okay like is this where I want to spend my time and so I think that that's one piece that's
like very important and not every you know it's hard sometimes but if
you have the opportunity look at like the types of companies and and situations you want to put
yourself in to you know maximize because again you know we're only here for a short period of
time you might as well make the most of it yeah solid advice and well um time's uh kind of heating up i hope you well i can stay a couple of minutes uh
we booked you for 60 minutes actually kevin um so yeah if you have to leave no i can stick around
yeah no i can stick around no problem yeah cool cool cool yeah thank you so much for that um just
a couple more questions that i had um you. I wanted to close it by looking ahead.
And so let's say a year from now, right?
You look back.
What does real progress look like for Uniblog?
Like in maybe more practical terms?
Yeah.
So right now, we are doing a couple of things.
One, we want to find partners like Anchor that have a unique product offering, whether that be a unique data set or unique with regards to the quality.
And so, again, we're bringing on companies like Zerion for wallets, Polymarket for predictions.
And so bringing on more data sets so that we really are the unified API layer for crypto and beyond fintech.
So that's one piece.
I think the next piece is making sure that our product is even more bulletproof.
is making sure that our product
can be even more bulletproof.
So like I kind of referenced,
we're at like version 2.x for our AI
and we want to get to like three
over the next couple of months and quarters
so that it becomes even more powerful
and just like just a better solution for everybody.
Kind of like your FSDla you know the first one
was probably going to kill you the second one was less likely to kill you now you're very like
unlikely to get killed and it's a better product so we're we're uh looking to make the product even
better and better and better and um yeah and then you know we're starting to just work with like
bigger customers and more professional people that need bulletproof crypto data. And so,
you know, that's,
that means that we have to scale the team and bring on some incredible
hires, which we've been doing so that we can be in those conversations as we
go. But those are kind of three main goals for us in the next, like, you know,
for Q1, Q2 of 2026.
That's a good way to frame and, well, of course, to keep up with progress.
And I love how Kevin shared qualitative and quantitative objectives.
and quantitative objectives.
That's, yeah, that's nice to have.
That's, yeah, that's nice to have.
And one last, like, kind of broader question,
like, what role do you want UniBlock to quietly,
or, well, maybe loudly, right?
But what kind of role do you want UniBlock
to play in the Web3 ecosystem?
Yeah.
As it matures.
Yeah, I think we want to become that you know again that
redundancy layer that routing layer um you know again like almost like a back end as a service
for our customers and i think as we add more partners and as we get you know smarter add more endpoints add more blockchains it just becomes more obvious for um you know for that to happen so yeah i mean we want to be we
it's inevitable then the next like couple years that projects are not expected to build that
like mini version of us it's just it's not reasonable for anybody to think that like mini version of us. It's just, it's not reasonable for anybody to think
that they're going to go and have like multiple providers
and multiple fallbacks and multiple retry systems.
And, you know, that's just not happening.
And so I'd love to get to a position where,
yeah, like projects know that,
oh, okay, we don't need to build that and maintain that ourselves.
So that's kind of where we're going for this year.
I think it's inevitable, and I also think it's inevitable
that we play an outsized part of that.
It's a great note to end on for this part of the session.
And yeah, what do you think about closing it with a quick rapid fire?
You know, first thing that comes to mind, five rapid fire questions.
Let's go, man.
I'm glad I drank some coffee.
Nice.
So first one, Web2 culture or Web 3 culture?
Oh, man.
Steely question.
I feel like I wish I could get the speed and cool, like the culture of Web 3.
But there's some level of professional professionalism where people like aren't
going to rob me which would be nice so i think like i think like can i say something i know this
is rapid fire but i honestly think sure sure point we're getting to a point where crypto is going to
become the financial rails of fintech honestly we're not going to be saying crypto and blockchain as much we're just
going to be we're just going to be part of the same like web web 2 web 2.5 that's where the world
is going yeah actually i was you know i wanted to follow up and then ask you if you thought you know
we were going that way or if we were just diverting into something different so yeah thank you for actually answering the question you know before i even asked um next next one kevin
early stage chaos or late stage scale uh i like early stage chaos yeah i don't think i um i don't
think i'm built to work for uh for big companies right now i i love just like
the messiness and the just like the techno prisoners of a startup kind of love it
and things get done like well i think yeah i think it's actually something really noticeable right
like things are more um immediate right things get done instantly rather than you know um i don't know you need three
weeks to to close something really really small like it gets done in three minutes right yeah
most large companies don't actually want to win that's the reality like most of them really just
kind of want to like um you know make sure people are you know not not losing they want to like worry about like
promotion cycles and not getting fired but like you know generally people aren't that like focus
on actually winning which is frustrating for me i'm very competitive interesting yeah you feel
like things like there are things that could be done but they aren't being done just just just because right okay yeah fair thank you um one metric that you personally care about the
most um at work or in life both in life my metric honestly is like sleeping getting a good solid eight hours of sleep is
probably one of my most ridiculous stat that actually really matters my sleep's gone my whoop
is uh is actually really funny and that flows through to just having like a you know a healthy
lifestyle um and i can use other things but it sounds nuts but like you know again man if if you're going to be an entrepreneur you're going to be an executive
you have to live a lot like an athlete the athletes get sleep they eat properly they like
think about their mental health so if you want to like perform at that level um as an athlete you
have to kind of like take care of yourself so i think that would be the personal one and we can
kind of riff all that if you want.
But,
and then at work,
I think right now it's like,
frankly,
it's just like getting revenue in the door.
That's pretty much the lifeblood of a startup.
So we're just like getting revenue in the door.
Of course.
Yeah.
Actually,
you're not the first founder that,
you know,
speaks about the benefits of sleeping well, you know, rather than, well, maybe what's more mainstream in Web2, which is you don't need to sleep that much.
It's the narrative, right, that me personally, I like to sleep a lot, though I'm chronically online.
But yeah, I mean, I think that resonates, you you know a lot with uh well all the founders
so yeah makes makes a lot of sense um best way to reset after a long work day that is not sleeping
oh you know it's funny man i was about to say there's an Irish proverb that says any rough day can be solved by a good laugh
and a good sleep and I actually think it's true so I care a lot about my family um family is really
important to me so spending good time with family and friends um is is really important um I don't
really like I love I I love the gym if you want to talk about that but
Generally, it's it's my family and then also picking up heavy objects over and over and over again
We are definitely
Do you bench? Yeah as a follow-up. Okay. Hey, um, can we know how much?
Yeah, like at peak I can do lots of plates.
So it really just depends.
I'm getting pretty close to a three handle,
but we're depending on safety and like blowing out my shoulder.
Yeah, I don't want to kill myself.
Yeah, I know.
I know that feeling, wow that's that's pretty
much and it's definitely not your first year in the hitting the gym i i pick yeah i pick up some
heavy weights every once in a while oh wow okay okay and well last one uh but not least of course
one non-crypto interest people wouldn't expect uh wouldn't expect oh my
god man i just used the gym thing i don't really have like it's interesting i'm maybe in politics
like i think the thing is like you know when you go to sf everybody's like super interesting they're
like i do all these things so i had to like start like thinking about this deeply because i'm like
what do you do it's like i don't know i just like just I'm not that interesting but I think probably it's
again it's like family it's like hell it's like gym those are things I don't
know if that's unexpected though I don't do anything super interesting like
skydiving I guess like finance and maybe like politics but I've I got a tone down
on the politics man it's just like crazy like the world is like
oh yeah you gotta like turn that shit off it's crazy it is it is it definitely is but um
i don't know i guess you know now it's a little bit less um non-expected i'm talking about the um the interest you know that the people would
expect but put it like two three years before um if you said oh you know i spend time with my
family and i have time for myself that would be highly unexpected yeah i guess yeah yeah that's
true i mean you know people say crypto never stops so you know
um don't don't have a girlfriend because that's distractions you know and gets you distracted
whatnot and and yeah so um well it was actually a troll pause but uh the other day so um hiring
requirements uh you don't have a girlfriend or family because you need to be online and working
yeah so yeah yeah my wife would not like that if i didn't have my wife anyway that would work
very well oh dear and um yeah well i mean that was uh that was the last um rapid fire question
for you thank you so much uh kevin again you know
thank you for staying a little bit um over and but yeah kevin before we wrap up you know there's um
something we'd like to do at anchor at the partner spotlight series uh which is giving
um the last word to to the guest you know is there anything uh that you would like to say you know uh to builders
founders listening in or well of course you know our audience or maybe any quote that you
that you like really much um whatever yeah well i think i would like to take a second to thank uh
anchor and sergio for hosting this and giving us this podium.
Really appreciate it and thank you everybody
for listening in. I don't think
we're that interesting so thank you for sticking around.
I would
also just say if you're building anything
in crypto, we're all
here. You can
ping us anytime. We're all
available on Telegram. You can ping
us via the X account and we're all available on telegram you can ping us via you know the x account
and we're here to kind of support you and your calls will get called to anchor and so everybody's
happy um but yeah we're here to help and we're humans that are trying to help your startup and
make you successful wow amazing kevin uh thank you so much for taking the time again and really appreciate all the love that you have for Anchor.
Really appreciate the conversation as well.
And yeah, to everyone listening,
thanks for tuning in to the Anchor Partner Spotlight,
of course, by Anchor.
And we'll see you in the next episode,
hopefully future in David.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Kevin. Take care.
Bye-bye. Thank you.
