SendBlocks, a pioneering startup in blockchain data management, announced today that it is coming out of stealth mode with $8.2 million in seed funding led by Castle Island Ventures with several other institutional investors including Pitango, Illuminate Financial, Laser Digital (Nomura), Starkware and notable ecosystem leaders.
SendBlocks makes accessing blockchain data simple. The SendBlocks platform is fully customizable allowing blockchain enterprises, ecosystems, protocols and applications to define the data that matters to them, and leave it to SendBlocks to sift through the blockchain to find their nuggets.
As high throughput blockchains emerge, many new use cases for blockchain-based applications are becoming evident thanks to better usability and cheaper transaction cost. “At the end of the day we want to create a reality in which any developer can access any blockchain data they desire, without needing an entire data team or spending thousands of dollars per data need to do so,” shares Itay Shrem, Co-founder & CEO.
Existing clients (that can be disclosed) include Bancor and SphereX who have already benefited from SendBlocks' innovative solution, experiencing streamlined operations and cost savings. With more and more high throughput blockchains emerging, SendBlocks is positioning itself to become the leading data management platform.
The challenges with data management in web3
While in traditional web2 development, backend engineers build and access databases directly; in the blockchain ecosystem, the blockchain itself acts as the backend, accessed through RPC calls. Resulting in two major challenges:
1. Flexibility: The increasing number of applications built on top of blockchains leads to diverse data requirements. Said differently, each org has different data needs and different ways that data is processed and used. Currently, there is no solution that delivers the exact information needed for blockchain users that offer a web2 like personalized experience. The way orgs currently solve this is by spending a lot of time and money on building in-house data management solutions.
2. Scale: To access detailed blockchain data, complex indexers are developed to continually query the blockchain and keep tabs on the data. However, these services struggle to maintain performance when dealing with blockchains that process more transactions in shorter periods of time (AKA high-throughput blockchains).
“Think of when Taylor Swift tickets go on sale and TicketMaster needs to handle millions of requests simultaneously, the site often crashes. That’s because the backend isn’t optimized for The Swifties,” explains Shrem. “The technological challenge of data management in high throughput blockchains is like the transition from supporting smaller, less known, artist ticket sales to being able to support Taylor Swift demand, but all the time” he adds.
Enter SendBlocks
“We believe that starting out in web3 shouldn't necessitate an extensive data team and that infrastructure costs should align with the application's user base rather than the blockchain's throughput,” says Michael Kellner, Co-founder & CTO. “Merley scaling the blockchain isn't sufficient; the entire stack must be scalable to support the next generation of applications,” he adds.
SendBlocks' innovative approach addresses these challenges head-on. Shrem and Kellner, having spent over a decade each in Talpiot are now leveraging their experience in building secure and resilient infrastructures.
SendBlocks aims to significantly reduce backend and indexing efforts for blockchain developers while maintaining flexibility and robustness by consolidating the conventional indexer/RPC process into a single, user-friendly platform.
Some simple use cases of the SendBlocks platform have already been a game changer for clients, such as flexible historical data access and fully personalized notifications.
By providing customers access to anything happening on-chain, SendBlocks helps developers save billions of API queries, resulting in leaner data teams, regardless of the underlying blockchain.
“Current data management solutions and indexers just don’t support fast blockchains,” explains Shrem, “we’re building with scale and ease in mind to ensure ecosystems enjoy engagement and retention” he adds.
“By providing enterprises, ecosystems and protocols easy access to on-chain data, SendBlocks enables customers to save tens of thousands of dollars per month in development costs and reduce time to market from months to weeks,” says Sean Judge, General Manager of Castle Island Ventures which led the round. “Itay and Michael’s cyber-security and cryptographic backgrounds make them the perfect duo to deliver on their vision to change the way businesses manage their blockchain data” he adds.
With the funds SendBlocks will continue to grow out it’s R&D team to support existing and future clients as well as scale its marketing and sales efforts to attract top protocols and ecosystems.
Shrem and Kellner lead a strong team of 9, all coming from notorious web2 enterprises such as Microsoft, AWS and Talpiot intelligence unit as well as web3 orgs such as Bancor and Algorand. Kellner holds a Masters in post-quantum cryptography and Shrem specializes in network coding and security.