Iris Radoi - Decentralisation, Infura and the Future

Transcript

cool thank you all right can everyone hear me okay cool if I need to speak louder let me know so I think this is probably going to be the most lightweight Talk of the evening so we're gonna start nice and slow we started very on time in a crypto fashion so welcome the expectations have been met all right so good evening ladies and gentlemen uh it is a pleasure to be here with you tonight at the ethereum London Meetup uh as has already been mentioned my name is Iris I'm a project manager and a web developer at consensus more specifically within if you're a team uh I do have to say although I'm trying really hard right now not to make it obvious but I'm very nervous this is my first time doing a big talk so you know

have some sympathy um all right so with that being said today we'll touch a bit on decentralization from a high level perspective we'll talk about infuria what is it that we do and also what our future plans are as for both ourselves and yourself um but first in uh manager fashion I do like to start all my meetings with a dad joke and I want to keep the tradition Alive Tonight with you so did you hear about the vampire who got into crypto yeah he got killed when he tried staking all right cool so um now getting to the serious part most of you here understand

the power and the promise of decentralization and uh Distributing control and decision making from a central entity to a distributed Network um it's literally the mission that first got me interested into web free and I'm pretty sure it's the same for a lot of you here tonight but what does it really mean right we hear decentralize this decentralize that it's a term that gets thrown around so much in the crypto world but it has so many layers to it and I believe vitalik captures this really well in the code that I have behind me on the screen so there is political decentralization with which means that no one controls the blockchain there is also architectural decentralization which means that your infrastructure has no

central point of failure but there will always there will always be um logical centralization which basically means that uh there is one commonly agreed upon States and a system that behaves like a single computer now this inclusion holds a lot of promises and as we move into this shared ownership space of the future and these promises are very powerful and very personal for a lot of us especially at the inferior team before I move further talking about web free I do actually want to talk about web 2 right this is something that's still very relevant nowadays and we do use a lot of the services that are very centralized still

for all the Innovation and the linear progress that big tag has inspired it has also failed to lead us into the better world that it has promised right it's centralized our resources and it's completely destroyed our privacy we know from Big tag that's not one system can guarantee 100 uptime and significant outages occur because of centralizing forces and systems rights uh people end up getting locked out of their online banking communication platform Goes Down And as we rely more and more on these services and these applications realistically we are going to be more affected by these outages right it's it's a really scary thing to

talk about but it's something that is going to happen um right so with this being said uh let's talk about web free apart from reliability in web free we are trying to build a better world a world with more self-soverignity with transparency and with more reliability and this would help you not place all your bets into big Tech or one single entity but rather moving towards something more decentralized is this possible some may say no I argue yes because the decentralized future gives us one of the best reasons to believe in it uh permissionless and a trustless ecosystem that gives the power

back into the hands of the creators all right uh by the way I feel like I'm having a sauna right now I'm just letting everyone know right cool so that's not to say you know I've just been talking kind of about the centralization but that's not to say that centralization hasn't been a powerful and an organizing or even and galvanizing force in our young history of web free thus far so popular and effective points of centralization in the current state of the blockchain in the crypto world uh includes a popular Fiat on-ramps and centralized exchanges we've got often data trolls like etherscan we've also got roll up sequencers and bridges all of which

basically have open access to blockchain into web free for a whole new generation of participants every developer in this room I'm pretty sure you know the octo cat there which is github's mascot GitHub is a central code repository owned by Microsoft one of the largest centralized computer tech companies in the world and of course to call out the elephant in the room we have RPC providers which are also centralized and this is infuria which it's a great segue into actually talking about the most awesome company in the world for Me Maybe for you uh we'll see um so how many developers do we have in

the room can I just get show offense all right sweet I know you guys didn't came here for a workout but how many of the developers raised their hands have actually heard and used if you rock and I get a raise of hands again sweet so many of you know if you are and what it stands for it's a gateway to ethereum infrastructure right it's one that makes it possible for thousands of brilliant developers like yourselves to build the future we envision infuri is built by a passionate very very Global team who care about growing the ecosystem and making the world just a little bit better than we left it so

from the very beginning we believe that only through the widespread adoption of ethereum we can fully realize its potential and one step closer to bringing us to that goal is for us to do what we do best and that's providing infrastructure as a service so together we strive to deliver the best tooling and the best infrastructure for developers to help them build trustless solutions to solve real world problems so I'm sure I have a lot of people in the audience who are probably a bit more technical than me but I do I've dipped my toes in the Deep Waters of the beautiful world of running notes and I

think we all know that running them is very resource extensive the same as running a server and um especially archival nodes are that hold like so much information it's just so extensive running your own notes to connect to the ethereum exactly the same story right for example running a full node on ethereum takes about 35 days to set up but within fira you can connect get the connection instantly now you can think of infuri as your gateway to um blockchain and it plays basically a very vital role in ensuring that the crucial data is transferred between the interfaces so you can kind of think of inferior as a really really efficient Matchmaker between your server and your

network we host notes for a variety of networks from the likes of ethereum polygon arbitrum ipfs you name it we probably do it developers basically can simply add one line of code to their daps and they can send transactions to ethereum uh almost instantly and we've been doing this since 2016 shout out Dev Conte if you've been there since OG days we've been powering depths through the Ico Mania the crypto kitties craze the black Thursday pretty much all major significant events that have been happening in ethereum and for the past six years since the Inception at Defcon 2 we have been so so

lucky to be part of this journey along a very big Suite of major players in this ecosystem from the likes of metamask uni swap maker polygon and many more and today infuria's dominance on the ethereum network is over 50 percent and although we started out with very humble beginnings we have unwittingly become a very centralizing force in the ecosystem with more than 400 000 registered users and we're basically processing over 10 billion transactions a day and last year we've processed about 263 ethereum transactions so this all sounds great right it sounds perfect but there is a double-edged

sword to our um our wins and that's basically the very uncomfortable outages that we've seen that have had a very big and significant impact both of our on our developers as well as the ecosystem and often you've seen this in the media I'm sure everyone checks Twitter the Bible of the media whatever you want to call it whenever there's an outage don't even bother going to our status page you're going to find it on Twitter someone's going to Tweet about it um right as a leader in the ecosystem right we've got a quite a big market share we feel the responsibility to find the solution to improve our service and to basically bridge that gap of the liability of a single point of failure that I mentioned earlier writing what

vitalik was saying now our plan is was always to work towards this and to build towards like decentralization as well as 100 uptime um and honestly now we believe that this is the right time to take that leap so uh back in 2016 infuria was really pretty much the only note provider in the in the space so uh there was not much choice and this literally led to the start of the fira's journey as a service to support the wider ecosystem especially the early Community we grow alongside with the big big names that I mentioned earlier so this is why inferior was actually free in its entirety until July 2019 and we still

hold up to this day of free tier and we will continue to do so because our goal has always been and will always be to enable developers to have easy access to a production ready and a reliable web free infrastructure now we don't live in 2016 anymore right so it's 2022 the world has changed the universe of knowledge provider is booming there's so many different options out there right now and it's expecting it's expanding so rapidly and you can feel in the ecosystem that it's just ready for decentralization achieving a hundred percent uptime requires a wide network of node providers to handle requests to the kind

of very excessive volumes that we've seen in those like Network events that I mentioned earlier the node providers need community support and they need deeper resources to power the flow the Flawless experiences we want to see so oh yeah we're shout out to poked we're also excited to see uh their Network going down the road of decentralization as well uh cool so Open Standards open architecture this has always been in our DNA and since like day dot now we're approaching the ability to fully achieve this and to fully come basically back circle on our initial Vision by offering a decentralized option

so a decentralized network could help prevent things like the two outages I mentioned earlier that I'm sure everyone saw in the media uh it's going to offer us better shared uptime we're going to have wider access to new networks and we're going to be able to get insightful report insightful reports on on better measurement of decentralization so it could also mean zero downtime which sounds really good doesn't it so in doing so we would basically underscore our vision to uh for a truly multi-chained future and it would allow developers and us to interoperate with the multiple of providers not

necessarily all of which we would have to support ourselves so in a collaborative Network like this the community can update the software the feedback loop is continuous and it's just going to improve transparency and it's going to equalize the Mind share in the space which sounds pretty damn awesome right so with this collaboration I believe we're going to get one step closer to building better software building a better experience and ultimately building a better world ah I love this one cool so last month if you watch Eve Berlin we've made the super cool announcement I don't want to steal the spotlight from EG he gave a really really awesome talk so I would

highly suggest you guys give it a watch because it's so amazing and it's much more technical than what I'm about to tell you so if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of these things give it a watch Mega shout out to EG I hope he's gonna watch this later wink wink sorry um cool basically in a nutshell uh the decentralized network will be a complementary offering to our current API services and this is really really awesome and really exciting and it's just the start of something really amazing so basically the end game that we envision is very easy right we want the resilient we want the decentralized ecosystem capable of 100 uptime the more we share the Bounty of web freeze growth the more we as a community

grow both individually and collectively so at infuro we're accepting nothing less than what we set out for and that is for us to be a model of web2 to web free Evolution not only for ourselves but for many other technology operations uh organizations in the years to come right so where are we in the process of this announcement that we've made so right now we're in the design and the research phase so that means we're very uh meticulously considering everything from Network roles operations benefits go to market initiatives and much more so with this whole decentralization of our services we're taking a phased

approach so what this means is it's going to begin as a Federated network of note providers and over time we're going to go towards that full decentralizations that we're aiming to get now there are two immediate outcomes that are really good and that I I really really would like to highlight today so we're going to encourage a cocktail approach by default so that means is when you're going to send requests through our apis uh this is going to go to multiple providers not just us and also it's going to offer us much more greater reliability with the end goal in mind of getting to that 100 off time that I keep boasting on about um cool so with that being said we've had an initial Target when we first set

out to announce this of getting six infrastructure providers and we received nearly 300 subscriptions which is amazing because that means the community is really excited about this now that doesn't mean that the list is closed so if you're interested in joining An Early Access program you need obviously some interest in decentralizing um blockchain API access and you need a genuine willingness to actively participate and to provide feedback as well as ideally having some experience in running blockchain infrastructure so if these things stick your box and it's something that you'd like to learn more about if you scan that QR code right there that should take us to our website

where we have a form and then you can just get in touch with us and we can talk more about this this has been me thank you so much for your time I really appreciate it and if you have any questions anyone has any questions we have about five minutes for um some questions so over to you guys if not I'm coming to the pub later as well so I might be just saying and you want any questions I blown them away that's it thank you very much thank you guys thank you