Alchemy has built a new push notification system for blockchain developers.
Announced Monday, Alchemy Notify is a product designed to enhance the user experience (UX) of various crypto platforms by providing real-time notifications for transactions and events.
Blockchain UX often relies on constant attention from the user, which can be off-putting for those who want to engage in a seamless transaction process. Alchemy Notify is hoping to change that through push notifications to smart devices.
"Extremely simple and intuitive user experiences are crucial to the mass adoption of blockchain applications," said Alchemy CEO and co-founder Nikil Viswanathan. "Alchemy Notify provides a key building block for a great user experience – notifications."
It functions by replacing the nodes businesses use to read and write on blockchains with more expedient and scalable infrastructure. It's meant to coexist alongside the developer platform, which offers tools for monitoring, alerting and debugging crypto software.
"Notify requires extremely technical and nuanced infrastructure to provide the notification capabilities to developers," Alchemy CTO and co-founder Joe Lau told CoinDesk via Telegram. "Notify is powered by the Alchemy Platform, which took years of research and development to build."
The San Francisco-based firm raised $15 million late last year from Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Samsung, SignalFire and others.
"In order to bring blockchain to a billion people, we as a community need to focus on building products that are accessible to normal people," Lau added. "Great user experience is an absolute must – users expect blockchain products to be at least as good as, if not better than, traditional web and mobile products."
That focus is why large names including Augur, 0x, CryptoKitties, Kyber and the Opera browser rely on Alchemy’s blockchain developer platform to solve their UX and design challenges.
Research conducted by Airship suggests push notifications can increase user retention by up to 820% compared to users who receive no push notifications. The data was collected via 63 million app users to determine how they interacted with their smart devices.
Alchemy is betting this can apply to the blockchain ecosystem as well. Events and transactions – such as interest earned, timed events, contracts, token swaps and in-game actions – can be confusing to understand for new users.
“Making it easier to build great user experiences is absolutely crucial for the success of the blockchain industry," said Pantera Capital's Paul Veradittakit. "Alchemy's developer platform continually innovates on empowering developers with new building blocks. Notify will be a game changer for the industry. Just look at what notifications have done for the mobile app ecosystem."