Blockchain Indexing Startup nxyz Raises $40M In Funding Led By Paradigm

It isn’t sexy. It isn’t a brand-new blockchain or a celebrity-backed NFT collection.

But five-month-old crypto firm nxyz has lined up a host of prominent venture capital firms behind its promise of “fast, reliable blockchain indexing.”

The company, populated in part by former Google staffers, announced a $40M funding round led by Paradigm, a multi-billion dollar venture capital firm.

“We often ask crypto/web3 projects: what are your biggest pain points,” Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang tweeted. “Universally … a top issue is blockchain data indexing. Complaints about slow existing solutions and/or having to build it in-house.”

“Web3 apps are about to get much faster,” pseudonymous investor mhonkasalo, who is also supporting the project, tweeted.

Retrieving blockchain data is difficult, David Taylor, strategy associate at nxyz, told The Defiant at Devcon Wednesday.

“If you want to show a user any sort of data around what they’ve done on-chain or what others have done on-chain, it’s still shockingly hard,” Taylor said.

People have been trying to index blockchains for a while, but because of the nature of blockchains, they’re hard to read.

David Taylor, nxyz

Todd Wang, the company’s engineering lead, told The Defiant nxyz has its roots at Google, where CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy served as senior vice-president of advertising. Ramaswamy would later leave to co-found the search engine Neeva.

“You have to index and crawl the internet in order to build a search engine, and that’s a ton of data,” Wang said. “Once you build the bones for that, the idea was, where can we take this and plug in a new data source essentially, and build something equally as useful.”

nxyz was spun off from Neeva in May.

Faster Apps

Simplifying data retrieval will make popular blockchain applications faster and allow the developers making those apps to focus on their core products, Taylor said. nxyz claims that it provides “real-time blockchain data in less than 200 milliseconds,” a datum that he described as “very competitive” relative to existing solutions.

nxyz enters a nascent market dominated by The Graph. Taylor and Wang declined to discuss the startup’s performance relative to its competitors and declined to provide a valuation for the company.

nxyz will launch on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance, Avalanche, Arbitrum and Optimism. Early customers include BitGo, Citrus, Fractal, Crossmint and Bello, according to its website.