How does QuickNode position itself in the current market for blockchain developer platforms and in relation to competitors like Alchemy and Infura?

To date, we have been very focused on making sure we acquire customers that can pay. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that we require a credit card to get started. Infura, Alchemy, and other players in this space don't require a credit card so presumably they're just getting a bunch of people that are making use of their service and not paying them.

That has a clear upside and a clear downside. The upside is that you get to say you registered more developers, and get them before they get big. You get to see them get big on your platform. 

Then the downside is you have tens of thousands of non-paying customers who’re just sapping your network and that's probably the biggest sort of clear difference. We're attacking people that we know can pay.

Second, when we're explaining our value prop, it's most certainly that we are faster. Every single way that we know to measure, we come up as a winner and that's not necessarily happenstance. That's a concerted effort from our engineering team to make sure that no matter where you are in the world, you're getting serious performance.

So, we actually run an open benchmark, quickNode.com/compare and if you run it, we will benchmark whatever endpoint you put in against our network from your web browser, right there in the browser. We're not sending it to some server and some place that we determined. It's you, wherever you are. 

I'm just looking at our compare page because I could see where the last couple were from. I'm looking at one right now where we are 25% faster. I'm looking at another one where we were 5, 6X faster. We're not choosing our favorite data center here to run these tests. We're just running it straight from the browser and that's very clearly telling us that we're faster.

Of course we run actual, controlled, more scientific comparisons and benchmarks, and we come up faster there as well. So speed is probably our number one sort of positioning differentiator. 

After that would be the breadth of our chains. If you, let's say, are building cross-chain decks or cross-chain NFTs and don't have all the chains that you have on your provider, you now need to open an account for each provider that you need. We're servicing all these chains to the tune of as much as 8 billion requests per day, and that's giving us an edge. 

You don't need to go and open three different accounts at three different providers. That's where we are today in terms of positioning, and there's more coming very soon. You might have picked up on it based on what I told you about the race to add value or what I like to call them—peripheral APIs.