In Web3, Hunting for Data Has to Get More Sustainable

Building on Web3 is in many ways a dream come true.  Instead of the many limitations of traditional software, Web3 (particularly decentralized platforms) are able to experience a borderless, trustless existence, with a community of users that can span just about anywhere in the world.  Smart contracts allow for unbiased management of different actions that a user might take, which enables business to be conducted by any two people without the risk of a bad actor.  Moreover, Web3 allows anyone to have a voice, with communities deciding the future of a given platform, with each person having a stake in its future.  All this, and you can use Web3 to build up currencies that don’t rely on any particular government for validity, allowing the platform to be as independent as possible. 

With all of these benefits, it can be hard to see a downside.  However, just ask any Web3 developer whose model requires a lot of data, and it becomes apparent that a decentralized architecture can be extremely cumbersome.  Let’s take a look at this issue, show how Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) are needed to pull Web3 data, and discuss their limitations compared to traditional APIs.  Let’s look at the improvements being made by the RPC industry (particularly with platforms like dRPC), and what the near future holds for data on the blockchain.

Web3 Data Woes

The simple fact is, if you want to pull data in a traditional Web2 architecture, it is amazingly simple.  All you need to do is find (or build) the centralized API that connects you with the data you need.  The efficiency and ability to set up an API quickly is why the architecture is so popular for traditional software development.  API calls operate much of our data flows today, and the standard just works.  So why would we step away from that and develop something much more complicated?

Decentralization and its many benefits is the answer.  The saying “freedom isn’t free” rings true here, because in a sense, decentralized data is very much a form of freedom.  Centralized data flows might be convenient when all the parties are playing nice, but it is also a source of bottleneck, a choke point, and major leverage.  If the holder of that data wished to do so, there is nothing stopping them from price gouging users for the privilege of accessing it.  If that party, or even an external force like a government, wanted to control the flow of information, they could easily censor that one outlet to ensure that the data from the centralized API was modified or blocked.  In our world that is growing more connected every day, this is no longer a hypothetical, and information censorship is very real.  Web3 gives the freedom to take away choke points through decentralization, but it can come at a price of complexity and inconvenience.  At least for now.

RPC Evolution

Why exactly does decentralization make data retrieval so cumbersome?  Well, it’s important to see this in the bigger perspective of Web3’s development.  If you think about retrieving data in an isolated instance, the process is straightforward.  The Web3 platform sets up a connection using an RPC, paying a small fee and retrieving the data from a decentralized source.  This by itself is fine, but there are two issues, both of them caused by scalability.  On one side, if your Web3 platform is relatively contained and not growing, you might be able to set up the RPC links you need and have a steady understanding of the data you need, the costs involved, and the fees you will need to charge users to fund the operation.  What if your platform is growing, as many are?  Web3 platforms are an incredible spectacle right now because they can explode with growth, adding users at an exponential rate if the service is popular.  Word spreads quickly in the Web3 community, and this can put a platform on the map.  However, the effort needed to service the platform’s users will also grow exponentially.  If that scaling also includes the need to pull data from different blockchains, then the platform will need to proactively reach out and identify those RPCs that can provide the correct information, all the while paying more and more as RPCs are added.  The platform itself is more reliant on a human or team of humans to be looking and connecting, which itself goes against the strength of decentralization.  All that, and there is one more side to scaling.  The entire Web3 industry is growing at a rapid pace, meaning that new blockchains are growing ecosystems that platforms might want to get information from.  This too requires RPCs, which adds manual effort, strain, and cost to the overall system.

So what can be done?  Quite simply, RPCs need to step up and expand.  As mentioned above, dRPC is one of few that has made its business model around being the “one stop shop” for RPC.  Other RPC services need to take note; they are the experts at seeing where data is located and who wants it, and they should be the ones linking to newly established blockchains and essentially being the decentralized index for Web3 as a whole. 

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We currently support over 90 blockchains.

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Looking Ahead

This advanced model is working well for dRPC, and seems to be the natural path of evolution for other RPC providers to follow if they wish to remain relevant.  The growth rate of Web3 means that soon platforms won’t be able to keep up with new RPC connections, and they will have to rely on a well connected supplier out of necessity.  It’s clear that centralized API calls are antiquated and irrelevant for the Web3 landscape.  To truly move forward, we need RPCs that can reach far and wide.