Alchemy's Workflow Ownership Increases Switching Costs

The real moat here is workflow ownership, not node access. Once Alchemy sits inside account creation, gas payment rules, and chain operations, it stops being a simple RPC vendor and becomes part of how the app actually moves money. Swapping it out then means rebuilding login and wallet flows, reconfiguring which transactions get sponsored, and replacing the operational stack that keeps a custom rollup live.

• Alchemy Wallet APIs handle passkey or email login, smart account creation, gas sponsorship, batching, session keys, spend limits, and retries. That means the app UX and transaction rules are wired into Alchemy’s account stack, not just its node endpoint.
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• Gas sponsorship adds sticky policy logic. Alchemy’s Gas Manager checks whether a transaction qualifies for sponsorship under configured rules, while rival paymaster products like Coinbase CDP expose allowlists, per user limits, and global spend caps. Migrating providers means recreating and retesting those controls in production.
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• At the rollup layer, Alchemy supports OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, and zkSync ZK Stack deployments. A team using Alchemy there is relying on it for chain infrastructure, not only API reads, so replacing it reaches into sequencer and operations workflows as well as developer tooling.
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This pushes blockchain infrastructure toward bundled platforms. The providers that own wallet logic, gas policy, and app specific chains will capture more spend per customer and hold on longer, because future migration work looks less like changing cloud endpoints and more like rewriting core product behavior.