Introducing Alchemy Notify’s Custom Webhooks
In real-time, receive the exact web3 data you want
On March 8th, there were over 585k new blocks across Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism and Arbitrum, equating to millions of transactions and events in a single day. Not only is this a massive amount of information, but it's often incomprehensibly formatted on its own. Figuring out how to integrate this data to enhance modern applications is one of the biggest challenges in web3.
Today, we’re excited to announce Alchemy Notify’s Custom Webhooks, giving you access to real-time notifications for any on-chain event. A shortlist of the infinite data you can get instantly updated on:
Uniswap token pair deployments
OpenSea NFT swap completions
Ethereum high gas fees detected
Aave tokens staked
A CryptoPunk is approved to be transferred
RabbitHole, the team enabling on-chain work through quests and reward-based activities, are early product adopters. They've implemented Custom Webhooks to ingest transaction-level data to confirm users have completed their tasks.
"With Custom Webhooks, we have gained the flexibility to receive notifications about the precise on-chain activities we care about. By implementing this pattern for our system, we can now receive webhook notifications with retry functionality, ensuring a more robust integration with on-chain data. As a result, we are able to move faster and with greater peace of mind." - Garrett Hughes, Head of Engineering, RabbitHole
With infinite data access and precise data controls, stream the data you care about, and ingest the information in the most usable format for your app.
Welcome to the next generation of web3.
What are the challenges of blockchain data?
Blockchain networks, at their core, serve as a modern decentralized database, but the structure of blockchain data can be problematic for a few reasons:
It's hard to identify the data you care about
It's hard to ingest the data at high volumes
The data is almost always incomplete from a UX perspective
The data may not be operating at the level of abstraction you need
There is a growing need to solve these problems with robust data infrastructure that can parse and transform blockchain data faster and easier.
Introducing Alchemy Notify’s Custom Webhooks
Through two key dimensions, flexibility and control, Custom Webhooks effectively solves the challenges of blockchain data.
1. Flexibility
Previous webhook solutions covered only pre-defined, transfers-based events. Now, with Custom Webhooks, understand any contract-based event, from token and marketplace activity, to comprehensive data ingestion.
2. Control
On its own, infinite data choice is not necessarily useful. But with custom filters, easily filter unnecessary information to receive the precise blockchain data you need.
Together, these two dimensions underscore the core value of Custom Webhooks: data that is expansive and precise.
What are the benefits of Custom Webhooks?
In addition to flexibility and control, Custom Webhooks come with a few other key benefits including performance, cost savings, and reliability.
1. Performance
Built with GraphQL and webhooks so that in a single push, you're immediately notified about the most recent blockchain data changes.
2. Cost savings
Transactions can include a lot of associated data values by default. With Custom Webhooks, curate exactly what web3 data you need, so you never overpay or send superfluous requests.
3. Reliability
Custom Webhooks provide infrastructure that is designed to ensure resiliency and scalability for any data engineering need. This means you can use the data to build simple notification systems or robust data ingestion pipelines.
Web3 Use Cases for Custom Webhooks
We built Custom Webhooks because of extensive feedback from our customers who wanted webhooks with greater flexibility. We learned that at a high level, there are three core use cases for Custom Webhooks: notification systems, tracking specific types of on-chain activity, and data ingestion.
1. Notification systems
Stream real-time notifications and alerts, anytime a specific type of event happens on the blockchain. Pipe these web3 alerts to platforms like Discord, Twitter, Slack, Telegram, etc., to easily notify your community.
2. Track and respond to specific activity types
With Custom Webhooks, easily track token activity (approvals, staking, mints, etc.), marketplace activity (swaps, atomic trades, etc.), oracle activity (attestations of off-chain data), or any other event-based activity that you care about.
3. Data ingestion into self-managed databases
Push data into your own database to transform and enrich the data, however is useful for you and your customers. Set up Custom Webhooks once, and always keep your databases up to date with the latest blockchain information.
How early adopters are using Custom Webhooks
During the Custom Webhooks private beta, companies like Collab.Land, The Indexing Company, and RabbitHole have started using Custom Webhooks to uplevel their products and user experiences.
Collab.Land uses Custom Webhooks to expand product features
Our partners at Collab.Land have built one of the most preeminent web3 platforms, designed to enable the creation of communities based on token ownership. Using Custom Webhooks, Collab.Land’s customers can create communities not just based on token gating, but also advanced token actions, like staking, lending, and more.
"Collab.Land needed a flexible webhook solution that is reliable at scale. Alchemy took our input and built Custom Webhooks. This unlocks entirely new capabilities for our product to more effectively and efficiently manage qualifying members for tokenized communities." - Raymond Feng, CTO, Collab.Land
The Indexing Company uses Custom Webhooks to ingest blockchain data in real time
Our partners at The Indexing Company offer indexing as a service, creating curated data pipelines for their customers. They’ve already started using Custom Webhooks to power these pipelines, a useful replacement to their previous solution: repeatedly polling RPC nodes, fetching all the data in a new block, then parsing the data to see if it met their customer needs.
“Custom Webhooks was incredibly quick and easy to implement. It took us less than 30 minutes to set up and has led to 3x faster, 24% cheaper architecture for us and our customers. Custom Webhooks have enabled us to significantly simplify our blockchain adapters, all without sacrificing on the exact data our customers need." - Brock Haugen, CEO & Co-Founder, The Indexing Company
Custom Webhooks vs. Alchemy Notify
Custom Webhooks is the newest real-time data solution within Alchemy Notify. All other existing Alchemy Notify solutions are designed to give you access to specific, transfer-based events, e.g., mined transactions or NFT activity. Custom Webhooks is a complement to these solutions, now giving you access to totally undefined, custom blockchain data.
How to get started using Alchemy Notify’s Custom Webhooks
Custom Webhooks is available for all Alchemy developers today. Get started for free.
Blockchains that support Alchemy Notify’s Custom Webhooks
Alchemy Notify’s Custom Webhooks are now available for all Alchemy developers building on:
Ethereum
Polygon
Optimism
Arbitrum
Custom Webhooks are also supported on Goerli testnets for Ethereum, Optimism, and Arbitrum, as well as Mumbai testnet on Polygon.
Read our Custom Webhooks Quickstart guide and get started for free.
Related articles
Introducing Geist: the Members-Only Blockchain
Geist Mainnet, the first members-only blockchain built for gaming, is finally here!
World Chain is open to the world!
World Chain is built on Alchemy Rollups, enabling teams like World Chain to launch their own chain, leveraging the most reliable, scalable infrastructure in web3.
Account Kit v4: Bring the world onchain
Plug-n-play components, familiar social logins, and more make it easier than ever to build zero-friction onboarding and one-click transactions.
