Augur is a leading decentralized oracle and peer to peer protocol for prediction markets.

“Alchemy resolved the consistency issues that had previously reared their head, removing 98% of user complaints and significantly improving Augur’s user experience and adoption.” - Augur CTO Alex Chapman

Summary

Augur spent years developing their protocol, only to find post-launch that their early users were unable to use Augur due to poor infrastructure. After switching to Alchemy for infrastructure, Augur now delivers great user experiences at scale.

At first, Augur was unusable due to poor infrastructure

Leading up to launch day, Augur had spent years on active development, protocol design, and testing smart contracts. Hours after launch, they were surprised to receive complaints that Augur wasn’t working. The problems arose because Augur had launched with a free third-party node service that was slow, unreliable, and frequently provided incorrect blockchain data. Even though the Augur application was working, the infrastructure powering the application wasn’t. In fact, this happens to many developers in the blockchain ecosystem; they deploy a well-designed protocol only to find out it doesn’t behave as expected in production.

Augur’s engineering team wasted almost 3 months patching up the worst of the issues caused by unreliable infrastructure.

Augur ultimately switched to Alchemy for quality blockchain infrastructure. Quality infrastructure is one of the most important factors for great user experiences, real-world adoption, and developer productivity. Here’s how Alchemy enabled Augur to work for their users and continue to work at scale:

Supplied correct, consistent blockchain data

Improved reliability and performance

Accelerated core product development

Served helpful customer support

Alchemy’s consistency removed 98% of user complaints

Alchemy resolved consistency issues and delivered the best user experience, reducing user complaints by 98% and supercharging Augur’s adoption. Alchemy utilizes a sophisticated and distributed architecture to guarantee consistency at scale.

Augur syncs over 3x faster

Infrastructure should be reliable, fast, and scalable. Augur took over eight hours to sync on their first third-party infrastructure service. On Alchemy, a user’s application syncs over 3x faster. Furthermore, uptime is crucial; users won’t use an application that might occasionally break.

Alchemy accelerates Augur’s core product development

Successful teams focus on their core competencies. Augur’s engineering team wasted almost 3 months patching up the worst of the issues caused by unreliable infrastructure. Now, Augur dedicates all development efforts towards building their core products.

Alchemy provides 24/7 customer support

Ethereum infrastructure requires continuous investment because of network forks, maintenance upgrades, and unpredictable live network conditions. Alchemy has experience handling these issues and helps Augur deal with them, saving significant amounts of time.