The Evolution of Blockchain Infrastructure EG Galano

all right hi everybody so my name is eg i'm one of the co-founders of infura if if you're not familiar with infiera infure is blockchain infrastructure we provide apis um and other tools for people to develop for web3 when when you look around what's going on at east denver today it's so different from two years ago and and the very first and the very first denver people are more interested in what's built on top of the core protocols people are interested about nfts nft platforms all of the different things that we can do in the d5 space and it's easy to forget all of the things that are underneath that all of the things that underpin that with the base layer the base layer being the consensus layer that ties all of this together so initially that was just ethereum and then we added ipfs we've added other layer 1 and layer two protocols and all of these things are peer-to-peer networks and to be able to participate in this you typically had to run your own infrastructure when when it was just bitcoin there was one thing that we were all doing it was sending transactions and it was really straightforward we ran our own infrastructure we ran a node typically something like this at home and we would just send transactions back and forth and and that changed over time because as uh as the resources that are required for that grew the infrastructure that we had to run for that changed but people weren't really too concerned about that people were more interested about transaction throughput and the things that you could do on the network rather than the boring thing which was the infrastructure so when ethereum came onto the scene people started using it the same way initially we were just sending transactions but it's because nothing had been built yet there were no nfts there was nothing really ready in d5 to play with we were all just kind of doing things that that were interesting things that um things that we could use ethereum for like buying a pixel on a website and say that we owned it on the blockchain and it was difficult to introduce new people to the space when if they were not very technical they had to run their own infrastructure and so working at consensus our goal was make it as easy as possible for people to enter the ethereum and web3 space make it as simple as possible for them to get onboarded and so the people at metamask have the great idea of creating the chrome extension the the experience that we're all familiar with and when they came to us we were a couple of people within consensus with this idea of trying to run the back end for that because if you're not running your own node you need somebody to run that for you and be that connection to the blockchain and so metamask did that metamask removed the ability or metamask removed the uh sorry metamask removed uh the requirement of having to run your own node and made it that anybody could just immediately install this have a wallet and immediately transact on the ethereum network first we started with metamask and then about three months later we did this for the rest of the ethereum ecosystem we opened it up and made it so that anybody could immediately sign up and build applications that would enable their users to transact on ethereum and no longer have to have that infrastructure component this started with our ethereum api we we launched our ethereum api first and you just had to sign up get your api key and immediately start consuming data from the blockchain you were able to interact with any of the applications that you wanted to send transactions and not have to worry about keeping that server online but you couldn't do that without also having a decentralized storage component a lot of these applications weren't just transacting they were starting to store data whether it was metadata for an application or an actual like image or some other asset that was important for whatever they were building they were starting to store it on ipfs because ipfs had the promise of being a decentralized storage network that would eventually tie into this promise of what what file coin and file coin storage would become so we started with those two things we said we were going to disa enable ipfs apis and gateways and deliver ethereum gateways so that people could immediately start building that that was the start of infrastructure for ethereum and that's that was our product suite and then as people started interacting with the apis it was very clear that trying to build a product for blockchain had this additional component that we hadn't really foreseen that would become a significant part of the problem space that we would have to solve and that was the transaction pools transaction pools are when you we send transactions on any of these blockchains that they're not instant they're not instantaneously written to the blockchain that they sit there for a while and depending on the gas fees depending on the conditions of the network it takes a while for these to get included into the next blocks and so people wanted to understand that information they wanted to see more of that information and use that to better inform what they're doing on chain whether as developers or as users and so we always wanted to solve problems for our users and so we developed this thing called itx which is inferior transactions when you think about the complexity of how you set your transaction fee depending on your comfort level with ethereum tooling and your understanding of the core protocols this might be intimidating or it might not some people really understand if the network is really busy how you send a transaction to get it included within a certain amount of time but if you're not it's extremely difficult and that'll continue to be a high point of friction for new users coming into this space so a couple of our our early partners asked us to develop something like itx what itx does is acts as a gas tank that enables people that are using ethereum to not have to worry about the transaction fees basically the transaction fees are paid for by this gas tank that's funded ahead of time by another user and that user can pay for the transactions of the applications that they're trying to deploy so for instance if you're deploying an nft marketplace you could fund a gas tank for your marketplace make it so that people can transact and have that gas experience abstracted away from your end users and you can you can build that into your model another way and not force that user experience onto a new user that's entering the space just trying to claim an nft and trying to understand what this gas fee is for so that that's what it's about it's we we wanted you just like you outsourced your infrastructure and api data requirements to us be able to outsource that complexity of gas to us as well this is another use case that was interesting that came to us from a couple of our partners which is uh some entities wanted to participate in public blockchains no longer wanted to just sit in a private permission chain and they wanted to do that but they had requirements that meant that they couldn't touch ethereum or they couldn't touch another asset on the ethereum chain but they needed to transact to coordinate with with other people on the network so they were using ethereum more as a coordination layer and not really looking at it for value transfer but to be able to participate on the network you need to pay the transaction fees and so we came up with a model where they can basically subscribe to a service with us that allows them to use this itx service and transact on the network for a consistent fee regardless of the dynamics of the fee market this is um this is really about building additional layers of infrastructure beyond ipfs and ethereum apis like that's it's what i've been talking about when uh when we go to these conferences talking about how they develo uh how to deliver this data to our end users but applications have become more complex they need data about the pending transactions and they need data outside of just the core blockchain constructs and so we're starting to focus more on these additional components that are built on top of our core apis like itx and so i'll do a quick demo here from my colleague mark going through some of the connectors that we're going to be releasing at inferior that you can then start to use in your own applications there we go so this is the consensus connector that mark demoed earlier this week it really is a low code no code solution so here he's using adobe creative cloud to upload some assets and what he's going to be able to do here is create some nfts without having to actually write any solidity deploying contracts like with code this is all using the azure power app suite let me pause it right here really quick so i can kind of walk you through slowly so once once the assets added there's a couple of different steps that you can go through here and none of this requires code all of this is basically drag and drop and configure right in the ui so that anybody that wants to build an nft mint an nft deploy these applications doesn't have to spend as many hours as some of us did early on just trying to get something delivered you can get something to market a lot quicker and be able to serve your users and then iterate on your design this next demo here is going to be mark uh publishing an nft directly from his camera one second all right there's mark so just like with the previous demo nothing here requires code it's all configuration through powerapps and the thing that i wanted to to make clear here is to do anything um on the blockchain you still need that blockchain connection that i was talking about earlier so this one's um something that we partnered with microsoft to build it's powered by infira that infera provides that blockchain connection so that it's now abstracted away you don't need to worry about these api queries this is all happening under the hood and then now we've published this nft and i think anybody in this room should be able to just come by see a demo of this and immediately try doing it yourself so we're going to be releasing more of these types of connectors this is just one of the most popular ones that we wanted to be able to show to you and uh so kind of transitioning a little bit all of these applications that we're building are continuing to put more load on these networks you can't just build these and not see an impact on the underlying base layer and what that means is transaction throughput that's why we're all really interested in ethereum two and uh the layer two protocols and other blockchains that are promising higher throughput because the more that we're trying to do on chain the more capacity and throughput there needs to be for us and one of the things that people don't talk about is the state growth there's a lot of research around stateless clients like clients things like that but at the core whenever you're sending a transaction on chain there will always be some small amount of data that's going to be written to the database and so that's going to grow indefinitely maybe your blockchain is going to have an issue a year from now maybe some are going to have that issue 10 years from now but it's a problem that the space is working on solving and it will get solved but the thing is how will it affect your application when you deploy your application to production and then all of a sudden your qr code goes viral and a million people download it and try transacting how will how will your app react how will the chain underneath it react and one of the things is it becomes more and more difficult to run these um this infrastructure because the database just gets so heavy so we're starting to spread transactions around other chains these these are the ones that we've worked with at infuria so we support not just ethereum but polygon optimism the arbitrary roll-ups and and we're looking at adding the start net and a couple of other uh l ones in the near future but all of these chains have the exact same problem that they're all going to grow and the faster chains grow faster and there's no getting around that and so if you read if you follow crypto twitter you probably saw an article from moxie one of the or the creator of signal uh a few weeks ago or a month ago and he was highlighting this as an issue like how can we call ourselves a decentralized community when so many of these projects rely on infira and metamask as the core uh places where they interact with the network and there is some truth to that there there are a lot of applications that use inferior but there's a key distinction between dependence and utilization a lot of these applications utilize inferior and utilize metamask but the thing that we wanted to do was make it as easy as possible for people to enter into the web3 space and and build we had no intention of trying to lock people into just using our services so in metamask you're able to use your own infrastructure you're able to use an alternative service to inferior if you want to and as in fuhrer when we started out there were other apis that were already available that were honestly a lot easier to run because they were traditional restful apis rather than the ethereum json rpc which is admittedly very difficult to manage sometimes but we wanted to we wanted to offer a service that used an open api specification and anything that you see from inferior is typically going to be an open api specification because that's really what we believe furthers the growth and adoption of this space if we continue to build on proprietary solutions and and there there are some examples i'm not i'm not calling out anyone in particular but there are proprietary examples of apis that if you build your application on top of it you're reliant on them and there isn't an alternative and so it's important for us to take that into account when we're making all of our design decisions with these applications that we want to ship and so decentralization comes in in many different flavors i always say that like we're very pragmatic in our approach as infura like we we recognize that as a service we're not like the most decentralized service that's out there but we've tried to balance that with being as open and collaborative as possible with the ecosystem uh one of the things that we've constantly highlighted is our harvard architecture model where people are able to utilize inference apis but also utilize their own infrastructure and basically route requests in between them and we've helped several large organizations set this infrastructure up for themselves so that they're using inferior as a primary and their own as a fallback or vice versa web 3 is about community and that's one of the main distinctions that you constantly hear about what's the difference between web 2 and web 3 is web 3's about ownership participation and community and infira has always been part of this community but we haven't really had a lot of opportunities up until now for people to really engage with us and that's one thing that's going to change we really want you as the builders you as the the people that are consuming and utilizing our services to really be able to participate in this whether that's giving us your your feedback on specific products that we already offer or really telling us what the needs are because i i didn't see uh nfts becoming what they are today i didn't see mev becoming as important as it was a year ago and i don't know what's going to be the hot topic at east denver a year from now but as developers if we're continually talking to each other we'll recognize like what are the problems that you're trying to solve what are the things that i'm trying to solve and we can try to solve them together in a way that's not just trying to capture value for ourselves but trying to solve it as a problem for the rest of the community as well because if we're doing that then we're going to if we're doing that then we're going to be able to help grow this entire ecosystem without hitting this roadblock of growth that we're going to hit because we're stuck on a particular proprietary solution so i put the link here to our community forum community.infera.io we have our feature requests um board over there and we'd love if people started to more actively engage with us there and tell us exactly what you need and how we can help you related to that at devcon 5 which was uh the last time i traveled before the pandemic was when we announced our open architecture initiative and then the pandemic hit and then plans kind of went the way they went so i want to i want to revive that where our open architecture initiative was about sharing more of the details about how we run in fiera because it's not a secret there's there's certain things that anybody that's trying to scale data reads and writes to the blockchain have to solve you have to index data you have to be able to spin up nodes quickly you have to have a way to keep data consistency around the apis that you're offering and everybody's solving these problems mostly independently and not really sharing solutions or and especially with other chains quickly growing in popularity they're all either in need of similar services or are already having issues because they don't have a service like infuria and if you wonder why inferior doesn't support something like solana or bsc it's not that we're averse to doing that we'd love to support developers wherever they want to deploy the issue just comes with the scaling challenges of an organization like we're no different from any organization that has scaling challenges and with any commitment that we make you can you can be assured that if we say that we're going to support a chain or an api it's not going to be pulled out from under you because this is supposed to be the immutable web this is supposed to be something that you can build something like an nft platform on that's going to last for generations and we don't want to offer something that we're not fully committed and prepared to operate long term and so we're going to start with open opening up some of our architecture around node management because that's what's going to be really valuable for a lot of these projects early on and so keep an eye out go to our website and sign up for our mailing list and we're going to start releasing more information about that and then we're going to continue to extend that initiative going forward and it's important for us to do this because all of these different applications that are built on top of us depend on us and everything from global trade to the metaverse are things that are going to be built on top of these layers so we need to make sure that the infrastructure layers are decentralized and robust so that we're building on top of a solid base thanks everybody [Applause]