Engineer at @echodotxyz, ex @monzo @pusher
UK
Joined May 2013
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We recently did a bunch of scaling work at @echodotxyz so that the site doesn’t die when we run big oversubscribed deals.
This involved making the backend horizontally scalable, so we could scale up from 16 to 384 CPU cores for the latest big deal.
Will Sewell retweeted
Bringing back Up Only was just the warm up.
We’ve acquired @echodotxyz, the leading onchain capital raising platform.
→ Joining builders with community capital
→ Giving investors access to new opportunities
→ Growing economic freedom worldwide
Will Sewell retweeted
Every entrepreneur I know thinks the fundraising process is broken.
Why capital formation should be onchain:
- It’s more efficient
- The process is fairer for both sides
- Much more transparency
What we've been building
We just shipped a new sale type for Echo private sales: Commitment Requests.
Instead of first-come-first-served, founders and group leads can instead run a sale based on Commitments.
Users can commit the maximum they’re willing to invest, requesting an allocation. Final allocations are adjusted at closing based on total investor demand.
If the sale is so significantly over-subscribed that the algorithm cannot fit everyone in, even with reduced small allocations, then it will select buyers at random instead.
Goal of this sale type is to maximise investor access into high-demand sales, and remove the fastest-finger requirement.
Founders and group leads will be able to choose which type of sale they’d like to run based on what suits their own goals.
First trials of this sale type likely live soon. Pls msg us if there’s any bugs or issues. Thank you, have a nice weekend x
Will Sewell retweeted
Good update on the state of Echo and crypto crowdfunding platforms.
Pretty remarkable how many more top crypto VCs are coming out in support of crypto crowdfunding vs TradVCs when @AngelList came out for Web2 startups.
🎉 Edition 28 of my newsletter, The Funding, is live!
Many thanks to @alpackaP, @cobie, @HadickM, @lalleclausen, @cmsholdings and @LexSokolin for sharing insights 🙌
theblock.co/post/354738/big-…
Will Sewell retweeted
The future of investing is open & onchain.
Coinbase Ventures is excited to launch the Base Ecosystem Group on @echodotxyz to support @Base builders. Like us, Echo believes in democratizing access to investing—so more people can back groundbreaking startups.
Why it matters 🧵👇
The trouble is, we run the backend on AWS ECS, and ECS caps the number of CPU cores for a single instance to 16. And our single lonely instance was hitting that limit.
I shared more on how we run load tests here
xitter.cf/willsewell_/status/187…
This demand is obviously a good problem to have, but we couldn’t keep having our site break when reliability mattered most to users.
Echo has really inconsistent traffic that makes it tricky to capacity plan and autoscale.
Normally we get relatively low traffic. But when popular deals are published, we’ve seen spikes of over 400k requests per second as everyone furiously refreshes the page, trying to invest.
