Blockchain may be decentralized, but reliable access to its data is anything but simple. In this episode, Ethan Chan, Co-Founder & CEO of Allium, shares how his team transforms blockchain firehoses into clean, queryable, real-time data feeds.

From the pitfalls of hosting your own data streaming infrastructure to the business advantages of Confluent Cloud, Ethan reveals the strategic decisions that helped Allium scale from 3 to nearly 100 blockchains, without burning out their engineering team.

You’ll learn:

• Why Allium opted for Confluent Cloud from day one 
• How data streaming supports mission-critical blockchain use cases
• What makes stream sharing a force multiplier for customer success
• How Confluent connectors accelerated their integrations with Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks

Whether you’re building real-time monitoring tools or reconciling petabytes of cross-chain data, this episode offers a blueprint for scaling with Apache Kafka® and Confluent.

About the Guest:

Ethan Chan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Allium. With over six years of experience in the AI and natural language processing space, Ethan has come to believe that high-quality data is the key constraint in building the best-performing models. This insight drives Allium’s mission: to provide the highest-quality blockchain data infrastructure for crypto analytics and engineering teams at institutions and funds. Allium focuses on delivering clean, reliable data in a simple, accessible format—data served on a silver platter.

Before founding Allium, Ethan was the Director of Engineering at Primer, where he founded and led the Primer Command product and team, and re-architected the core machine learning pipelines powering Primer Analyze. Earlier in his career, he lectured at Stanford University and conducted research at the Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab as a graduate student.

Guest Highlight: 
“We definitely always wanted to go for a managed service from the get-go… If you break [streaming], every other engineering company is going to complain and you become infamous—for no reason.”

Episode Timestamps: 
*(01:10) - Allium’s Data Streaming Strategy
*(05:20) - Data Streaming Goodness
*(26:50) -   The Runbook: Tools & Tactics
*(29:55) -   Data Streaming Street Cred: Improve Data Streaming Adoption 
*(32:10) - Quick Bytes
*(36:40) - Joseph’s Top 3 Takeaways

Dive Deeper into Data Streaming:

• EP1—Stream On: Unleashing Innovation with Data Streaming | Life Is But A Stream
• EP2—Processing Without Pause: Continuous Stream Processing and Apache Flink® | Life Is But A Stream
• EP3—The Connective Tissue: Shift Left to turn Data Chaos to Clarity | Life Is But A Stream

Links & Resources:

• Ep 8 - How Airy Powers Real-Time AI Agents with Data Streaming and Confluent
• Connect with Joseph: @thedatagiant
• Joseph’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thedatagiant
• Ethan’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ethanyschan
• Learn more at Confluent.io

Our Sponsor:  
Your data shouldn’t be a problem to manage. It should be your superpower. The Confluent data streaming platform transforms organizations with trustworthy, real-time data that seamlessly spans your entire environment and powers innovation across every use case. Create smarter, deploy faster, and maximize efficiency with a true data streaming platform from the pioneers in data streaming. Learn more at confluent.io.