Moralis Super Bullish Article 🚨
As many of you may have seen, we at EQT Ventures led the €11.5M seed round of Moralis a few months back. Now that the financials are out of the way I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell you more about what makes us so incredibly bullish about Moralis and the ecosystem they are building.
There are times when you meet teams who give you such an insane amount of energy that you get out of the meeting wanting to spread that energy with everyone you cross. The Moralis team is the living example of this: an explosive mix of raw energy, unchained ambition and pure enthusiasm.
This article is the story of why we partnered with them last year and how they’ve been on a roll since we met them.
A history of helping shadowy super coders
Ivan and Filip first met during their studies, went on their own entrepreneurial journeys and reconnected to run the Moralis academy. This project stemmed from their common desire to broaden access to the world of crypto. Fast forward to today, the Moralis academy has trained more than 30k people on the fundamentals of blockchain development making it one of the most successful programs out there. However, we didn’t meet the team until recently when we got introduced by Tony Högqvist (thanks Tony❣️) to Ivan and Filip. Along with their team they had started focusing on a new beast: building a fully-fledged web3 development platform.
After assembling one of the largest communities of blockchain enthusiasts, the duo started to look for their next challenge to further advance the space, the next step was clear. While the ecosystem was bursting with enthusiasm and creators were looking for the next big thing to build, core infrastructure and developer tooling was still in the works. The team envisioned an ecosystem, Moralis, in which developers would have all the tools needed to build their dApps.
A huge vision to arm those shadowy super coders with the best tools for the job
When chatting with the team it became apparent that their vision was much bigger than we had initially anticipated. Their vision was to provide the core layer to power the next generation of crypto-enabled applications. By managing everything from authentication to blockchain data, Moralis is slowly building the Firebase of Web3. People often debate the revolutionary or evolutionary nature of blockchain technology and in the context of Moralis, they’ve humbly taken the best of Web2 and combined it with the best of Web3 to build the best developer experience out there.
This is where Filip and Ivan really shine as founders. You rarely see such insane founder-market-fit:
- they’ve been in the crypto space for longer than many can claim
- they’ve themselves built with the existing fragmented tools out there
- they realised the huge opportunity ahead of them: onboarding web2 developers into web3.
The time is now
According to the 2021 Electric Capital Web3 Developer Report, “34,000+ new developers worked on an open source Web3 project in 2021, the highest number of new developers in history” and 65% of active developers in Web3 joined in 2021. Those developers aren’t just building on Bitcoin and Ethereum, no ser, they are building on Avalanche, BSC, Arbitrum, Solana, and many more. It is for this exact reason that Moralis has been built from the ground up to be cross-chain. Moralis isn’t betting on the success of any individual Layer 1 or 2, they are betting that decentralised applications, however they may be supported in the future, will capture a significant portion of user and developer attention. At EQT Ventures, we are fully aligned with this vision. They are building the core infrastructure to deliver on this vision. From node management, to APIs to query to their SDK, the team has assembled an all-in-one solution to serve beginners and experienced developers alike.
As Cobie highlighted in a recent piece discussing the links between crypto assets and retail attention:
“the only scarce resource in crypto is attention”.
I believe that this can equally be carried over when considering developer eyeballs. If “the only thing truly scarce is attention”, then Moralis has built a perfectly oiled machine to build a huge business…and it’s starting to show.
The best content flywheel to convert the shadowy super coders into Moralis mages
For any person working in the developer relations and developer tooling space: when is the last time you’ve met talented developers who are also talented community builders? 🦄
The Moralis founders have built the best content factory and community out there. Period. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and check their Youtube page, go check out the engagement on their Discord.
For those unfamiliar with the Orbit model, the Moralis team has built a funnel of developer engagement on steroids, turning enthusiasts into engaged members, contributors into builders, builders into Moralis superfans.
Things become easy
The beauty of a perfectly executed content and community strategy is that all of sudden, things become easy:
- You become the preferred dev tool for hackathons
- You collaborate with the largest names in the space (Chainlink, Avalanche, Polygon, Covalent to name a few)
- You launch a Unity SDK, finally enabling all game developers to focus on their craft and seamlessly layer NFT mechanics on top of their games for truly engaging P2E/P&E dynamics
- You grow the team from 5 to 50 in 34 countries in just a few months, fully remotely, with an insane sense of ownership. Struggling to hire? Not when you’ve built a community around your brand.
- The earliest contributors to the crypto space such as Craig Hammell, the 1st Coinbase engineer, recognise your work and want to support your future growth after having used the product themselves
- Users proactively rave about your service
- You overtake all the other ecosystem builders in terms of web traffic after being around for less just a few months
- This traffic is then translated into real users driving 10x growth in downloads in 5 months. With more than 65k+ blockchain projects using Moralis tech, developers are running their dApps without the cost & complexity historically associated to them.
Frens and anons, there’s never been a better time to start a web3 business and Moralis might be the perfect starting block to do so, give it a try here. Excited by all the developments above? They are hiring remotely and bringing on top talent, have a look at the open job opportunities here
