Once upon a time, there was a high street store for everything. You bought bread from the baker, meat from the butcher, and veg from the greengrocer. While these businesses still exist, they’ve largely been supplanted by supermarkets that enable shoppers to purchase everything in one place.
Something similar is now occurring in web3. Not so long ago, it was routine for blockchain businesses to utilize half a dozen different providers to meet their infrastructure needs. Infura for your Ethereum node. Ankr for your Polkadot node. Blockdaemon for your exchange APIs. Chainlink for your off-chain oracles.
Not any more. While these companies, and the many more that have since sprung up in the blockchain infrastructure space, still provide vital services for both crypto-native and enterprises, today’s web3 developers crave something more convenient. They want the supermarket experience. A single infra partner they can rely on to meet their needs – and the commoditization of web3 infrastructure is now making this possible.
Convenience vs complexity
All systems add complexity over time as new features are added, existing ones expanded, and fresh integrations plugged in. And nowhere is this increasing complexity more apparent than in the web3 landscape, which has gone from a handful of dominant smart contract chains to a plethora of blockchains optimized for highly specialized tasks. We are now living through the omnichain era in which there are more L1s, L2s, rollups, and data layers than you can count.
While the proliferation of blockchain networks has greatly expanded choice, giving developers a virtually unlimited smorgasbord of tooling, APIs, and streams to satisfy their tastes, it brings certain challenges. Just as there was once one brand of milk and everyone drank it, anyone walking into a supermarket today will find chillers stacked high with an array of competing milk-based products, each subtly different from the next.
Marrying the convenience of having a chain for everything with the complexity this brings has proven a headache for blockchain developers. Not only do they have some tough choices to make in terms of which chain to build on, they’ve now got to factor in the prospect of needing to expand to a multichain setup in the future. This necessitates determining which infra providers will be able to support them on this journey, or whether they’ll need to sever ties and find new partners better equipped to meet their future needs.
Simplifying the ever-expanding omnichain landscape is one reason why multi-providers – that is, infrastructure specialists that can do everything – is one reason why they’re fast becoming the favored partner of choice. But there’s also another factor driving this shift: reliability. Outages that were once tolerated in the past during web3’s startup phase (remember when the Solana blockchain had to be routinely restarted?) simply don’t cut it any more. As institutions arrive onchain to do serious business like trade tokenized bonds, uptime is everything.
Infra that works all the time
As web3 adoption accelerates, and talk of disrupting trillion-dollar industries such as global commodities gets real, there is a major push for blockchain reliability. Developers now expect fallback mechanisms at every level of the underlying infrastructure, from RPCs to data verification. Sure, it’s not the end of the world if the onchain data feeding a GameFi app with 500 users falls out of sync for a couple of hours. But it’s a very big deal if a tokenized bond market grinds to a halt because an oracle’s stopped delivering real-time pricing.
The solution to this problem is to move towards a multi-provider setup – and not just any provider, but one with an impeccable record for uptime and reliability. There are instances in web3 when it’s good to hedge your bets by having several irons in the fire. But when it comes to infrastructure, relying on multiple independent providers is simply compounding risk. Rather one reliable partner that will have your back and respond promptly to your support tickets than half a dozen with patchy performance. All it takes is one such provider to go offline to brick your app.
Failsafes and fallbacks
Web3 infra has become a highly competitive business, and with clients increasingly seeking a single provider that can do it all – a supermarket rather than a high street in other words – the stakes couldn’t be higher. Infrastructure providers know that if they can nail things like uptime, UX, and pricing, they’ll gain a customer for life; get it wrong, and their clients will desert them for a more reliable rival.
It’s no coincidence that the reliability of web3 data delivery in particular has improved significantly in the last couple of years, fueled by innovations that make former promises of “99% uptime” look like rookie numbers: today’s web3 businesses want more and they get a whole lot more. dRPC, for instance, part of the new wave of infra multi-providers, combines a fallback mechanism with auto-load balancing to ensure a service that has near 100% uptime.
Of course uptime isn’t the only benchmark that companies such as dRPC are optimizing for: as a multi-provider, it allows node providers to enter a permissioned pool where they compete for data requests, resulting in consumers getting the best performance and price possible. These are the lengths that web3 infra providers are now going to – and there’s ample evidence that this approach is bearing dividends.
How many monthly RPC requests your dApp is making?
If it’s more than 500k you should check the picture below, in detail. pic.twitter.com/VQwzwL7Yej
— dRPC // All data from any blockchain in one place (@drpcorg) December 25, 2024
Despite being called upon to juggle more tasks and connect to more networks than ever before, web3 infrastructure providers have risen to the challenge. Data delivery is more reliable than ever. Issues with misconfigured nodes are now extremely rare. And thanks to web sockets and REST APIs, you can have your data served any which way you like.
It’s a good time to be building in web3, in other words. The tooling is better than ever, the data – both on- and off-chain – is accurate, and omnichain connectivity is never more than a few clicks away. Pick the right supermarket and you’ll have a store for life that will satisfy all your infra needs.
