Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Alchemy.

Alchemy is NZRT’s primary blockchain infrastructure provider. More specifically, it gives you managed RPC node access for the Base network. If you’re not familiar with RPC — it stands for Remote Procedure Call — it’s essentially the communication layer between your application and the blockchain. Instead of running your own blockchain node, which is resource-intensive and complex to maintain, Alchemy handles all of that for you and exposes a simple API endpoint your code can talk to.

So what does Alchemy actually give you? There are five main services to know about. The first is RPC endpoints — these let you send transactions and read the current state of the chain. The second is enhanced APIs, which go well beyond basic node functionality and include things like token balances, NFT data, and full transaction history lookups. Third, there are webhooks. These let you set up event-driven notifications, so your system gets alerted automatically when a specific transaction event happens on-chain, rather than you having to poll for updates constantly. Fourth is mempool monitoring, which gives you visibility into pending transactions — ones that have been submitted but not yet confirmed in a block. That can be really useful for tracking the real-time status of a transaction. And fifth, and perhaps most practically important, is node reliability. Alchemy offers a 99.9% uptime SLA, which is a meaningful step up from public RPC endpoints that can be slow, rate-limited, or simply unavailable when you need them.

Now let’s talk about how you actually connect to Alchemy in your project. You store two environment variables in your dot-env file. The first is your Base Mainnet URL — this is the endpoint you point at when you’re working on the live network with real funds, and it has your API key embedded at the end of the address. The second is your Base Sepolia URL — same structure, but pointing at the Sepolia test network, which is where you do development and testing before going anywhere near mainnet. Your actual API key isn’t hardcoded anywhere in the codebase — it lives in the credentials store under ITE, Blockchain, Alchemy.

If you’re using Hardhat — NZRT’s smart contract development framework — wiring Alchemy in is straightforward. In your Hardhat config file, you define a networks section. Inside that, you add an entry for base-mainnet. The URL for that network pulls directly from the environment variable you just set up, and your wallet’s private key comes in from a separate environment variable. That configuration is all Hardhat needs to know which node to connect to when you’re deploying contracts or running scripts against the mainnet.

For day-to-day monitoring, Alchemy has a dashboard at dashboard dot alchemy dot com. From there you can manage your API keys and keep an eye on three key metrics: requests per second, compute units consumed, and error rates. If your blockchain calls start behaving unexpectedly, the dashboard is your first diagnostic stop.

Two related topics worth reading alongside this one are the Hardhat wiki entry, which covers the contract development and deployment tooling in more depth, and the Ethereum and Base Network page, which gets into how the underlying network itself works.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.