Dmitry

April 26, 2023 — 5 min read

Founded in early 2022 by a former Coinbase employee, Coherent began as a blockchain data indexing company. However, as the data indexing market grew more saturated, Coherent pivoted to data warehousing in January 2023.

Coherent’s customers require quick, accurate data retrieval and analysis for various internal use cases such as accounting, machine learning, fraud detection, and in-house analysis. Coherent’s differentiating factor from other data warehouses and analytics providers is its ability to decode and enrich data requested by customers, then deliver data directly into customers’ dev environments in parquet file format via BigQuery or Snowflake.

The Challenge: Speed and Accuracy without High Costs

Coherent operates in a fast-changing and hyper-competitive industry, facing the constant challenge of quickly retrieving large volumes of data and keeping costs low without compromising data accuracy. Coherent didn’t want to self-host, believing it doesn’t make sense to self-host node operations — a challenging and expensive process — unless a business has scaled to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Coherent needed a blockchain infrastructure provider that could run node operations and provide blockchain development solutions, allowing the Coherent team to focus on optimizing the core value areas of its data warehousing and analytics offerings.

Why Coherent Chose Quicknode: Key Priorities and Benefits

Coherent uses Quicknode’s remote node infrastructure as the primary endpoint for blocks, block receipts, block traces, and the latest block number. When Coherent launched, it had initially contracted the services of a node infrastructure provider that didn’t support enough chains for Coherent’s goals, and costs were too high for the quality of service received.

Fast API Response Time

Coherent needs fast response times to deliver the level of service its customers require; retrieving, decoding, and enriching their data, and delivering it directly into customers’ development environments for a variety of use cases, including in-house analysis, accounting, machine learning, and fraud detection. Coherent also offers custom data transformations for customers requiring custom views for internal teams.

To do this, Coherent uses BigQuery or Snowflake to deliver customers’ data in Parquet, an open-source file format that provides highly-efficient data compression and encoding schemes capable of handling large amounts of complex data.

With Quicknode handling node operations, Coherent can achieve the low latency required to retrieve and deliver large amounts of data to customers within fifteen minutes. In addition, Quicknode’s high rate limits allow Coherent to backfill entire chains faster and cheaper than any other provider.

Data Quality

Coherent needs to retrieve large volumes of complex data quickly and without compromising accuracy to provide the data solutions its customers require.

With Quicknode handling node infrastructure and operations, Coherent can ensure quick and accurate data retrieval. As business operations scale up, Coherent will have the power to provide even faster data analytics to its customers, bringing the time down from fifteen minutes to the goal state of two to five minutes.

Pricing

By switching node operations to Quicknode, Coherent achieved 55% cost savings over working with other node infrastructure and operations providers. As Coherent said:

The Support of an Attentive Team

The support of a dedicated and attentive team was “game-changing” for Coherent, and both the customer support team and sales teams are very accommodating to Coherent’s unique needs. For example, the Quicknode CS team suggested custom solutions to fit Coherent’s needs, and the sales team created custom quotes.

Quicknode's Customer Support team communicates with the Coherent team via a Slack channel that allows the CS team to provide quick responses with a high level of technical expertise, night or day.

With Quicknode, when a problem or question arises, Coherent knows they’re not simply filing a support ticket that is handled in two to three business days. They’re getting actionable insights and support when they need it, not later, after uptime has been compromised.

The Impact: A Winning Partnership

Coherent's ability to efficiently retrieve and analyze massive data volumes at low costs is crucial to its success as a data warehousing and analytics firm. As the company pivoted from blockchain data indexing to data warehousing, it faced the challenge of finding a reliable and cost-effective blockchain infrastructure provider.

After evaluating several options, Coherent ultimately chose Quicknode, impressed by its low latency, industry-leading request-per-second capability, and exceptional client support.

Coherent currently uses Quicknode’s Core RPC offering as the primary endpoint for blocks, block receipts, block traces, and the latest block number. As the business evolves and collaboration with Quicknode continues, the Coherent team is excited about the possibility of a new backfill solution providing a valuable service to retrieve and process data in bulk in a less commoditized way that doesn't require constant reliance on an API.

By partnering with Quicknode, Coherent can concentrate on optimizing its core offerings, ensuring data quality and accuracy without compromising on costs.