There you are. Okay. First question, how do developers ensure that users of their decentralized applications, dapps, have access to Ethereum and IPFS clients? If you create an an awesome dapp, how can you be certain that everyone who uses it has a reliable connection to Ethereum or IPFS? This is one of the things that makes programming on Ethereum tricky.
Your app will not work without a running Ethereum client. After all the hard work you make and all the effort you did, can you afford to let a problem like that get in the way? Does a user's Ethereum node have to be local? Many of us sort of assume that you need to run an Ethereum client on your laptop or in a virtual machine. Is that really the case?
Does every dapp user also needs to be a sysadmin? Should users need to read documentation to use a dapp? Today we understand the importance of user experience. Enforcing users, especially non-technical users, to read documents can be a death sentence to your project. Is it possible for dapps to be installed with just one click?
It's 2016. Everyone expect apps to be installed that way. How can we make this possible for dapps? And finally, how will the community develop dapps over the next few years? What are the needs of the ecosystem and what kind of solutions will be created to meet those needs?
To answer those questions, we created Infura. Infura provides the world with secure, stable, fault-tolerant, and scalable Ethereum nodes. No more worrying that your users won't have an Ethereum client to work with your dapp. No more worrying that the chain needs to be synced for a while because they closed their laptop for a few hours. You close your laptop, you want to do a quick transaction.
You open your laptop, you need to wait 10 minutes, 20 minutes to synchronize. No more worrying that their Ethereum client got a stuck and needs a restart. No more worrying that they are running an old version of the client. All those issues just go away. Infura has been designed from the ground up with security in mind.
It's robust and stable and it scales. Infura is here to make your dapp succeed. Infura provides the same type of dependent infrastructure IPFS, which is a project to build a distributed web. As many developers have already discovered, IPFS is a perfect complement to Ethereum when creating dapps. And just as it does with Ethereum clients, Infura provides reliable IPFS nodes on your dapp.
So, you have access to a centralized storage. Infura lets your users focus on the DApp, not on the things the DApp needs to run. Last, Infura provides a service called Ferryman. This is the special sauce, the secret sauce of Infura. This is where Infura really shines.
Ferryman does the stuff you couldn't do if you were just running your own node. It provides advanced routing of requests, load balancing, caching, failover, and analytics. This is the Ethereum and IPFS on steroids. From an From an architecture perspective, Infura consists of several layers of software. As you can see, at the top we have DApp users and their devices, also servers.
Next is Infura front end, which is the entry point for all the requests from those devices. From there, Ferryman takes over to make the service ultra-fast, ultra-flexible, and ultra-intelligent. Finally, we have the Ethereum and IPFS nodes, which are the workhorses of this decentralized world. They're the ones talking directly to the Ethereum and IPFS networks. We're planning to add many features to make Infura even more valuable for developers and users.
Among other things, we plan to support various flavors of Ethereum clients, so that developers and users have the option to select the preferred client. We are working also on a fork early warning system, a fork early warning system, which will sound the alarm when the Ethereum network is experiencing problems. With IPFS, we're working on a content pinning service. You will be able to ask Infura to pin certain files. And you won't have to worry about them disappearing from the network.
We will also provide a hash verification API. So, you can quickly check that file IPFS hash is what you expect it to be. Infura will also be supporting the IPDB network. We have been designated as an IPDB caretaker. Finally, but not less important, we have some really cool plans related state channel networks and state channel networks monitoring.
To try out Infura and stay up-to-date with our progress, go to our website at infura.io and our Twitter @infura_io. Many projects already trust Infura to provide them with a rock solid Ethereum and IPFS infrastructure. Every day, Infura is serving millions upon millions of requests. I really want to repeat that.
Every day, Infura is serving millions upon millions of requests. It is my hope that Infura helps you make your dApp a success. So, that the world the whole world can participate in a decentralization revolution. I will leave you with some closing thoughts about Infura and our mission. Thank you very much.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.