Launching Decentralized Infrastructure - Josh Neuroth

all right good afternoon my name is josh neuroth i'm going to be talking about uh decentralizing infrastructure today and i work for a project called anchor we're growing we have a token out there and uh we support decentralized infrastructure so what is infrastructure i think a lot of people when whenever you throw that word out it's like infrastructure can mean so many different things and here in the slide you see in 1890 new york this is what infrastructure looked like under the street right so we see the subway we have water or maybe even early electricity and that infrastructure ends up being really important to enable growth here's that same intersection today at fulton and broadway thriving city and we see this all over the world that cities and economies that have great infrastructure they end up growing faster than ones that don't so how does that apply today in web 3 well we can look back at web 2 and see that massive amounts of infrastructure have been put into place to support the amazing growth that we've seen so how many of you remember those buffering netflix bars about 10 years ago yeah yeah we all know about it and the fail whale anyone remember the fail whale on twitter early twitter users you'd go to twitter you'd see that fail well and you wouldn't be able to use the service and so all these companies which i worked with at the time on their infrastructure they've invested amazing amounts in infrastructure and they've seen incredible gains where you see netflix has got a 40x market cap since that point and twitter has seen 10x active monthly users so how does that how does that relate to us here we have seen incredible growth in blockchain infrastructure in 2021 right so 20 anchor saw 20x growth across all of our infrastructure and here are some real numbers i just pulled these last 30-day average for some of these countries like like look at philippines they're making 6.26 billion requests every 30 days to blockchain infrastructure that means traders that means projects there they're there they need to talk to the blockchain and we've seen this growth across all of these emerging markets i think i want to point out on argentina argentina since the start of the pandemic the argentinian peso has decreased 20 percent in value right and this has pushed argentinian users into using d5 and to use d5 they need access to blockchain infrastructure so we're going to be talking a little bit here around what is blockchain infrastructure and why is it important so you guys are probably most of you are familiar with a validator the block creators you probably if you're doing staking you're sticking to a validator but there's another type of node that everyone in web3 needs access to and that's called a full node also sometimes called an archive node or an rpc node but any anyone that's trading or doing any kind of development on the blockchain needs access to a full node and so what happens is when you talk when you need to talk to the blockchain you send requests to the full node and if that request includes a transaction that transaction is sent to the mempool and eventually the validator picks it up right and so every single use case in web 3 needs access to the full node if you're building a dex you need it if you're trading in metamask or another wallet you need access to the full node really anything in that sense all right so here's an example if you use metamask and you're connected on ethereum you use infuria which is a project that's here owned by consensus what anker does is if you need access to these other networks we provide access to the kind of the multi-chain future and every time you do anything in d5 connect your wallet you're making a request to those rpc nodes so here's an example spear swap one of our projects that's using our infrastructure all of these things that you see on the user interface here need access to that blockchain infrastructure when you connect that wallet that's calling the rpc when you're displaying on-chain data in your user interface through web3.js or whatever it is you're also connecting to those rpc requests so this uses a massive amount of infrastructure and a massive amount of requests when you're when you're talking to the network so here we see another one of our user zapper.finance what's awesome about tools is we've seen an explosion in multi-chain support so you see there in the over in the left-hand corner of the slide you can use all these different chains with zapper and every single one of those has unique requirements for talking to the blockchain and they all make those rpc requests directly to those nodes right so what does that look like and why does decentralizing infrastructure matter all right so when you have a blockchain like ethereum it's decentralized anyone can run a node right you can run a node on your local machine if you get if you know how you can you know maybe find a web provider to run a node on but then when you start building a project like spirit swap you need a load load-balanced environment that can handle that node because one single node will not handle the traffic that you need to support those requirements and this brings up an interesting challenge because in order to support this massive amount of growth we start to begin centralizing a decentralized system all right so what what should what should web3 infrastructure look like so i put the logos some of these companies are here i think all of them have some kind of event or have a booth here you can probably find them around here but in our opinion decentralized infrastructure needs to be built across multiple data center providers has the community involved and distributed across geographic locations so something that is unique to anchor that we've done is most of our other services out there that are centralized just use like aws that means aws goes down your rpc goes down all of the d5 crashes at that point that's using that we've put nodes all around the world we have notes now in brazil we're putting nodes in india um there's south africa is installing next month so this kind of helps localize that traffic and build that decentralized system across different service providers all right so here's you have kind of like this platform versus protocol and we've seen that you know early on and fewer was kind of first to market they've done a great job alchemy 2 building kind of a web 2 business model for web 3. but you know in doing that you have a centralized system and you take most of the value and that's going to the founders that's going to the venture capitalists that have invested in that whereas we think protocols the web 3 business model will eventually beat the web 2 business model where the community is incentivized to add compute to run nodes on the network and help power this decentralized system so we think that why should we care about this i talked a bit about this a couple minutes ago but i think i think what centralized service providers have done is they've really helped aid in the institutional adoption of web 3.

and i often get a question there's a lot of debate right now in the community around who's going to be the aws of crypto i think that's going to be aws i personally know that all of the cloud providers are working on rpc services right now launching validators they're all coinbase cloud they're all centralized service providers and we really think that a decentralized and incentive protocol is the right way to attack this where we have a dow where the communities help governoring and supplying has that community first pricing and this is such a key piece because the pricing piece is so important i want you guys to see this next slide here so i brought up spirit swap earlier sending about 8.5 billion requests rpc on a fura if you use the list pricing with no discounts or any kind of grants or whatever at that kind of scale you're paying in fear 1.6 million dollars per month for infrastructure alchemy are paying almost 300 000 without integrands of course they're going to give you volume discounts and whatnot but um we're launching with our protocol a new incentive-based pricing where we take payment it's less and 80 is going out to the node providers that are putting the compute on the network so i think there's a lot of drama around this slide i know many of you probably liked it or retweeted it but we think this is happening right now with infrastructure being so important vcs know that this is important they're incentivizing they're building out they're helping resource there's been like almost like 500 million just in the last six months that went into web3 infrastructure companies from vcs and we think the community needs to have the value and extra and capture the value from that by being node providers so how do we do that well uh proof of stake really only incentivizes the validators if you remember my slide earlier the validators are in the gas fees what we're doing is we're using the anchor token to incentivize running those full nodes and we're actively doing this these are some of the logos that are working with us we have several dowels providing nodes even some of our competitors like chain stack that are now providing nodes for us as well and they all serve traffic to that system that's how we build a decentralized service so the way to think about this is we're almost like uber for nodes where we run an aggregation service and then um the node providers bring the nodes serve the traffic and earn out in that way and that's how we believe the decentralized system can succeed all right so we have a decentralized infrastructure out there today being actively served by um many different node providers if you're using if you're a meta mask user you can go to anchor.com protocol public you see that little metamask button there click on that it'll load this decentralized infrastructure just in one click and you can begin using the network no sign up no credit card also we have kind of this new public rpc same thing if you're a developer you can begin using these endpoints immediately they're extremely fast there's tons of capacity on and they're not rate limited and so that's um we want you to try this right now so if you're a developer you can literally start curling against this right now rpc.anchor.

com that has full historical data of the blockchain we have i think we served what i just pulled this screenshot today 50 million requests just on this one in the last 24 hours so it's definitely growing we want to support the community and certainly there's more advanced features like web sockets and some other stuff that we offer if you want to invest in the protocol and deposit anchor tokens and that too all right so um where do we go from this we've taken a lot of feedback from the community and i think what's important to note is we started out really as a centralized service provider it's very hard to build a decentralized product and get product market fit and you know in 2018 when we kind of started this journey really like the concept of a dao was very early on right and so we're essentially disrupting ourselves and kind of converting all of that centralized business over to a decentralized protocol so in 2019 we launched node as a service was i kind of claimed to famous we we had the mo we're the most multi we were doing multi-chain in 2019 really before anyone else and then this last year we started working on this decentralized decentralized effort and we've seen 20x growth last year and now in 2022 we're starting to roll our tokenomics get the token in and pay out the payout to those node providers and that's where we're at today now you're probably wondering if you're technical here you're like okay anchor still runs a load balancer we still run the service that distributes all the traffic right and so there is essential there is semi-centralization in that but we do have a plan and something we're working on is a method to decentralize that load balancer itself and that's probably happening next year so um we're excited and we want your feedback you know and i would love to hear your feedback we're open to suggestions if you want one of the amazing things about this is like not everyone is a programmer not everyone is a developer but you can learn to run a node we have several node providers through one of our dows they're not programmers they learn to run a node and they're earning out crypto now for providing traffic to the network which is super cool so it's kind of a path to like incorporate a lot from the community through those dials that are launching kind of nodes and providing that traffic to the network all right so um thank you for being here we got like i said we got the infrastructure you can reach me on telegram at j0sh7 or twitter and you can also see us at anchor