Nansen and Google Cloud announce extended multi-year collaboration

Nansen, an industry-leading blockchain data analytics platform, today 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.”

CT Bureau