Understand nxyz in three minutes: Founded by a former Google Senior Vice President, a Web3 search engine that raised $40 million
Infrastructure may be the most robust investment in a bear market.Written by: 237, Old Yuppie
Against the backdrop of an overall bearish market, Web3 practitioners are increasingly inclined to engage in infrastructure development and the overall layout for the next bull market, rather than broadly participating in investment activities. As a result, the activity frequency of Web3 developers is exploding at a visibly rapid pace.
However, the increase in development frequency has also exposed a series of issues, the most acute of which is that the existing infrastructure seems somewhat outdated compared to current development activities, making it difficult for blockchain developers to build scalable applications.
In response, some seasoned professionals have keenly identified the problem and have begun to work on the iteration of Web3 infrastructure aimed at developers. Today, we will introduce a project dedicated to providing flexible and reliable blockchain indexing for Web3 developers—nxyz.
nxyz: A Product Suite Born from Big Tech Talent
nxyz is a multi-chain indexing product suite that provides real-time blockchain data through low-latency APIs. The developers of nxyz are committed to providing users with top-notch data infrastructure so that Web3 developers can spend more time building user-facing applications rather than wasting it on building the infrastructure itself.
nxyz aims to empower the next generation of builders, creators, and entrepreneurs to develop a better internet by providing fast, flexible, and reliable blockchain indexing and data infrastructure. Its platform can directly ingest real-time data from blockchains and their associated applications.
nxyz offers developers a high-performance API suite to help them easily utilize blockchain data. The blockchain API of nxyz is built by distributed systems engineers behind Google and Neeva, providing real-time blockchain data in under 200 milliseconds. Its high throughput capability will directly benefit applications such as wallets and NFT projects.
On the team front, nxyz is primarily composed of Web3 enthusiasts and veterans of distributed systems who participated in building the early infrastructure of Google Search and advertising services. nxyz hopes to leverage the expertise of its search technology specialists to build a large-scale, full-stack real-time indexer for billions of data points.
With a strong team background, nxyz is quite confident in its product, with the team even stating that there are currently no products on the market that can guarantee the speed, uptime, throughput, and flexibility that nxyz can provide. In fact, the performance of nxyz is indeed outstanding.
Its API provides access to common entities such as NFTs, fungible tokens, and balances. If users have more complex needs, they can specify custom indexing patterns for any contract not covered by the predefined API suite of nxyz. This process is not overly complicated; users only need to provide the contract ABI and the events of interest, and nxyz can generate custom endpoints on demand.
At the same time, as a mature consumer-grade product, nxyz's consumption model is tailored to the needs of user applications:
nxyz features sub-second response time REST APIs
It has streaming APIs for on-chain event updates
nxyz will also launch SQL queries for running against real-time, rich on-chain data
Team and Funding Information
According to information provided by the project team, nxyz's team strength is quite commendable, with many members being veterans in building distributed systems, some of whom participated in constructing the early infrastructure of Google Search and advertising services. It can be said that the team possesses expert-level development capabilities to a certain extent, which provides strong support for the development of its products.
According to nxyz's announcement, it recently completed a significant Series A funding round. On October 12, 2022, nxyz announced that it had raised $40 million in Series A funding, led by Paradigm, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, as well as angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, Jaynti (JD) Kanani, Jing Wang, Packy McCormick, Surojit Chatterjee, and Ryan Selkis.
From this announcement, nxyz's investment lineup is indeed impressive, with top-tier institutions like Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, and Sequoia Capital standing out.
Moreover, in a market where enthusiasm has almost been exhausted, nxyz's $40 million Series A funding is particularly remarkable for an infrastructure project that already lacks exposure.
With the dual boost of top investment institutions and a substantial funding amount, the value of nxyz has been fully reflected.
Infrastructure May Be the Most Stable Investment in a Bear Market
Previously, we have conducted detailed analyses and discussions on the bear market investment layouts of many top investment institutions such as A16z, Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, and Animoca Brands. For these top institutions, their layouts in the sector are highly overlapping.
Taking Animoca Brands as an example, it made a total of 66 investments in the first half of 2022, with a total investment amount exceeding $185 million. About two-thirds of the investments flowed into gaming and infrastructure. In my view, the flow of funds into gaming and infrastructure may represent two different investment philosophies.
GameFi, like previous DeFi and NFTs, is an application sector with a strong tendency to break out, possessing the potential and characteristics to become a hot spot. Even though there are indeed some uncertainties, once it gains traction, the economic benefits it can bring are likely to be astonishing, as evidenced by Axie Infinity and STEPN.
Regarding investments in the infrastructure sector, it is quite logical in the current overall bearish context. Given the characteristics of the infrastructure sector itself, it is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate the miracles brought by DeFi and NFTs. However, compared to the illogical explosions and unreasonable rises of DeFi and NFTs, the infrastructure sector appears to have a clearer trajectory.
It possesses strong practical value and almost no possibility of a bubble. The actual value it can create can be quantified to a large extent. Therefore, for most investment institutions, the infrastructure sector may represent a stable financial measure akin to bank deposits, compared to the high-risk, high-reward nature of GameFi.
The combination of GameFi and infrastructure investments is undoubtedly a relatively reasonable pairing.
