Onchain maximalism with Brock Haugen of Indexing.co
Brock Haugen is the co-founder of Indexing.co, helping teams access blockchain data across 120+ chains. He's also the most committed onchain-everything user we know, running both his business and personal finances through Splits Teams.
You started Indexing right when the news broke about FTX. How'd that go?
My first VC call was literally the day FTX went under. Probably the worst possible timing for a crypto startup pitch!
But I'm a terrible employee by disposition, and I was jonesing to start my own thing. My boss at Coinbase knew it — I had basically already quit before getting caught in a round of layoffs and ending up with severance.
I still wanted to be in crypto. Quickly I realized that anything I wanted to build would require data infrastructure. I was looking around for solutions, wondering why hasn't anyone solved this? To be honest, I never validated what people would pay, but I got weirdly passionate about the problem.
Since I had worked on internal data platforming at Coinbase, I felt like I had the experience to fix the gap in the market. And it was the right time for me, even if it was an insane time to launch a crypto startup.
How does Indexing work? Break it down.
We make it possible to do whatever you want with blockchain data, minus the headache of running your own infrastructure. That way you can focus on your actual product instead.
One example is Mesh Connect, which facilitates payments between centralized exchanges and DeFi. After triggering a transfer from a centralized exchange, they often get no confirmation, no transaction hash, nothing.
So Mesh Connect pings Indexing: "Hey, we triggered a transaction that should look like this, going to this destination across one of these 40 chains. Find it." Our systems locate the transaction, relay the hash, and then Mesh Connect passes the info to their customer. Indexing sits in the middle to make sense of the chaos.
At this point, Indexing has tried many angles on the basic idea of provisioning blockchain data. Now we're laser-focused. We just do pipelines. We source from 120 chains, and we'll transform that data as needed, but then we deliver it straight to the customer. No APIs, no bulk, etc. We send the data to your database, your message queue, or wherever else you may need it.
As for Indexing's own backend, we don't have a centralized database for any of this! We source all this data and store a distributed cache of its raw form from RPCs. Then we run hundreds of small servers to process that data in parallel.
Every customer can decide how their data is processed, when it's processed, where it goes to, and if it's filtered or not. All of that gets done across those hundreds of servers. This architecture keeps our costs really low and allows for maximum flexibility.
You use Splits Teams for almost everything. Walk us through that setup.
I'm forcing all banking onchain for both the company and personally. My paycheck goes onchain, then I have to move it out to pay my mortgage. But I'll also bridge to Avalanche and use an Avax card for coffee.
For the business, customer payments come in, I move them to Aave to earn yield while they're sitting there, I pay vendors onchain whenever possible… I even took an investment through Teams recently. I only move money back to a Mercury account for fiat vendors when I absolutely have to.
What's the most satisfying part of this setup?
I can do most of my "banking" from my phone with passkeys. That's amazing. And hypothetically I could add a signer that's a private key for an automated service — imagine programmatic payroll. Splits has been the first time I've actually enjoyed using passkeys. This is what they're made for!
How long have you been trying to do everything onchain?
I've taken at least part of my salary in crypto since 2016. It's way easier now; night and day difference. Everything else I've tried before, I'd give up after a month. It was too cumbersome and simply not worth it. With Splits I thought, "Whoa, I can actually do this for once."
Broader thoughts on where crypto is headed?
Real adoption won't come from the hype. We're seeing it now with stablecoins: nobody knows how to make money off it [besides the stablecoin operators], and that's the point. The real utility comes when it's no longer an investment. What's exciting to me is the slow, steady stuff that actually helps people.
Indexing provides blockchain data infrastructure for teams building onchain. Learn more at Indexing.co, and follow Brock on Farcaster.
And if you're curious about Splits Teams, here's all the info.