Today, we’re excited to introduce Portex, an R&D organization with the goal of accelerating the adoption of onchain applications with real-world data. 

Portex’s founding team is united by a history of joint efforts deciphering crypto protocols, analyzing onchain data, and building data products. Drawing on our collective experience, we’ve designed our first product, the Portex Platform: a first-of-its-kind, living, interactive map of crypto ecosystems. 

Our platform has made it easy for you to explore, learn, and contribute to a growing universe of crypto products, protocols, and primitives across three inaugural networks: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. Let’s take a look.

The Portex Platform at a glance

Keeping up with everything that’s going on in crypto can be a challenge even for the most informed researchers. Our initial goal is to provide a universal view of projects operating in a given network. Below, we can see the expanse of the Ethereum universe on Portex.

From the start, we’ve tailored Portex protocol integrations to answer questions we ourselves often ask as operators in this industry: what does this project or set of projects do, and how can we distinguish projects in a category? Portex integrations focus on getting to the true essence of diverse crypto ecosystems in the form of natural language while steering clear of hyperbole, tribalism, and exaggeration.

To kick things off, we’ve curated a collection of integrations across the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana ecosystems. But to reach a more comprehensive and balanced understanding of these ecosystems, we’ve built the platform to be collaborative by design, much like a social network. Starting today, we are opening up Portex to everyone. Sign up, and start exploring, learning, and suggesting edits or making contributions to improve the graph.

Pragmatism at the intersection of AI + Crypto

The Portex Platform is no ordinary social network. It will never follow the advertisement model that is so pervasively used today. Instead, under the hood, the Portex Platform feeds its intelligence into an AI model that was designed to improve the understanding of crypto primitives across networks. Our hope is that this creates a positive feedback loop that results in the most comprehensive knowledge graph of the cryptoverse. 

Our first integrations are in a natural language, English. At first, these integrations will foster a better understanding of the crypto primitives from the [human] user perspective. But we’re not stopping there. In our research, we have seen how machine language, the code representing these applications, will play a significant role in improving the ways blockchain programs understand each other. This translates into a new era of composability: the ability to combine crypto primitives in new and interesting ways to create novel systems.

In our view, it is the new developments in AI that will drive this emerging Composability Era in crypto. But rather than full-fledged agents operating independently onchain, we instead see AI emerging in crypto as an interface to the game—a tool that improves how users build programs and interact with blockchains. Our hypothesis is that this interface will simplify the process for users to compose applications and bring their data onchain. We’re excited to share more about how we aim to make an impact at this intersection. 

Our story

The Portex founding team traces its roots to the R&D arm of Coin Metrics, a pioneer in the field of onchain data. Working within Coin Metrics’ experimental Labs unit, we bonded over a profound curiosity to decipher blockchains with onchain data, building innovative crypto data products and sharing novel research in long-form reports and State of the Network—the longest-running crypto newsletter focused on onchain data. 

We all share an excitement for the future of public blockchains and the types of cool applications that we think crypto primitives enable. But as researchers operating deep in the industry, we’ve also experienced the difficulty in analyzing protocols and mapping them appropriately. Research is in our DNA, and we’ve founded Portex with the mission of making it easier to research, and develop, on top of public blockchains.

As for our name, Portex is a reflection of our shared interests in history and the origins of modern cryptography. The Portex was a British electromechanical cipher machine used by secret services in the UK during the late 1940s and 1950s. It was similar to, but more advanced than, the infamous German Enigma, and pays homage to the early days of cryptography as an emerging field. The world of public blockchains can sometimes resemble the scrambled outputs of a cipher machine, hence our efforts to decipher this emerging space. 

Stay tuned 

If you are interested in accompanying us on our journey and research, make sure to follow @portexai on Twitter/X and subscribe to our Research below. 

The Portex founding team is Lucas Nuzzi (X, Linkedin), Kyle Waters (X, Linkedin), Tadhg Looram (Linkedin) and Nancy Herriman (Linkedin).