Stablecoin Infrastructure Surpasses Visa Performance As Alchemy’s New Blockchain Engine Powers 70% Of The Market
In Brief
Alchemy has launched Cortex, an AI-powered blockchain engine that delivers ultra-fast, scalable, and reliable infrastructure for real-time global onchain finance.
Blockchain infrastructure provider Alchemy has introduced Cortex, a high-performance blockchain engine engineered to support real-time, globally scalable onchain finance. Developed over 18 months and trained on trillions of historical onchain requests spanning the past seven years, Cortex reflects a full rebuild of Alchemy’s core infrastructure. The engine offers a 66% reduction in response times and achieves up to 500 times the throughput of a standard blockchain node. It is designed to support ultra-fast transaction responsiveness while addressing emerging demands for finality and real-time settlement in blockchain ecosystems. Cortex also incorporates a system Alchemy describes as “block-perfect consistency,” which ensures all users, wallets, and platforms access identical data simultaneously.
Alchemy currently supports more than 70% of the stablecoin transaction infrastructure, facilitating flows for issuers and platforms such as Circle (USDC), PayPal (PYUSD), Paxos, Anchorage, and new government-affiliated initiatives like World Liberty Financial. Its systems also enable stablecoin integration for companies like Stripe and Coinbase, and it serves as the exclusive infrastructure provider for Robinhood’s cryptocurrency wallet. In institutional finance, Alchemy provides infrastructure for smart wallets, rollups, and real-time transaction processing at J.P. Morgan, which recently piloted an onchain U.S. dollar deposit token built using Alchemy’s technology.
Cortex allows these applications to achieve transaction response times as low as 50 milliseconds—outpacing Visa’s global average and aligning with Mastercard’s latency benchmarks. While final settlement remains bound to blockchain-specific speeds, Cortex facilitates significantly faster confirmations, thereby introducing web-level responsiveness to blockchain-based financial services. As stablecoins, tokenized financial instruments, and smart wallets increasingly transition to onchain formats, Cortex represents a fundamental infrastructure upgrade for digital asset mobility.
The enhancements introduced by Cortex are already operational across the Alchemy platform, which processes over $150 billion in annual onchain volume. The system maintains 99.99% uptime and underlies the technical foundation for nearly all major stablecoin ecosystems.
“We’ve never had intelligence in Web3 infrastructure—Cortex is the world’s first intelligent blockchain engine,” said Nikil Viswanathan, CEO and co-founder of Alchemy, in a written statement. “Stablecoins are becoming invisible infrastructure for global finance, and this is the backend that can keep up with it.”
Cortex Leverages AI And Custom Infrastructure To Deliver Scalable, Real-Time Blockchain Performance
Cortex employs AI-driven traffic optimization and context-sensitive routing to manage increases in global activity without experiencing downtime or reduced performance. The system dynamically adjusts to changing network conditions, redirects requests based on geographic location and latency factors, and intelligently scales infrastructure to satisfy the demands of institutional users. Unlike many blockchain platforms that depend on generalized cloud infrastructure, Alchemy has reconstructed its backend using specialized bare-metal servers, direct data center routing, and real-time monitoring across all network components.
This overhaul occurs at a critical juncture for onchain finance. With the implementation of the U.S. GENIUS Act regulating reserve-backed stablecoins, capital is shifting from yield-generating coins to tokenized assets, and institutions are accelerating efforts to adopt real-time transaction systems. A recent report from McKinsey highlights the urgency of this transition, noting that tokenized cash has the potential to revolutionize payments by providing faster, more cost-effective, and continuously available alternatives to traditional systems, while warning that institutions lacking scalable infrastructure risk falling behind.
Examples such as Polymarket, a prediction market that reduced latency by over 50 percent through Cortex, and World Chain, which serves more than 30 million users and recently onboarded nearly 600,000 new accounts in a single week, illustrate how Alchemy is quietly powering the next stage of financial innovation.
“When you’re moving billions of dollars per day, you can’t tolerate stale reads or outages,” said Guillaume Poncin, Alchemy’s CTO and former Stripe engineering leader. “Institutions need infrastructure that performs like the cloud but settles like a clearinghouse. That’s what we’ve built with Cortex,” he added.
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About The Author
Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
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Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
