Evolution of Ethereum Infrastructure - Sahil Sen | QuickNode

all right so we will be talking about uh as the title says evolution of the ethereum infrastructure and just a small disclaimer that uh this will be a uh pretty bit dumbed down version of uh how the space has evolved or how the etherum ecosystem has evolved so a lot of you probably must already know whatever you will see on this but let's uh try to enjoy it or let's try to see it from a different perspective a different point of view so before starting the presentation let me introduce myself so Shia Belgrade I'm s sen and I work as a senior developer Advocate at quick node which is a uh developer platform tooling provider infrastructure provider whatever you want to call it uh we provide a lot of tools and apis to make development in web3 on different different chains easier from core API which is RPC and rest apis for interaction to blockchain networks then streams which is ETL project uh ETL tooling for blockchains then storages which is ipfs ETC so if you want to connect with me I'm s andile on Twitter and now let's start so ethereum from the beginning in the beginning it started as a platform to provide developers or to provide basically anyone to deploy appc applications on blockchain or decentralized applications on blockchains um completely different from Bitcoin which was just me meant for financial applications ethereum envisioned it to become a platform for decentralized applications right so in the early days it was just about nodes everyone who wanted to interact with the network it was just via full nodes so people who wanted to interact with the network let's say wanted to deploy contracts wanted to interact with those contracts are wanted to get the blockchain data they would have to run their own nodes and then to run their own nodes they would have to sync the entire blockchain data on the nodes and then once that's done then and then they would be able to interact with that node so let's take this with the help of or let's understand this with the help of an analogy so let's uh consider ethereum as this new and emerging small town where things are done somewhat different and people are liking it people are starting to move and uh once People starts liking it it starts getting crowded right A lot of people starts getting into the crowd a lot of people starts living into the crowd and uh it started it starts getting crowded and once uh Town starts getting crowded once the population increases it kind of becomes overwhelming on the town right it kind of puts burden on the services of the town and that's what happened with the ethereum network as well since it started gaining more popularity it started uh getting used a lot more a lot of projects were getting deployed a lot of projects were getting built on top of ethereum so that resulted into high transaction volume and because of the high transaction volume the block space become kind of expensive because everyone wanted to land their transactions in that particular block or within that block so because of that the GH fees started increasing and because of the GH started increasing the network kind of became very difficult to use and had and started having scalability issues just like how uh Town gets overwhelmed when a lot of people starts moving into it just like any other big city so and the transaction speeds also started getting uh slower because someone can just increase the gas place their transaction in front of you and your transaction will take more time compared to their transaction because since they have more gas fee sent with their transaction their will get accepted quicker than yours and on top of that another big issue or not issue but another big thing was happening which was expanding block data because the transactions were increasing a lot of people were using it the blog data started increasing and the entire chains data started increasing so at this point it was um not feasible for for people who were earlier running their own nodes to interact with the blockchain network to do read and write operations at this point it was not feasible for them I mean it was still doable it's it's doable right now as well but people don't do that right because it's not feasible they just focus on their applications and offload the infrastructure part or offload the tooling part to others so at this point a lot of node providers like quick node Alchemy infura started coming in and uh people started using these to interact with the blockchain networks and uh we were still having the scalability issues so to solve that there were some scalability solutions and these Solutions you can assume as or you can think of them as these satellite towns which every big city has right these satellite towns getting developed near the ethereum city so what these towns does is the they help in offloading some burden from the main city to these satellite cities now some solutions like side chains they adhare or they copy the model of how the ethereum City Works but they do not have to do anything with the ethereum city they just copy the model and then form their own City but uh uh but Solutions like rollups what they do is they yes first copy the model model of the main ethereum city then does some changes to make their City better and then they also send just like how just like how a country works right each and every state and each and every city still has their own operations still has their own government but they work on terms of the federal government or the national government so that's how rups works or rups used to do they uh they have their own government they have their own working but they still has something to do with the main ethereum Network they still send their data or roll up their data to the main ethereum network but there's some issue with this as well I mean we are seeing uh even these uh rollup Solutions like uh optimism arbitrum 1 and uh zing zing is still not that much overwhelmed now but obit arbitrum and optimistic even these chains have started to get uh overwhelmed started to get more expensive if the number of transactions are so high for example for a use case like gaming where there are so many transactions and uh if people were to use the optimism main net or arbitr main net for their use cases for let's say gaming or even fintech where High tra uh high frequency trading even These Chains can get expensive because at the end of the day they would have to roll up their data in batch to the main ethereum Network so even that gets expensive and then the another issue is since these towns or these uh um satellite towns have their own thing going on and they just talk with the main eum city they don't talk with each other so there's an interoperability issue as well so if something is going on on optimism main net arbitrum main net or arbitrum one main net would not know about that so there's an ongoing interoperability issue as well so at this point the demand of uh node operators or node as a service started to increase even more even further because the because of the number of chains and because of your requirement or necessity to get the main ethereum chains data as well as these side chains and rollups say data as well and uh not just node providers but even indexers starting started to see um a lot of uh traction during this time indexes in terms of calent um graph protocol I mean graph protocol is not exactly an indor indexer but it is kind of an indexer where you have indexed data and you can access that index data using graphql so all of these started gaining a lot of traction during this point but as I mentioned earlier even this started to get saturated even this started to get um overwhel as the as the use cases of blockchain Technology started to come more into mainstream where the frequency of transactions was very much high so we will talk about the solution for that but before that what happened in the timeline is um ethereum merge happened so these rollup Solutions and these uh side Chain Solutions were and even plasmas were uh looked at a temporary and makeshift Solutions until the main ethereum chain scales but uh the thing is even after merge like uh and that was not intended from the eum foundation as well that the main chain cannot scale that much to occupy or to cater to the uh mainstream Solutions like gaming and high frequency trading Etc these are just examples but I'm saying that uh the main main change cannot scale that much where it can handle all the traffic so that's why we have uh modular blockchains right now we will talk about them later but what happened in merge is that uh we we are going in the timeline like how we came to where we are today from the earlier days so in merge we went from the older or the original consensus mechanism which was proof of work to proof of stake where the miners had to leave and validators had to come and because of the merge the energy consumption of the entire ethereum blockchain as a network went down and then a lot of people started to get more opportunities it opened up it opened up gates for more possibilities of participation as anyone could stake their e and become a validator and like compared to earlier where you needed very much highend Hardware Etc so we talked about issues or saturation of the layer twos right how even that started to get overwhelmed so then the solution I mean this is not an official term but people like to call them layer threes which is one more layer on top of the second layer of the ethereum network or ecosystem is I guess the better word so now you might wonder that why does this ethereum or this um ethereum ecosystem has more layers than uh 10 years birthday cake so the thing is that each layer serves its own purpose so layer three is not like Layer Two where it's a completely different layer on top of the main chain where just uh the proof of the ethereum chain or the state of the ethereum chain is stored on the main chain or or the badge transactions are stored on the main chain but layer 3 serves different per purposes some layer 3es can be just a interoperability layer where it can be used to access data from other layer tws and some layer 3s can be a actual layer on top of a layer two where it uses for example s uh Z Network which was just launched last uh if I'm not wrong within last weeks or last few weeks it XI X sh Network it is a layer three built on top of the arbitrum arbitrum network so it uses the arbitrum optimistic layer technology and create and and it they have created a specialized chain but just for gaming so that it can serve high frequency gaming transactions they have made transactions cheaper and how they do is that they use the they use the arbitrum rollup technology from optimistic role of technology to make the execution faster and then another thing is that they have used is data uh data availability layer where arbitrum has this nust layer using which they anyone can form a data uh availability committee for example you delegate two to three or I'm just giving example but data committee can be uh delegation of data availability to some providers where you what you can do is you can have these delegated person and whenever that data needs to be fetched for let's say that you want to fetch data about a particular transaction which happened a month ago or 10,000 blocks ago so what you can do is instead of uh querying the actual blockchain you can query these data availability providers and get the data back so this makes the trans uh this makes the operations cheaper and faster because you don't need to store the actual data on the blockchain where in layer twos it was stored on layer tws just the proof of uh just the batching of those transactions was stored on layer one but in in this kind of Layer Two what you can do is you can store the data off chain and just store the proof of that data or verification of that data on the main chain so that's what layer 3 does they further make the chains more scalable and more efficient and serves a specific use case it can be interoperability it can be a specific use case like gaming Etc so with layer 3 the term modularity or modular blockchain became more prominent more uh popular because we started separating these uh different operations of blockchain and started doing them on different layers for example execution on different layer consensus on different layer settlement on different layer and data probility on different layer execution is again your uh transaction execution consensus in terms of L2 and L1 is cons your consensus layer will be ethereum and your execution layer will be your layer two and then data availability as I talked earlier can be a committee or can be a provider like end da aail Celestia Etc so a lot of uh a lot of people would have also seen SE uh another layer in the modular blockchain stack or in the modular ethereum blockchain stack which is called settlement so in that case what happens is execution happens on one layer then settlement happens on another layer so settlements layer can be your fraud proof or fraud verification layer where your transactions happen on one layer but the transactions are proved or verified on another layer and then in consensus layer the data of those transactions can be stored so that it's more secure just like how data is stored or rolled up on the ethereum chain and just the proofs of everything happening on chain or stored on these layer and the actual data for example what was the transaction about which uh contracted interacted with what were the opt codes what were the uh what were the parameters which was the transaction sent with all of that is stored on the data availability layer so it's it becomes even further cheaper and even more optimized and efficient and uh with modularity and with the layer 3es a lot of new chain creation Frameworks started coming in where people can just use any of these sdks or chain creation Frameworks or they are even called rollup as a service if you want to create a chain with a particular rollup so they started getting more popularity where you could just use these Frameworks or sdks to create your own chain they are just like how you can use hard hat or you can use you can use create react app to create your react app right you do not have to get each and every Library yourself you do not have to worry about okay what library I should use for serers side interaction or what library I should use for CSS Etc everything is there within that bundle and you can just uh use that and start getting started and start with your new chain or launch your new chain very quickly so some of the examples for these are op stack arbitrum mobit ZK stack polygon cdk with OP stack and arbitrum mbits you can launch your own optimistic rollup chains pretty quickly they have a framework or a bunch of tools like a toolkit and you can use them to launch your own chain as for example Z chain they just launched their are uh layer three chain based on arbitrum using arbitrum op Obits and then ZK stack and polygon cdk helps you launch your own ZK evm based chains pretty quickly so because of this a lot of new type of infrastructure providers started coming into the space like coinu gelato Network gelato was have already been there but they have moved their operations to roll up as a service provider so uh because of this advancements new rollup as a service provider started coming into the space where uh even quick note does that so where a infrastructure provider provides infrastructure or nodes for that particular small Network and they even run sequences for them even provide uh block explorers for them Etc so that's where we are today where a lot of new chains are being launched and can be launched using these chain Frameworks or rollup as a service Frameworks and in the future I think this is going to be even further easier where even a non-native web3 user or even a non- technical person can just go into a user interface click few buttons and launch their own chain that's even possible today to some extent with arbitrum orbits that you can just enter your name you can just enter how many nodes you want you can just enter what kind of uh uh data avability layer you want and then deploy your own chain they'll give you a Docker container and then you just have to deploy that Docker container it's that simple so this is uh this is going to get even more simpler in the coming time so yeah that's uh that's my time I guess so we saw that how we came from just being nodes where people used to access data from a single ethereum blockchain to these modular blockchains where there are so many layers for each type of functionality and it's become even more easier to launch your own blockchain earlier it was difficult to get data from a particular chain but now it's so easy to even launch a blockchain so yeah that's my time thank you everyone [Applause]