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Remote procedure call (RPC) caught the attention of investors recently, driven by an issue on the Solana network with transactions down. As reported by crypto Briefing, one of the reasons behind this issue is that RPC nodes become overloaded with transactions.
Lava Network Modular Infrastructure lead contributor Yair Cleper shared his thoughts with crypto Briefing on the importance of RPC integrity and interoperability.
crypto Briefing: What are RPCs and why are they important for a blockchain to thrive?
Yair Cleper – In general, I can start by asking you what languages you speak. RPC is like the language of blockchains. The way it works is that everyone who uses the blockchain must make RPC requests every time they interact with the blockchain.
So, for example, if you buy an nft, if you interact with a contract: you're exchanging a token, you're opening your MetaMask, and then MetaMask is querying the blockchain. This is RPC. It is called a remote procedure call and this language is used to interact with the blockchain; There are usually different RPC and API requests for each blockchain. There are tens of hundreds of APIs.
At the end of the day, each blockchain has a specific way of communicating with end users or the user has to communicate with the blockchain themselves. The way end users consume this data is that they need to use RPC. But to do that, they can run a node. They can use a decentralized provider, Alchemy or Infura, or they can use a public RPC offered by the chains themselves. This is basically what RPC is.
When you rely on a single provider to provide you with RPC, there is suddenly an overhead. There is a congestion. And suddenly, there is a recession. And as a middleman, it's a very, very difficult job.
At Lava, we realized early on that there are a lot of problems, but that's what we want to address. The most neglected gap, I would say, is this space with the communication protocol, access and values of Web3.
crypto Briefing: Interoperability between chains is a topic discussed since the last bull run, and it recently came back to the fore with the deployment of different blockchains. Can you describe some problems that the new chains have regarding RPC?
Yair Cleper – That is the point that led us to develop Lava. And I'll break it down into two main problems. The first problem is for the chains themselves, for all applications, the blockchain. And the second problem is for users and dApps.
When I jumped to Web3, it was three years ago. And a year later, the bear market began and everyone was telling me that there would be a consolidation of all these chains into one, two or five at most. But the reality is that it happened the other way around, right? We see an explosion of different blockchain buildups and there are different doctrines in the field.
You have the monolithic, like Solana and ethereum, you have the roll-up focused and you have the modular. We can see at the end of the day that there is not just one, not 10, not 100, but there will be thousands of different chains that will probably only be revealed this year. This is the trend, right?
New chains are launching and need a quick way to launch and also have a scalable and reliable infrastructure. So the first thing they do is outsource that to the community RPC node brokers. If they want to invite developers to come and build, they need to have scalable RPCs and node brokers.
However, there is no good way to ensure high service quality and optimized trending is met because those community node brokers are not professional node brokers. So it's a kind of favor for the ecosystem.
Those new projects then go to the centralized providers, which I mentioned before, but the centralized providers cannot scale and adapt quickly with the speed of the current ecosystem. Still, chains should go ahead and use these RPC nodes in this way. In the end, what they do is simply run the RPC node, which is a waste of time and resources.
They don't need these DevOps to run that infrastructure. And instead of focusing on the core product, they focus on DevOps and insights. In a nutshell, these are the different problems for both blockchain and rollups.
The second problem is for users. If you think about today and you find user-centric providers, they have a single point of failure. So when they have access and Infura is down, they can't access MetaMask. They cannot return information and data to users.
Imagine that you are in a supermarket and you want to charge your credit card. And the cashier says, “Sorry, for the next four hours you won't be able to cash out.” It is not scalable. We believe this is one of the reasons why you don't see great apps today, because the infrastructure is not resilient, is not scalable, and does not create the security for dApps (decentralized applications) to be created.
What we see at the end of the day is that dApps start implementing load balancers, backups, disaster recovery and all those things that they don't need to do either. So they are wasting a lot of resources and generally there are small teams that don't have them.
There are actually three problems, the third is censorship. For example, the Venezuelan government asks Infura to stop using MetaMask. He sees problems such as Web2 selling data again, collecting the data from dApps and selling it to other third parties.
And privacy, you have no privacy when you use them. Those are the main problems, both for blockchains and for end users.
crypto Briefing: How does Lava help address this lack of scalability in the RPC problem?
Yair Cleper – Definitely. If you want to scale, you need different layers and different options for developers to build on. I think what we'll see in the next few years is like the vision of community, where each chain is unique in a special way, so there won't be just one community.
Modularity really drove that vision, you have different layers that help you serve. It has the execution layer, the settlement layer, the consensus, and the data availability. And what we think is missing is the access layer for each blockchain rollup. And this is exactly what we think Lava is.
We design a data access layer, a network, that anyone building a blockchain or rollup can connect to and enable the best data access infrastructure. We are talking about low latency, developing a peer-to-peer communication protocol, SDK (software development kit), directly from the browser you get access to the main providers.
Other features are dual caching and constant availability, which doesn't matter, even if the Lava network is down, the dApps still have service. We also talk about profitability, because the suppliers themselves are paid not for their reputation, but for the quality of the service.
If there is a provider that is simply activating nodes in rural areas of East Africa, because there was an nft drop and they performed very well, they need to get paid and they need to get paid according to demand. So if he is the only provider, he will obviously get a lot of money. The last thing that sets Lava apart is decentralization.
So, Lava is a decentralized network of high-profile nodes that need to stake Lava to be accountable and receive rewards based on their performance.
crypto Briefing: Lava is running an incentive program with Magma points. A question that arises is: “wen token?”
Yair Cleper – Everyone asks. I know that the Foundation will abandon the audit and come with Mainnet in the coming weeks. Hopefully, we will see an announcement regarding the listing of the token at that time as well.
crypto Briefing: What role does Lava play in fueling blockchain growth?
Yair Cleper – You know, I think if you want to understand that, we like a couple of analogies that help you understand it. I think Lava is building the door for all blockchains. And it's very unique because no matter what person has to go through the door, the door is flexible depending on the person. So that's an analogy.
Another analogy is to think about amazon. Lava is the permissionless amazon for any Web3 service. Imagine that amazon offers consumers to buy from all merchants, any type of item.
In the same way, Lava allows data consumers, dApp users, to purchase and access any type of data through providers, which is kind of like the merchants there. And because Lava is permissionless and open source, each ecosystem can spin up the pools, put incentives there, and invite providers to serve.
It's the same when amazon wants to go to a new country it has never been to before. Imagine that amazon calls all suppliers, from furniture to cars to pens, no matter what items. And they say, “Now we have a pool of a few million dollars.” Everyone who joins first and provides good quality service will get the incentive.
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