Stablecoins Speed Up Thanks to ‘AWS of Crypto’ Alchemy’s Latest Upgrade
Alchemy, a blockchain infrastructure provider, has significantly improved the speed of stablecoin transactions. Their new Cortex Engine architecture boasts a 66% reduction in transaction delays, bringing average response times down from 300-400 milliseconds to under 50 milliseconds. This rivals the speed of traditional payment systems like Visa and Mastercard, which process upwards of 65,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Stablecoins, dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies, are increasingly used for international payments, competing with major card networks in transaction volume. Alchemy supports many leading stablecoin issuers, facilitating a large portion of USDT activity, even though they don’t directly support Tether Holdings Ltd. Their infrastructure plays a critical role in the stablecoin ecosystem, handling data exchange for numerous decentralized applications (dApps).
Alchemy’s improvements extend beyond speed. The Cortex Engine also dramatically increases throughput, enabling the processing of hundreds of thousands of requests per second – a scale comparable to very large applications. This represents a 1000x increase in the throughput of a single blockchain node.
The company, founded by Stanford computer scientists, initially provided developer tools for enterprise-scale blockchain node operation. They subsequently developed APIs for data indexing, smart contract automation, and wallet optimization, working with major players like Coinbase, Stripe, JPMorgan, and Anchorage.
The impact of Alchemy’s advancements is noticeable to users. In a silent rollout, users spontaneously reported significantly faster app performance, highlighting the tangible benefits of the Cortex Engine’s improvements. The reduction in response time, from around half a second to 100 milliseconds, is a substantial upgrade, exceeding the threshold where users perceive delays. This improvement in speed and scalability positions Alchemy to handle transaction volumes comparable to those of major financial institutions.
