DeFi by Design EP#81: A Deep Dive into Blockchain Node Structures w Chainstack

Transcript

welcome to d5 by design where we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate empower and enrich it's your boy andy and welcome back to the defy slate youtube channel smash the like button on this video that really helps us out and sit back and enjoy the content thank you very much welcome back defy slate fam to another episode of d5 by design this is episode 81 and a lot of frankly chaos yesterday were on the tales of the uh the solana vulnerability in the wallets there was a bridge hack there was just all kinds of vulnerabilities exposed over the last uh

24 hours so we're uh we're kind of gathering uh collecting our thoughts here and uh diving into the uh the conversation around node infrastructure that changed that is delivering so we'll touch a bit on what happened in the recent days as well as the overall picture for the node infrastructure and how these blockchains are set up for success um we have nick uh ethan and alan all from the chain stack team ethan and allen work closely with protocols and uh advocate for some developer relations for chain stack and nick is head of d5 over at chain stack so i'm super stoked uh to talk to you

guys and explore at a high level what what chain stack is doing and the impact on node infrastructure that it has at these different protocols and dive deeper into what we're experiencing now and some of the unsolved problems that are resulting in in you know these vulnerabilities and how we can ultimately improve the ecosystem overall for the better so uh it's a pleasure to have you guys on and i'll pass it over to nick and let him introduce himself doing great yeah thanks robbie quite the last 24 hours as you said and i mean uh not to change topics we're obviously thrilled to be part of your podcast here and you know big fans of d5 slate what you guys are doing for the community you guys are deeply connected i think you're

sharing to the masses and you know i'm personally a fan so you know glad to be on board um so i'll do a quick intro for myself i'm nick sanchez i'm the head of d5 with chainstack uh we're a singaporean based company we've been around since 2017 really started picking up pace in late 2021 uh you know team has doubled or tripled since the time that i've been here in my last four months we're really picking up pace uh you know during the bear market as we can imagine you know clients are building they're getting their heads down they're preparing for the next bull run and i think chain stacks will set up to be able to support them going forward so i'm out of toronto or just outside of toronto and east coast of canada we work you know obviously 24 hours a day across

20 countries uh happy to support any clients and any customers that are interested in learning more about infrastructure i'll pass it over to ethan and allen so i can get started um and then alan can go after me so my name is ethan i also go buy tabasco online i cover harmony and solana for uh chain sex so essentially my job is to go out to these different protocols in the communities within these protocols and evangelize chain stack and talk to people and understand what developers need um and kind of how we can support them with that um so yeah the salon hack has been really crazy the past couple days and of course as the head of solana for chainstack uh i've kind of been at the forefront of it and you know it's there's a lot a lot to unpack there um so i'm excited to be on here and kind of

chat together a little bit so i'll hand it over down hey guys so i'm adam like i am a developer from changetech and mainly i handle two protocols i handle i handle stock net and ethereum as a goal and like my job is you know go to go and like talk to all the projects in this ecosystem and help them out with their needs and also you know contact amas and all these kind of things with this project so like that's pretty much what i do so i think it would help the audience to paint an overall picture of node infrastructure as it relates to blockchain design right the the general understanding as i know

it is we have a blockchain that's an organization of nodes in a network and this you know is typical of distributed ledger technologies and distributed systems across the board these nodes organize themselves in a way to basically share information across the entire network of nodes and from there you know different packets of information can mean different things in the ethereum network and in essentially all blockchain networks we have nodes that connect to each other uh sharing um kind of a collective uh pool of unconfirmed transactions and each of these nodes have their own state of the

blockchain which is kind of this chronological order of the confirmed transactions and a node will propose a new block of transactions to be confirmed and then share it with the rest of the net the nodes in the network to ultimately settle those transactions on the blockchain so you know correct me if i'm wrong if that doesn't you know seem like a clear picture and could you explain how the node infrastructure can be organized in you know different ways in order to impr improve kind of the scalability trilemma or pick you know certain spots on that um so you know how does chain stack

look at a set of nodes and then make choices to improve either scalability uh security um speed cost and and you know some of those other blockchain parameters sure yeah so i can kind of get started with that i've written a couple threads on twitter regarding kind of rbcs and how that fits into the blockchain so you definitely got it right rbcs and nodes specifically are kind of the fundamental layer of blockchains that work through transactions and kind of hold the blockchain so we do specifically in relation to nodes so we provide rpcs so rpcs are i like to think of it as sort of the ethernet cable from a user to a node so essentially when you're moving

through the blockchain you need some way to send your requests to the chain that you're connected to right so whether that's harmony or solana you need some connection with that chain to push that request through and specifically you need a connection to a node right so typically you'll have public infrastructure which will be that connection to a couple different nodes what we do civically is we run uh enterprise grade high performance private infrastructure so infrastructure that connects you to a node that we run ourselves and that's really designed um for speed so this is a node super beefy components um and we essentially give builders and developers access to this node uh through an rpc which is like i said

that connection with the user in the blockchain um and uh yeah so they can access that node and they can build on it and it really you know it empowers these projects to build effectively and scale um public infrastructure and kind of uh you know less private means of connecting with this blockchain you have a big issue with scalability right so nodes that are designed to be servicing a high volume of people typically aren't going to be as reliable as something like chainsaw which is designed to serve you and your project um so it's it's you know really great for scaling and i'm kind of taking control of your project so you know most projects and i guess nick and alan probably have a good

insight to this as well most products will either use public infrastructure or run their own nodes um smaller projects will use public infrastructure which is good until you get to a certain point in which you're going to need to switch to something private which in this case is going to be either using something like chainstack or writing it yourself a big problem with running it yourself is that it's costly and you need a developer team to run that right so you need a devops guy or someone to manage that node and ensure that it doesn't go down um what chainsack does is it allows these projects and these developers to uh run nodes and utilize their their project on a hack on a high power node without having to hire a devops person to manage that node for them um so it really allows these developers in these

products to innovate rather than focus on kind of the boring infrastructure stuff so yeah and before we dig into the maybe subtleties of nodes on different protocols had read an article and i i think it's it's fairly well understood that there is these uh connections in the traditional financial world between um wall street and like manhattan where these trades are ultimately settled and the hedge funds who are operating kind of around that that hub where they're actually running cables and you know for high frequency trading firms there is a latency between getting

from submitting that order until it's actually received um by the by the settlement engine and the the the trading clearing house so i remember there was you know several articles there was almost a race to get the closest possible to the clearinghouse to have the lowest latency when a hedge fund was submitting a trade it reminds me of this ethernet cable connectivity to the blockchain that you mentioned through rpcs is that uh you know a reasonable uh comparison to make yeah i guess ethan could hop in here but just to give some thought so that's a great example that you're putting out there so the idea is um obviously you know i think in the trading world you

need up to eight connections japan new york london you know tokyo eight of those in the traditional finance center uh for blockchain obviously that's worldwide it's global but there's still kind of big hubs right so there's china tokyo japan you know west east west uh you know europe those kinds of things so what we try to do is try to decentralize that as much as possible zombies so providers like ourselves would use a multiple of different cloud providers and obviously different locations for those nodes across different infrastructure providers there so let's say aws we have you know east and west um and then as they add new data centers we can kind of add those to the stack virtuoso would be frankfurt uh you know we have gcp google cloud in another region so we're still building out that scale i think we're actually digital ocean as well so we'll

have five six seven different cloud providers so we try to be as decentralized as possible and access to like you're saying specifically in d5 right the latency the speed arbitrage bot trading you know people want to actually co-locate their bots as close to possible to the data centers and similar to your example about wall street is we've had people ask us hey can i actually you know co-locate my bot right beside the data center to get that lowest latency so we're always kind of working around those types of engagements and i think scalability is big right so we can do a number of different things we start with kind of on ethan's journey there from developer would use a public rpc endpoint they're going to max that out pretty soon then they'd go to chain stack and take a look at our elastic node setup which is kind of master node

back load balance etc and then there's further options down the path of scalability for customization like a dedicated gateway or something like a dedicated node load balance geographically located so there's kind of a scale that you can work with with providers like ourselves obviously you know speed latency those kinds of things are very important in game five we've heard a big kind of resurgence there nft traders sniping uh specifically in d5 arbitrage uh there's this whole concept i'm not sure i think i saw a podcast episode from you guys on mev apis you know flashbots relay we use blocks route for warp transactions so we're doing a lot to really help that kind of speed and latency and block propagation um but yes i mean you nailed it right you know the idea is the provider that's going to win and then the bot that's

going to win is going to be the closest the lowest latency and the best reliability and that's what we try to provide what what does maxing out an rpc look like um you know in a in a blockchain i i take it you know you increase the gas you can basically get your transaction kind of to the front of the queue um what yeah what does maxing out an rpc look like and how does chainstack introduce a new uh route for trade so that it's uh it's got that lower latency yes i'll i can just kind of give you a quick rundown then i'm sure nick knows he's pretty good with kind of all the

the blockchain and the meta api and stuff yeah so first of all chain stack really focuses on high performance nodes so these nodes are designed to service uh super large scale enterprise projects like your d5 kingdoms like your magic edens like these huge projects is designed to support those um so you know it's designed to do this as fast as possible so i actually did some testing with chain stack against public endpoints and in terms of latency and really reliability with uh your speed and your connection with chainstep nodes um it really rivals most other public solutions um so it's really great for running these different things and and you know especially with our elastic nodes

and give some context we offer two types of nodes so we offer elastic and dedicated um our elastic nodes will be at this point that leads to our master node or collection of master nodes and this is going to be load balance between a couple different nodes um so our lasting knows ensure that you can plug an endpoint into your project and uh it'll be like nick mentioned earlier load balanced um throughout a couple different nodes this ensures that you don't you know throw too much traffic to one civic node instead you can uh kind of have the fastest and most requests possible without any limitations meaning that all of our nodes are actually not even rate limited uh we have a super high request per second threshold and you know all this really adds up to

be something that developers don't have to worry about ever reaching limitations of our notes because this limitation then that ceiling is super super high with you know our elastic no technology um and then for dedicated nodes these are going to be civic nodes that are dedicated to one project um so instead of uh elastic nodes which are a pointer to a number of master nodes um dedicated nodes will be one singular node that is ran specifically for this project and that's good for a couple different use cases and i'm sure nick could probably get into the use of that um yeah that's kind of our rundown of the different offerings cool and and i'm starting to to think of the uh the nodes as

almost roll up solutions into themselves where if you have an elastic node it's almost serving as that execution window and we can we can kind of speed up the latency uh going into one specific node so that when it's broadcasted to the rest of the network it has the greatest speed right so by having a dedicated node it's almost pointing directly to the node in the network um and i'm curious alan if this is like uh like an e2 staking node if you guys have plans for that and if it a dedicated node is you know like a specific point

for one project where they can send all of their transactions and it's really only it's only containerizing like the the transactions from that one project and then an elastic node is almost like a roll-up where like you know you point to one node and then it points to a master node but it's got a it's got a quicker route to the settlement engine which ultimately is the on train network um more so than just pointing to a public rpc which is now collating all of these transactions and you know then putting them in the queue from there yeah you so how is this process on ethereum now and it you know do you guys have thoughts on

on any changes or adjustments to make for for eth2 yeah i guess alan i can help you up there as well yeah yeah so like mainly like i would say like ethereum right now like the node structure wouldn't change much the only thing is that like when you have an each node like and like when you're running it as a dedicated node you look at like better privacy and security then i could like go on to like add one more point regarding it then i would say like the sovereignty it would be like much better than compared to you know a elastic node but like you know running it for a company like dedicated node on your own can give you like full custody of the digital asset like because like not you are not literally like sharing it with any other person so at the same time you

can have the fully control of the private key uh with your address then you now have like you know choice to uh you know fully have a copy of it on your own and just like when you are doing it it's the same case elastic node like what would happen whether like you are literally like uh connecting to a node which are like shared within like multiple users and it's good ultimately like there isn't like much problem with that like button like uh if you are someone like who's like very deeply into you know vulnerability and security issues and everything like that then it could be a problem because obviously like having an education not could like fully you know fully like give you full control of it and at symbol elastic note like people who are like really you know very much

worried about executing it they wouldn't really consider it as an option yeah so to add on what alan was saying there so right now what we do is our pc's we're considering validator node specifically we need to robbie that's something that's very interesting for many you know working on the beacon chain um so we're actually in talks right now with a few different partners and we're actually considering launching our own set of validator nodes so what we do today is we we support something called the pocket network that was kind of our first foray into the validator node setup it's been quite successful obviously you know pocket network is up and down but what they're doing is really neat and it gives us a chance to kind of test that thesis so you'll see a lot more coming out of us in the next few weeks and months around these two

obviously with the september merge date put it out and then what kind of alan was saying so you know in terms of the dedicated mode versus the elastic node a lot of people come into this robby with this thought that they need a dedicated node they want that security level our cto eugene would say look you know elastic nodes are load balanced they're built to be supported they're built behind these super big masternodes beefy as heck that's going to be probably the first step and then when somebody wants something even further on customization like what alan was saying number one is you know you have this a bit more feeling of security and dedication it's my own node uh but usually we recommend kind of load balancing two of those and geographically distributing them so you know the cost can go up it's a lot of

based on requests so just diving into a bit of the pricing plan with chain stack right so we charge based on requests like many other node providers and then with the dedicated node you're actually just paying for compute and storage so you have unlimited requests so for projects that are really big and scaling they don't want to have any of these kind of ups and downs in terms of cost per month based on requests going up and down or hitting peaks so you can do a dedicated node in that case and then further down that path is once we launch this validator node setup then you can say hey great i want to go and stake let's say you know 80 to 100 rocket pools or 800 validator notes um and then we kind of adjust the cost and those would each be dedicated nodes so

that's kind of i think where your question was going with these 2.0 yeah yeah that that does help and you mentioned pocket network which we we've done uh podcast and michael over there that is uh super cool he's on top of it as well and they're bringing an element of decentralization to this ultimately this tech stack that's built on elements of centralization with aws and other providers and bringing a decentralized element to it could you talk a bit about that partnership and kind of how pocket network and change that complement one another yeah absolutely so i do the pocket network uh with chainstack as well and so we're very close to the team in florida uh you know big fans of what they're doing obviously

the token prices is getting crunched right now but you know we're all in strong belief that it's going to turn back around so what we do with pocket is we actually support them through a number of engagements where we'll actually support some of their pocket node runners with our chain relays so let's say somebody in the pocket network was you know infrastructure costs are high right so especially with the bear market we've had a few of them say look you know i actually was running thousands of pocket nodes or you know the chain relay nodes and i actually just don't want to do that anymore the cost the roi isn't there so we would help them with their chain relay nodes at scale then they can offload that and then run their own pocket nodes we also offer pocket nodes themselves as a service and we kind of help a lot of the network

that way and in terms of decentralization you kind of nailed there so a lot of clients come to us and say look can i you know run chain stack nodes and then decentralize that and offer that to clients and we're kind of thinking about how that works you know our cto would say look we've got multiple cloud providers we're across the geographies we're already kind of in a decentralized space there but people want to take it one step further so we have a lot of conversations with the different clients around you know taking this one step further down that decentralization path and allowing them to run chain stack nodes for our client base those kinds of things so there are discussions there i think with the pocket network the big thing is you know the token economics what the business model is looking like and how they can kind of recover from

kind of this bear market right and right now the economics are really tight on node running um where you know the validator knows the stake sorry the rewards that you're getting on a day-to-day basis are a little tight based on the price of the pocket network uh this thing as you know was you know over a couple of bucks now it's under i think 0.08 cents or you know eight cents right so it makes things a little tricky and that's where provider like ourselves could say look we operate these nodes at scale we're pretty low cost we're you know where we're effective you can offload a lot of that infrastructure cost to us and focus on kind of what you do best on the front end of things so it's neat there's a lot more to come from it and and like i said we're big

fans of the pocket network as well so happy to have a you know future conversations on that yeah yeah they uh they're really in tune with the security model i know michael has explored um a lot of concepts dating back to you know early blockchain design and distributed ledger technologies um and kind of built from the ground up to eliminate some of the uh the weaker points of of the tech stack when we think of web one plus web two plus one three and and you know building from the deepest part of the stack up um and it's great to hear that you know chain stack and uh

pocket network can can relate the node infrastructure where you know pocket network has these nodes but then chain stack is able to uh integrate them with one another and and pull them all together into the most scalable and you know like you say cost effective way um that's awesome so now get getting to like you know i guess the more recent uh times right so we we talked about you know the the recent hacks the one on nomad bridge solana um you know how does a dedicated node or an elastic node help protect against uh these these kind of exploits is it even possible to protect against these kinds of exploits

and i know we're still kind of you know digging through the details in in these vulnerabilities um is is there a measure of security to take with chain stack and kind of having dedicated nodes where chainsack is able to you know provide uh like you said a private process and a private endpoint uh for these for these projects and they wouldn't come under um you know this this type of uh they wouldn't come under fall like in these vulnerabilities i know solana you know was a private key hack um the nomad bridge i'm you know we're still kind of digging through the details there

how does chain stack with i guess the dedicated nodes and even the elastic nodes provide this kind of uh side load element of security at the node level and you know kind of help protect against any any of these node level vulnerabilities sure yeah so um i'm sure alan and nick probably have a good insight into specifically our nodes and in relation to security um but first of all that's a great question um the solana hack recently was uh an interesting act and it was a rare one in that the basis of the hack was a private key leak so um the civics of how that happened are not super known at the moment

um but ultimately at some point a list or a database of private keys um got leaked so in that case a an attacker can take control of those wallets um and send funds to them and then drain them effectively so with wallets anybody who has access to a private key is effectively the owner of the wallet right so whether you created the wallet or you didn't if you have the private key now you have full control of that wallet um so in solana's case somebody got access to a bunch of private keys and then took ownership of that wallet and sent it to the attacker's wallet and stole that money that way so it's an interesting case um and in that case uh chainstack probably wouldn't be able to help much

um and that's kind of like that's outside of the node territory and more into database security and uh like keygen library security um yeah dedicated nodes and elastic nodes definitely are gonna be more reliable and more secure than something public um and alan and nick might have a better insight into uh yeah i guess uh maybe i can comment on it sure so like when you are like using you know your own public notes you are like 100 at the risk of being vulnerable to it so it's like when you have it running everything on your own you are obviously like allowed to you know have the private key like with yourself and the risk that could come up with this would

be the fact that when you have it within yourself and it's public obviously uh you have to like take care of it at the same time like you are at the at the scene of like you should you know start a certain place which is your responsibility so like if it gets late your entire notes everything will get vulnerable so like if you're using you know an rpc provider like us we have like an enterprise credit like security which would allow you to you know uh like fully secure it for you at the same time we have our own backup service and we can literally help you recover everything within your own and like if you're doing it like on your own this could you know take a lot of money a lot of lot of you know engineering power and like just running your note on your

own it will it could cause like up you know eight to six thousand like dollars per year which is like a lot so like the best thing would be to you know just you know make an rpc provider like chain stack to run it for you and like we will like hundred percent take care of all security messages for you maybe nick can add absolutely i mean i think robbie you know some of the recent events it's tough to say whether chainstep could have helped or not i know we speak with a lot of providers and marketplace vendors that do you know auditing and analysis and sort of you know private key recovery kind of social engineering those kinds of things so i think some of our partners may be able to help in you know the next i guess probably 48

hours is usually when this stuff gets flushed out to see who's going to kind of take responsibility what happens there but back to allen's point what he was saying is when you're running an rpc endpoint publicly you're kind of solely responsible for everything that goes on there versus running a provider like us we kind of give you that peace of mind right so you have node authentication you have two fa controls to get access to the platform you can have multiple users user management so it's really kind of bringing an enterprise grade application around a node and i guess you know back to the cost savings measures of it is instead of a team of you know two three four guys that are running uh you know obviously nodes is not there they're they're 100 daytime but i think we did some math and you can get up to 100 or

250 k depending on what a developer engineer kind of costs per year versus you know a couple hundred dollars a month depending on where you're at for plans with chain stacks so um you know we'd love to kind of you know catch up in the next few weeks and see how this unfolds but uh you know a lot of the partners that we work with in the marketplace can actually help clients like these kind of fix these situations or get ahead of it whether it's auditing smart contracts taking a look at new wallet technologies there's a lot coming and i think we're in touch with a lot of the folks there so you know i guess ethan's gonna be on the hook for the next few weeks to see how this whole selena thing plays out [Music] uh yeah

it is it is too early to tell really on uh the depth of the most recent vulnerabilities um i'm i'm curious on like the the common misconceptions that that users have when it comes to control over their own wallets um you know even i think there's you know really um simple uh security measures to take like not putting your private key into a website um you know it's just one of the most basic ones um it could have prevented probably a a large portion of these uh solana hacks if it was a database that was uh vulnerable um and stored these private keys um and then

there's some other you know simple security measures um and alan you mentioned you know how uh running a dedicated node gives you full control over your wallet and your private key and full i think you mentioned full control over that digital asset that you're moving back and forth on the chain can you unpack that a little bit like why does running a dedicated node give you more control over your digital assets okay so like to like you know get to know that better you need to understand like why you know when you're running a fully node on your own and you need to understand like why you should be using an rpc not running on your so like when you are running a node on your own uh within within your pc the problem would

be the fact that like you are essentially like contributing more to the distributed control and convert more to digitalization but at the same time like when uh in the case of like eighth notes like when you are running it on your own like you will get like full control of it at the end you will get full control of the digital asset and like when you are using an you know rpc provider like us and like there are like two kind of nodes like we provide like that is the elastic node and dedicated node elastic node essentially like shared node like you will be like sharing with other providers other people will be like using it and uh for the like basic information like for like any any security person they would know that like sharing something you know sharing sharing and within and of the person like that is a uh you know

a common common practice of vulnerability and like when you're doing it in sync you dedicated note you are essentially the only one who it's like using it and this could like uh it's like pure logic you know if you're logical basically like think about like get a note like you are having like 100 percent control over like whatever transaction whatever blocks everything that gets rendered on to it and at the same time when it comes like elastic ignore like two three people are accessing their notes at the same time this could like you know they're they're you know at the same like right now like there isn't any you know any research or anything that would actually say that like uh running an elastic node or running a dedicated node which one could be better but at the same time like if you're like thinking it from you know security

perspective like dedicated node could be essentially better but then like i said like running an ls plus node has its own you know common practices yeah got it yeah the uh the dedicated node you're not sharing with anyone else um elastic node you're only sharing with the the few that roll up into that into that master node and then a public node you're sharing with kind of the entire you know population um and when submitting transactions to these public nodes it you know seemingly gets clogged and congested um if there's you know so many users that are sending transactions through that node um the the

kind of the idea of sharing that node right like um sharing that that throughput i i understand could reduce kind of the scalability measures um and going and submitting transactions is there a possibility where like someone could submit like a malicious transaction into the same node that you know i might be sharing and submitting you know fine transactions and that that's like one of the reasons not to share a node or is it mostly in scalability terms not not so much in in security terms to run a dedication i guess maybe i can take go ahead ethan yeah so sure yeah nikki i'm sure you have um

i'll get you talking after this um so yeah so so with public stuff uh you know security-wise they're gonna be pretty safe generally speaking um so like you know if you're going onto a public node and like harmony for example um which is a network that has historically not been great with the public nodes um security-wise you're gonna be fine but you know the big uh problem with public rpcs is that um that scalability factor that you mentioned so um specifically with harmony which is the other particle that i do on top of solana you know congestion like you mentioned and the lack of scalability is a huge issue um so you go into this protocol and it's hard to load websites or it's hard to get transactions through because like you said you're sharing this node

with the entire protocol and because of that it's really easy to get to get it to congested or um for arbitration to kind of clog the network um so really with these these uh i like to call them personal rpcs with these personal nodes whether it be elastic or dedicated um you really don't have to you know of course you have to share the network with anybody else it's your node so you um unlock it an entirely new platform of scalability that you don't have with public infrastructure um and you know like you said this really allows both users and projects to fully utilize the protocol that they're on whether that be harmony or solana without having to worry about uh that kind of shared factor and having to fight with the network to utilize it properly

yeah i was going to say robbie there's also some neat things that we're adding um i'm not sure i know mev api and mev is a big deal when it comes to this i know i've been reading a lot to see how mev is going to impact 2.0 so minor extractable value or maximal extractable value that's something that's happening as we speak you know all over the world i think they were talking about 600 million dollars in the last year has been kind of you know drained by this type of solution right so what nev does is it allows them to kind of do sandwich attacks or front running or back running and really you know kind of i think take it i don't know how you want to put it you know it's kind of maybe not political but kind of your ethos here whether you take advantage of

people in that kind of case right you know profiteering is one thing but you know for the general average user that doesn't know and you know they were about to pay fifteen hundred dollars for each and now they're stuck paying 1505 somebody made some money out of it you know it may not seem like a big deal but at the end of the day it is so there's a few things that you know kind of chain stack at least is doing with our partners so we like to talk about you know the mev api we're actually enabling people to take advantage of that um but you know the way that mev is going with the flash spots is they want to actually kind of almost segregate that and allow that to take place and it may be a little bit less of an abusive way

and then there's other things called the warp transaction setup which is really neat that's with our partner called blocks from i think you've spoken with a few times um and what they do is amazing right so we actually have built in with this new chainstack 3.0 the integration with blocks route we call it warp transactions and you can essentially you know enable a node to have warp transactions on it so that can be done both on elastic and dedicated and what will happen i think it's on esc and polygon and you can actually you know propagate a transaction much quicker and faster through the blocks route delivery network so there are things that we can do with some of our partners on top of the node setup to really help you get your transactions through um and we include a number of free transactions blocks route there is

some value to signing up with their platform but at least the chain stack within our ui you don't actually have to have a subscription you can set up blocks throughout warp transactions right out of the gate so it's kind of this constant battle between you know i guess the bots the sniping kind of folks the arbitrage players and then kind of the traditional sort of middlemen and the small players like the retail componentry and so like like uh like ethan was saying is you know people usually start as developers on kind of the public rpc endpoints you know when they're doing test that that kind of stuff then once they get a test set of clients they kind of do some geographical testing worldwide and then when they actually go launch to go public at that point they're going to want to set a load balance probably

elastic sets of nodes into different geographies to cover tokyo japan and east and west and then you know further on the path once they start getting into some big volume that's where they kind of decide okay is it worth going to dedicated node so it's less about the security practices it's more you know we at least the chainstaff have a long platform that integrates that makes sure that your stuff is secured on both elastic and dedicated nodes um but to allen's point is dedicated is you know my own endpoint there's no other transactions on this it's only my project's endpoint and ideally if you're load balancing that and you're scaling up the gpu and resources you can actually get a pretty super powerful mode for yourself so you know consider chain stack as a quite the custom shop you know we do have out of

the box platform but uh in terms of you know working with projects that are going through their scale across networks and different kind of use cases we can help them grow through that path yeah it is a common misconception where you know just bumping the gas up is gonna is gonna submit that transaction and get it through faster but as you guys are saying there's a few um stops along the way for a transaction to go from you know in you know clicking a button in the wallet ultimately to settling on the chain it hits these various this these various endpoints first the node and then you know kind of so and so on and so forth from there on

on different nodes and broadcasting to the to the entire node network um we're speeding up this transaction and i'm curious more on warp transactions where how this path is ultimately sped up whether it's from decreasing the amount of endpoints that a transaction is hitting along the way or if it's actually increasing the speed but then the you know lowering the latency and increasing the speed of that transaction through that i mean honestly it's kind of looking at the blockchain side of things right so the way and i don't want to speak for blocks right here but the way they've set this up and i was just watching a video yesterday from yuri you know they have a geographically distributed network that's been up and running for many years that is high

performance high focus just speed and latency that's all they do is to make sure that their nodes through this distribution network are going to be you know kind of ahead of the curve so they spend a lot of money on infrastructure they have some big clients clients spending 50 60k a month with them just to be able to get this kind of stuff up and running and so it's really amazing that specific custom delivery now right beyond just chain stacks kind of nodes that really helps you get that speed up and running and there's a whole kind of science behind it [Music] and that's what kind of helps your transaction gets pushed into this concept so you know if your transaction goes

through and you're going to say i'm going to spike the gas on this as well you know the bot reader on the other side can say great i'll spike it a little bit i'll come in and in front of you and sandwich you at the end of it and they'll still make money on it and you still feel like oh you know what i've burned some extra weight on the gas and my transaction went through but it wasn't optimized so i think that's where kind of the blocks route you know concept comes in and you know we do a lot of work with them and we're very happy to get it up and running and you know i think there's been a lot of success recently with some of our clients on board with the warp transactions and it's it's a combination of kind of the speed but it's really

using their delivery network that helps accommodation [Music] sweet yeah yeah yuri uh years of gingerbread that speed scalability um increase kind of the throughput on uh on the user side you know without kind of increasing the the block size or anything like that it's actually you know utilizing the block or it's you know greatest power it's able to kind of like build the transactions in a way that's more efficient than just simply kind of like uh rudimentary you

know putting putting transactions in there with various amounts of gas it's kind of you know optimizing as you said so cool now switching gears here over over to um start next and some of the newer protocols that are coming out um allen like what are you most excited about over there what are you seeing on the ground um you know across kind of like the developer relations that you have on in the space um you know what what's new and exciting coming out to start that i would say you know uh the thing about starting it is that it's like pretty new so like mainly like all the projects that are you know developing and like getting on board with stock nets they are like very much focused on the zika like rollups and then i would say that like uh

the main language in stock that would be terror and like only you know hardcore coders would actually you know actually take the effort to you know learn that encoding that so we already know that like people who are like developing projects on stage that they are like pretty much serious about like stock that and how much like you know it can like blow up so like i would say all the projects that are still you know developing like i would say there are like 60 projects that are on developing over there and like eight of them are on maintenance right now and like out of the main like out of the eight of the projects like or many of them are like you know wallets so these wallets are like slowly developing like much further and further and people are like getting to use it more and more so like

essentially what could happen in the future could be that these projects that are already you know developing on it they could like you know scale up much more and essentially like these small small protocols like starcraft they could like replace and like compete with like uh huge protocols and a lot of developers over there would uh grab onto these stuff just uh anyway probably sorry i'm gonna cut you off but yeah we're quite excited and the reason why obviously a lot of people are excited about but you know the cool thing is it's such a new protocol that we have a chance to kind of take the leadership route here and we were the first provider to be able to offer nodes on startnet um and what we were seeing is a lot of the ecosystems they start with a good strong wallet background so we're speaking with

kind of the mostly the main wallets in starknet and what alan was saying is a lot of them are on kind of test net maintenance sort of kind of you know cooking up so you're going to see in the next i guess a couple of weeks or months here how things develop and the apps actually get on board the start net platform but what's really cool to see is that at the bottom level is it always starts with kind of a wallet infrastructure and so we're speaking with kind of the main wallet providers there and you know getting on board and working with them uh because that really sets the foundation for the infrastructure and the whole network can kind of build on top of that so we're quite big fans of stark net you know we're talking zk sync and you know stark x all those kinds of things that

we we're working with so it's going to be a big project for us um alan's kind of you know taking the lead there and he's made his way through most of the different uh projects on the platform and we're just making sure that they know that you know chain stacks there and ready to support them solid yeah i'm stoked for start net obviously mainnet alpha is out there now and they're kind of uh you know holding the majority of the ecosystem in the entire space kind of that arm's length before allowing kind of opening the floodgates and allowing everyone to to rush into the system to you know prove out the resiliency of their of their network um and is there is there a difference on you

know from chain stacks perspective on these different validator mechanisms like you know zk uh roll ups and ck proofs um differing from arbitrary optimism and other optimistic types of solutions does the validator mechanism have anything to do with how the node infrastructure is built yeah i guess i would venture to guest so just to note that we are going to support arbitram and optimism very soon so it's kind of you know we'll have access to the whole camp of them but you're totally right so we use something called startnet pathfinder which is kind of the software library for starting it today some others are using core js those kinds of things so as these kind of like you talk about the consensus mechanism

they each have their own kind of flavor of it and obviously kind of behind the scenes is the software that powers that is a bit different for protocol maybe within a protocol you can have a different version of it so you know maybe a little tricky to kind of dive into just on this call but yeah we're very positive that this is going to revolutionize the way that you know consensus is done in the future and you know it's something that we're going to support how to support it you know to have a chat with the development and engineering teams on our side to see how they're actually doing outside the scenes but they definitely each have their own flavor and you know in case it's not really our position to kind of tell the market which is the better way or the other way we're sort of agnostic

in the middle saying look at the end of the day you're going to need an rbc provider for them and then we'll kind of work to support those out of the gates and then you know the community will choose which one's the leader which one's the winner at the end of the day right yeah i'm excited for these uh zk uh chains um ultimately leveraging ethereum's security model similar to how optimistic roll-ups are as well but without the without the you know dispute period um and the the consensus mechanism of providing the proof right with the transaction rather than you know optimistically saying oh you know kind of waiting for that

dispute to come in and and dispute the transaction if it's malicious requires it seems extra bandwidth to to always be looking at the chains scanning for any malicious transactions and uh you know then you know flagging that as as a bad transaction and going through the speed period you know providing the proof right along with the transaction seems to speed up the efficiency with it and just kind of tap into this you know relatively undiscovered kind of mathematics that allows the the proof to to you know send right with the transaction rather than rely on a um external provider to you know judiciously kind of look at the chain and and flag the transactions that

should be disputed so yeah i'm particularly excited about startnet and the zk proof system overall um and yeah it kind of brings up a question in my mind of the differences between validators and nodes i i think generally they're almost considered like within the same family like you know if a set of validators you know all talking to one another and broadcasting transactions to one another constitutes a chain or if there's a more basic um infrastructure at play here where it's like these these nodes and then certain nodes or validators or validators are you know could you speak to that a

little bit like how um nodes and validators are they one in the same or are there different kind of segments of nodes some of which are validators some of which are like these other types of nodes sure yeah so i'll give alan and nick a chance to answer this as well because it's kind of a multi-faceted question here um but yeah so so generally there's a couple different types of nodes um with harmony specifically which is the main protocol that i do you have validator nodes and you have explorer nodes so explorer nodes are going to be nodes that you use to push requests grab data and and the kind of general surface level things validator nodes are separate and that these are going to be nodes that are designed and specified by usually one person or group of people to exclusively validate transactions

within the network and a lot of times these validator nodes also have rpcs they run alongside that but validator nodes are special in that they're elected by the network specifically by a proof of state network like um like harmony to validate and to receive delegations um so for example in harmony you can go into a list of validator nodes and these are all nodes that have been elected to be validator nodes throughout the network and you can delegate your your currency to that and that is a dedicated uh validator node that you are sticking to um that's going to be separate from our explorer you know like the less validation specific nodes that you might run for rpcs um these are

a little more lightweight and they don't require uh consensus and um you know election yeah um to work with an important stake right robbie so that's kind of the big difference is when you're talking about you know your skin in the game when you're validating right then you have the potential of losing the stake and getting slashed or you know those kind of things so it comes with a certain level of responsibility you have to have the funds to be able to do this right with me for example it's 32 it's you know everybody out of the street that has the 32 to go and validate at stake um so it's a neat component and i guess you're going to see a huge transition in that people have already started working towards beacon you know you've got lido you've got a bunch of other companies that are already

offering eth 2.0 services it'll be really interesting to see how institutions transition even myself personally you know i was kind of concerned about staking eighth just because there's no real guaranteed you know windows i don't know how you've done it or if you've been involved at all but you know you kind of have this risk as a user of you know is this thing going to happen in this merge is it not most people in the space think it is they're pretty confident right but it does take a certain level of responsibility and like what you've been saying is you know it's kind of election it's consensus it's maybe one scale up in terms of uh you know level responsibility in terms of the hardware requirements i actually believe you know after speaking with the cto is they're actually pretty likely in terms of what

is actually needed to manage them and so it's it's not like um they're kind of a different flavor of node but they're essentially one in the same just with a different set of privileges and permissions and requirements maybe like again i don't do it regarding the case of ethereum so in ethereum like maybe like you could run like two nodes one of them is evaluated to nodes the other one is you know you actually use you know develop on ethereum so like in the case of like a validator like mixer like you could like state much onto it so validated node are essentially you know they uh used to you know actually like take part in the mechanism that's happening in ethereum and in the case ethereum like nick said like you'll have

to like take like 32 each to actually you know take part and there is no guarantee like the merch is gonna happen over like it's actually gonna take place like they already have been like talking about the merge since like 2090 and there hasn't been like any much progress but then like now that there's a date we could actually say it's gonna actually happen then valid notes are like mainly you know you could say you could you could have like power in the uh in the counsel so you can take part in it and other type of node is mainly like you see you know develop or application personalized application and just you know dabble with the tables and that unveils like a new endpoint for transactions that that flow through it's like you know first the transaction is

created um and your wallet when the smart contract function is called and it goes to this explorer which picks it up um and it sends it to a validator um and then the validator you know if it's in a zk system it'll it'll construct that proof before sending it to the settlement engine um if it's optimistic it'll just kind of relay it over to the settlement engine um and and yeah i think that pays a really clear picture of the life cycle of a transaction right from getting created in a wallet um through through the different sets of nodes ultimately to selling on the chain um so yeah that that really um i think you know paints a clear picture

here of uh the different um the different kind of end points and the the the path that that a transaction takes and how it can be sped up um with different levels of scalability and security with uh dedicated nodes elastic nodes um running e2 nodes ultimately with validators and you know kind of making this this uh route to settlement a much more cohesive and efficient system overall with the different levels of security and gas optimization with you know pocket network and block throughout and and some of the other partners so as we kind of wrap up here is i'm actually curious is there you know unanswered questions that you

guys have and uh if you have like a dedicated research team maybe they're exploring some of these questions what are some of the mysteries that are still prevalent in the space that you know you guys that chain stacker are looking to solve kind of on the forefront of this node infrastructure concept yeah i would say sorry you can i mean go i was going to call out the contact right so we've got a few kind of experts antonio and hayek evgeny and you know you guys can catch them on twitter and we've got to hold i mean they've doubled their triple the content team but you know they're always out there kind of you know putting out tutorials i think you know lewd languages those kinds of things that they're trying to figure out um there's also a whole set of apis right kind of we're trying to figure out

what's the future is it just known running is it bringing apis developer tools those kinds of things so i think that's kind of the focus is uh for them and you know happy to you know introduce them to anybody that's interested they've got twitter handles they're putting out content and blogs and tutorials and uh you know we're also big on the community right so if anybody has any questions that they'd like us to try to answer feel free to shoot them their way and we'll jump in on that i don't know if ethan you had another con yeah so you know in terms of like research and finding these unanswered questions um we're always chainstack we're very centered on innovating and ensuring that we have the most modern solutions for whatever problems arise right so like we just introduced like warp transactions and med apis which

solves an entire subset of problems that typically uh most node providers don't solve so ultimately our goal is to kind of as blockchain continues to expand and develop and of course more problems and things need to be accounted for and provided um kind of start to be developed uh we always want to be at the forefront of that and kind of giving developers the tools and the answers they need um to innovate and kind of get where they need to be um so you know we're always releasing new things new whether it be new protocols or new features and all these things are things that you know like nick said at the beginning our team of 80 people are always working really hard to find exactly what we need to do to service developers in the most effective

and of course you know the most modernized way possible uh maybe like uh maybe like again i don't something more about instead we have like our own you know patented technology called bolt where we allow like singing with the note like within like six minutes so like if you're doing it like without without technology it would take up to like more than more than one week which could like waste a lot of a lot of time for any developers so our technology like the polytechnology we make sure you know it takes snapshots of the ledger so like whenever you are starting to you know to play a note with with us you don't have to like start from the genesis block you can like start from the snapshot that we created and we will like regularly update it at the same time so this could

literally like save a lot of time compared to like you know other like english herself have personal experience with this back when you had to run a node to create an ethereum wallet i mean i think it took like weeks of my computer being on and like fan going fur right and overheating for me to download the entire chain in order to set up the node just to hold my wallet so yeah that that is uh a problem you know i've experienced and now that's kind of salt on the wall up front but still on setting up the node front um you know taking a snapshot and then just you know building on that snapshot rather than downloading from scratch is certainly a time saver um

cool very cool yeah and um my last question is when we we asked all the podcast guests if um you know just in in one sentence or so if you uh if you are you know stuck in an elevator and you had to give an elevator pitch to like one person you know dead or alive on chain stack um you know who would it be and why um as far as like you know just one minute elevator pitch on on uh someone yeah i guess i could take a swing at that one if i was stuck in an elevator i guess we're always after kind of the chief technology officer in those cases right we'd say look you know you want to be able to sleep at night right you've got a family you've got things that you care about uh you know why not try to offload

a lot of things that are you know not core to your business like node management right you guys have developers engineers that are brilliant they're targeting the new problems that the communities need to solve they're building ui experiences user experiences communities and managing nodes you know having an outage in the middle of the night taking those teams away from that that's just you know that's that's old days you know there are vendors like ourselves that can help and it really is just you know our cto would say just have a good night's rest knowing that your nodes are kept well and they're safe and they're up and running right cool ethan allen if you guys were uh stuck in an elevator

you know who who are you explaining uh distributed letter tech to and and this whole uh web of notes yeah definitely i agree with nick um or sorry allen didn't mean to start um i agree with what nick said you know he's he's definitely right in that i think that uh what i would say is that you know these nodes uh are really high performance and with me specifically i focus on like latency and um like the scalability factor like the purely technical stuff is super impressive so you know any project leader or somebody in that elevator that that kind of knows what i'm talking about um i'd say i usually say high performance node provider that works across a ton of protocols right now i think we're up to about 14 protocols um that allows you to really scale your

project and like nick said not really have to worry about no management yourself so that would be kind of what i focus on who actually you know develops technology at the same time who would actually understand the financial uh money it would actually take you on it so i think like talking number would be the best thing to do because like literally running it out on your own would actually take like more than like 86 000 any year to like maintain it at the same time it could cause like extra 5000 for the cloud services each month then it could take like more than five thousand to get a set of people to work on it so like talking numbers and maybe like maybe like making sure like uh

they'll understand like uh why they should be like doing it with us and like how they can like do it better at the same time like they can have like better service that would be like one of the you know main point to really consider you know while elevating it cool yeah yeah we've heard the likes of elon musk and you know zuckerberg and it's cool like you guys are you know really tapped into the technology space and the data architecture of of how these blockchains are constructed um and really any cto you know that that's a valuable conversation to have and it would probably make their elevator a much more productive one so thank you for uh for coming on the podcast it was an absolute pleasure and uh yeah it you know our our audience can find you on

twitter uh yeah i would say all three right i mean we've got uh you know chainstack.com website we've got the twitter we've got the discord we've got the telegram channel uh each of the developer advocates ethan and alan are involved with the community uh you know you heard about ethan tabasco alan your handle if you want to share that out there uh yeah uh my handle and twitter would be like alan jones aj itself like i already shared it and like you guys can hit me up over there and you can find me like we are me and ethan like all of us are like very active in discord like so like putting a message over there like we'll just reply back in like within like you know half an hour or within an hour uh while you're awake

awesome guys absolutely thanks robbie keep it up no problem it's great to beer thanks for having us