Nansen announced an extended multi-year
collaboration with
Google Cloud
to empower Web3 investors to make informed decisions with real-time access to
high-quality market intelligence. By running its platform on Google Cloud's
open, secure, scalable, and carbon-neutral infrastructure and data services,
Nansen aims to accelerate the introduction of product lines that serve new
audiences, supercharge its next phase of global growth, and establish itself as
the definitive information "super app" for Web3.
Founded in 2020 and backed
by the likes of Silicon Valley-headquartered venture capital firms Accel and
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Siam Commercial Bank subsidiary SCB 10X, and
Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC, Nansen is an industry-leading provider
of high-quality market intelligence for retail investors, as well as
institutional investors like Acheron Trading, Polychain, and Three Arrows
Capital. To help users discover and assess investment opportunities on trending
smart contract platforms and digital assets, Nansen is extending its database
management capabilities to support 10 additional blockchains and deliver insight
into fast-emerging sectors of the non-fungible-token (NFT) market.
"We've been using BigQuery from the very beginning,
and its low-latency lookups and dynamic autoscaling capabilities allow us to
analyze up to one petabyte of on-chain transactions data per day, extract
millions of easy-to-understand labels that show users where the
‘smart money' is going, and increase our subscriber base by 20 times in the
past year. This has made us Google Cloud maximalists," said Alex Svanevik, Co-founder
and CEO, Nansen.
"As we attract more users and bring all the market intelligence an individual
or institution needs under one roof - by integrating with more proof-of-stake
(PoS) blockchain and off-chain data sources - we're doubling down on Google
Cloud to stay ahead of multiple growth dimensions."
Establishing the Web3
Information and Transactions Gateway for the Future
According to a Fidelity
Digital Assets study, 70% of institutional investors intend to invest in
digital assets in the near future. To provide them with rich context and
actionable insights that aid decision-making, Nansen is combining Google
Cloud's advanced analytics and granular
computing capabilities with
institutional-grade application programming interfaces. With programmatic
access to Nansen's proprietary
data, market makers, hedge fund managers, and asset managers can train their
own algorithms to anticipate market movements, generate bespoke reports and
metrics, and conduct due diligence - all within their firms' mandated IT
systems and visualization tools.
As part of its roadmap
toward becoming a transactions gateway for Web3, Nansen will use Google Cloud's
dedicated node deployment and hosting service to connect into selected Layer-1
blockchain protocols and leverage Google's web
and mobile application development platform to give investors an
aggregated view of their portfolios across multiple Web3 native wallets like
Coinbase, MetaMask, Rainbow, Trust Wallet, and imToken. This will then form the
basis of investors communicating with each other and engaging in
over-the-counter (OTC) trades within the Nansen platform.
"Web3 is not only going to
permanently alter finance, but also it will become the fabric of gaming,
culture, art, entertainment, and music, with its total addressable market set
to expand even further in the years to come," said Andrei Brasoveanu, Partner,
Accel. "Nansen - with its
founders' deep technical experience and close collaboration with Google Cloud -
is building an all-in-one platform for investors to differentiate quality from
hype, emerge as winners, and help the industry grow. The company continues to
take the right strategic steps following its Series B fundraise, and we're excited to be
active participants in this next phase of growth and development."
Serving a Distributed
Workforce and Continuous Stream of Actionable Insights
To attract top talent from
any part of the world, onboard the Ape Board team after the portfolio tracking company was recently acquired by
Nansen, and allow its staff
across 35 countries to safely connect, create and collaborate, Nansen adopted Google
Workspace. Built on the industry's
leading cloud-native communication and collaboration platform, Google Workspace
brings together the applications people know and love - like Gmail, Docs,
Sheets, Slides, and more - into a single, integrated workspace, with built-in
enterprise-grade access management, device management, data protection, and
data encryption, to establish a secure remote working environment from
anywhere, on any device.
Having doubled the size of
its team in the past year, Nansen is now enabling its engineers, developers,
and data scientists to build innovative features that add value to the
business, instead of spending an excessive amount of time managing complex IT infrastructure.
Even as Nansen uses serverless
streaming analytics
to cost-efficiently process large volumes of data, it must also curate - from
its "data firehose" - the 1% of information that is tailored to the interests
of each user. With Google Cloud's automated
workflow orchestration,
data
filtering and messaging delivery
technologies absorbing what would have been laborious tasks for engineers,
Nansen can reassign them to projects that require human creativity, while
continuing to serve notifications of relevant events and trends in real-time -
called Smart Alerts - to help investors defend their trading positions.
"We pride ourselves on
being very quick in shipping new updates. From Smart Alerts to six NFT Indexes
- each new feature can be designed in a matter of hours, before we iterate
further, test it in stealth mode, and roll it out in a scalable way. Google
Cloud's ability to automate
application deployment and upgrades
- with zero downtime - really minimizes the need for human intervention and
tedious manual backend configurations. It's the perfect fit for our agile
product development cycle," said Svanevik.
The NFT Price Estimator is another example of
Nansen making optimal use of its technical talent. To provide investors with
price estimates for any given NFT, Nansen's data scientists turned to Google
Cloud's Vertex AI
to bring the feature to life in weeks, rather than spend months building
machine learning (ML) pipelines from scratch.
"ML-powered features like
price estimators are a great start. But we believe that a strong technical
foundation - with qualified Site Reliability Engineers to optimize overheads -
is needed before taking a deeper plunge into artificial intelligence (AI).
Nansen is now battle-tested and mature enough, from an infrastructure, data,
and talent perspective, to make active use of services like
Cloud
Inference API and TensorFlow. We expect a lot of
progress over the next few months in developing predictive modeling and
recommendation systems, to surface more AI-driven investment signals that will
amplify value creation across the Web3 community," said Svanevik.
"Nansen's desire to
organize large volumes of blockchain data to surface signals and make them
universally accessible and useful aligns with Google's mission," said
Ruma Balasubramanian,
Managing Director, Southeast Asia, Google Cloud. "We are proud to
collaborate with Nansen and contribute to its innovation and business momentum
through our open, secure, scalable, and sustainable cloud infrastructure, data
services, and collaboration tools."