Web3 developer tooling startup Tenderly is getting into the node game with a new product it announced today called Web3 Gateway. The product will help web3 developers read, stream and analyze blockchain data, according to the company.
The offering builds on the company’s observability stack, which it says indexes over nine billion transactions across more than 20 blockchain networks.
While many blockchain and crypto companies have struggled to grow amid unfavorable market conditions, infrastructure providers such as Tenderly have remained relatively resilient to the headwinds, buoyed by the trend of steady developer interest in building web3 products.
The new offering is a sign of competition between web3 infrastructure providers heating up, as it puts the startup in direct competition with ConsenSys, the company that owns popular node-as-a-service provider Infura, and Alchemy, another widely used node provider in the industry. Prior to this, Tenderly was focused solely on the smart contract space with its dashboard and API that helped engineers develop, test and monitor the health of decentralized applications.
“Unlike other nodes, Tenderly Web3 Gateway is tightly integrated with the rest of the Tenderly development platform, eliminating development, test and infrastructure silos from your dapp building process and helping smart contract developers save time and costs,” Tenderly CEO Andrej Benčić told TechCrunch in an email.
Node providers, are often compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for web3 companies because they provide a critical layer of blockchain infrastructure. One aspect of Tenderly’s offering that differentiates it from other node providers is its transaction simulation platform, which Benčić said is already serving 50 million simulations per month to web3 apps such as Instadapp, Yearn, Safe and Yield.
The Belgrade, Serbia-based startup last raised a $40 million Series B announced in March this year, just before crypto prices started a substantial descent. The financing came just months after the startup’s Series A round and it was announced in the same month as Alchemy’s $200 million Series C extension, which valued the latter company at $10.2 billion.
The company says its platform is used by tens of thousands of developers from apps such as Uniswap, Yearn Finance and OpenSea and that it works with the majority of the top 100 Ethereum projects, TechCrunch reported in March.
Yasmin Razavi, a growth investor at Spark Capital who helped lead the firm’s investment in Tenderly, told TechCrunch that the startup’s new offering came as a result of its developers finding they could not rely on existing node providers for their purposes and deciding to instead build out that capability themselves.
“The issues you hear with Alchemy and Infura are mostly around their inability to scale,” Razavi said.
According to Razavi, customers report that Tenderly’s offering is three times as performant as Alchemy’s based on beta testing the company has conducted. While its performance has yet to be validated in the public realm, it’s clear that this offering brings Tenderly closer to being a full-suite provider of web3 infrastructure services and therefore a more formidable force in the subsector.
“With this latest release, we complete our end-to-end promise to our developers, supporting them from the very first steps of writing and debugging Smart Contracts all the way to providing full infrastructural support for dapps once they hit the mainnet,” Benčić said.
