Paul:
Hello, and welcome to PodRocket. Today, we have two exciting and great guests with us from QuickNode. So we have Anthony Campolo and is that how we say your last name, Anthony?

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah. Yeah. I say it's Camp like camping in Olo like water polo. Campolo.

Paul:
Campolo. Great, thank you. So we got Anthony Campolo and Noah Hein. They're both from QuickNode and we're going to be talking about some of the infrastructure that helps run the Web3 ecosystem that's being built today, some of the challenges that companies face and how QuickNode can help you as a beginning developer or having a big piece of infrastructure, bring it to the fruition that it can be. So, Anthony, we had Noah on a little earlier as like one, two or three months ago, and we were talking about QuickNode and accessing blockchain data. Noah, you are a Developer Advocate and Relations. Is that the correct title for your role?

Noah Hein:
Yeah, the Developer Advocate.

Paul:
Developer Advocate. Great.

Anthony Campolo:
He's basically running DevRel is how I put it.

Paul:
Awesome. Okay. Before we hop into it, what does that mean? Running DevRel? What is DevRel?

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah, so DevRel would be the different parts of working with the developer community in terms of how they interface with their tools, and that can involve speaking with people who are using it, creating content for them and that whole kind of feedback cycle. And so I'm actually fairly new to QuickNode. This is only my second week so far and so Noah is one of the people who's part of this kind of DevRel team that we have now at QuickNode, which is really great, because I think DevRel is a lot for one individual to do so it really takes a couple people to do it well.

Paul:
So you guys are tagged teaming this whole effort to really get people indoctrinated into the space and understand what QuickNode does and make it accessible?

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah. I don't know if I'd use the term indoctrination, but that's kind of what is a little bit, yeah. And Noah, who else would you kind of put in this bucket of DevRel at the company?

Noah Hein:
Yeah, so right now we have Sahil, who is also at the company. He's also a Developer Advocate and for anyone listening, we are hiring for more. If you are so interested in doing developer advocacy for Web3 companies, please hit me up in the DMs.

Paul:
Yeah. You might be right, indoctrination is not the best word, but it's a really confusing field and yeah, it's hard to find people. It's hard to find people that can really understand the needs of businesses and how QuickNode can help. So jumping right into that, how can QuickNode help, right? Let's talk about one of the number one things that either Anthony or Noah, you guys will step into and somebody says, "well, what does QuickNode do?" What's like the 30 seconds of that? And we can boil it down from there.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah. It's infrastructure for blockchains. So there's a couple terms we should define here, because most people who have heard of Web3 may know of that somebody with blockchains, but they may not necessarily know what a blockchain actually is. And the easiest way I've found to describe it is that it's like a shared database that a bunch of different people have on their computer at the same time that are all kind of synced together and agreeing on the current state of the world and so that have a lot of different use cases. The main one that was first is like for transactions, so that database could have everyone's account balance and how much money they have for just this unit. The unit is whatever you kind of want to call it and then when you want to transact, send balance from one account to another, then every node in the chain has to agree on that.

Anthony Campolo:
And then you also will just kind of have it be one long linked list, that makes sure that you're always appending to it. So you can't tamper with it or change it because obviously if you could change it, then you could make yourself have a million dollars and you don't want to be able to do that. So that's why it started out as a thing for currencies and it's expanded out to now have what called smart contracts. And so smart contract is basically arbitrary code that can be executed on the blockchain. So that can be any sort of logic you could think of that you could write in a programming language like JavaScript or Python, but there's usually specific programming languages like Solidity, but there's also other ways to actually write JavaScript.

Anthony Campolo:
So the main thing is that it allows you to have a program be embedded into the blockchain and then that is what's called a dApp, a decentralized app, so the thing you really got to explain is like, why is it important to be decentralized? And so Noah, how would you kind of explain? What is the benefit of decentralization?

Noah Hein:
Yeah. The benefit of a dApp versus, I guess a regular application would really be, there's a lot of hype around the word, but permission-less is the word that I would use around decentralization. And so typically if you're thinking in terms of APIs, I think is the term and a paradigm that everyone is familiar with, like, "hey, if I go over to some arbitrary company, I get an API key and I start using this API that they gave me and I get some benefits and I don't have to write all of my code." It's nice to use libraries that do really hard things for you in just a couple lines and so a dApp could in theory, do the same thing on unlock the same kind of functionality that a traditional app would.

Noah Hein:
But at that point you don't have to have that API key. It's fully permission-less, no one can stop you from using this API. Once someone deployed up this dApp, everyone is free to use it and everyone is free to incorporate it into their application, whatever their application might be and whatever original use case maybe the author had for it. Once it's out there, it's just kind of out there similar to open source software, it's infinitely forcable, anyone can do whatever they want with it. And that's, I think the main benefit to a decentralized application versus a traditional one.

Paul:
It really rests on the shoulder of the main use case and product of the blockchain is a decentralized database like you were saying, Anthony. I feel like if we take the general idea of what do you use a database for? Okay, what kind of interesting human interactions can we foster, whether it be a dApp, whether it be a coin, whether it be anything, what type of human phenotype of this new piece of the infrastructure of permission-less, that you said, Noah, there's a lot of cool stuff coming out. Even beyond dApps there's network, I guess they are dApps, but networks for sharing computing and stuff that aren't necessarily a platform that you would build off of.

Paul:
We could talk for hours about what's going on in the blockchain space and what a dApp is and how they're fitting into business models and stuff. But I'd love to take a second and wrap this up into a really neat package. So we're talking about permission-less, distributed blockchains and QuickNode is a infrastructure provider that can help people access those tools and start building things today. So how does QuickNode fit in there? How does QuickNode help me as developer trying to build a dApp tomorrow?

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah, so we should define what an RPC provider is, because that's essentially what QuickNode is. So when you have these blockchains that are out there, they have an API that you can use to access it. And it's just like method names, like eth, geth or what are some really common method names? Know like eth_call, or like eth_estimateGas.

Noah Hein:
eth_call is the big one and then there's like various implementations, really, if you're thinking about a decentralized database, obviously that's not too useful without any methods to access and manipulate that data in some form or manner. And so pretty much every single chain has as these clients that expose a number of methods that are useful for interacting with the blockchain. And that's what I would consider an RPC provider to be is someone that exposes this API to you without having to run the client on your own computer.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah, that's another thing is that if you think about, because a blockchain is a bunch of computers, all connected to each other, it's like running a server essentially. So it's a big DevOps task really to do, so most developers, you have this whole wave of really nice dev tooling companies, like all these different ways to deploy things, all these tools to deploy stuff. So if we want to really get developers from Web2 who are comfortable with that kind of tooling into Web3, we need to give them similar tooling in terms of really like auto scaling and making sure that you have a nice interface and you have a dashboard and you have all this stuff that is going to allow you to interface with that blockchain in a way beyond just like making a CORS request.

Anthony Campolo:
That's a good way to start, but there's lots of different libraries that you can use to interact and Noah's done a really good job of documenting all the different ways you can kind of interact. So you can see how to do it with a CORS request, how to do it with Ether, JS or Web3, there's a Ruby one as well. So that's also we provide, not just the infrastructure, but also the education and the guides and the knowledge you need to actually interact with these applications.

Paul:
Right, because as a developer, if I want to build something that makes a call request or debug, trace transaction to get information or whatever, I need somebody running a hunk and big piece of hardware, that's ready to accept my request. And I know from my own experience, there's some calls you can make that man, it's megabytes or more of data that you get just from one call. This is nothing light. I've tried personally to run one, it took me, let's see, I used a 16 gigabyte gaming laptop and it was using all of the power. It was ridiculous for a Testnet. So QuickNode doesn't make me do that. QuickNode lets me go run something with you guys and so you're mentioning libraries and stuff. So there's a lot of easy SDKs, I'm thinking like Firebase, right? Where I can like download a package, interact with this backend as a service right away in the language that I'm familiar with. What are some of the most popular ones? I'm guessing JavaScript obviously, because everybody, that's like the Bible language.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah. I've been learning ethers.js, That's one that is really common. You'll see in a lot of tutorials and Noah has used quite a few of them by this point.

Noah Hein:
Yeah. I would say JavaScript is probably the main one and I think that's a testament to just how web development and software development has been as a whole. You mentioned solutions like Firebase and the Web2 world, I think is very indicative of how software has been iterating, is it's just been very much focused on making someone who is coding like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS providing this front end experience for users and trying to give them all of the data that they need in the easiest way possible.

Noah Hein:
I would say it's a fairly accurate summation of the last 10 years or so of web development. It's like, how can we make it super easy to get the dynamic data that we want into like a react application? And so I'd say JavaScript has been the main driver for most of these libraries, ethers.js Being probably the most prominent one currently, there's also Web3 JS and there are a number of other solutions. I think most blockchains offer both Java and Go lang, SDKs and Rust is also kind of on the come up. But I would say if you're just getting into things that JavaScript is probably the way to go and is where you'll find the most documentation for as well.

Paul:
And one of the cool things about crypto here, like mentioning the libraries, the SDKs that we're working with is if they're not like specific to QuickNode, unless you guys have something that I don't know about, but the general idea, please, correct me if I'm wrong, is that you guys are running infrastructure, right? I could go ping in Ethereum node, just randomly on Mainnet. And I could expect to take all that code that I'm writing in my prototype or disinvestigative research and I can bring it over in port in... Direct it right at anything that QuickNode, I would have host for my Ethereum node and it would just work because it's all the same protocol. It's the same blockchain. Is there any higher level libraries on top of that? Or do you see most of the activity happening with people just booting up these RPC nodes and kind of hitting them and powering their applications?

Noah Hein:
Yeah. So while I would say like three-ish months ago, the answer would've been, yes, we are just purely exposing the API and we are really just an infrastructure provider and you're still correct in the sense that if you write a bunch of code using any one of these libraries and you're testing it locally on your machine, and then you just change your URL to be from local host, whatever port you've put it on. And then exchange that for a QuickNode URL, everything will just work albeit a little bit faster, because we have some optimizations on our end that are going to kind of speed up a couple of specific methods that are a little bit heavier, but we are also starting to add higher level APIs. And so the NFT API is one that we launched recently, that's both on Ethereum and Solana and that's like a high level API that will just get you a lot of NFT data.

Noah Hein:
Whether it be like, Hey, I want to get all of the NFTs that a wallet owns. That seems like a really simple use case. Like, Hey, I have some random wallet address and I want to get all of the NFTs from it. And while that sounds easy, if you were technically implement that yourself, you would end up making several requests. And so we are starting to offer these higher level APIs that offer not only abstractions and makes your life a lot easier, because you're just making the one request, but there's also performance optimizations that we're making on our end as well and are continuing to make those to be, like I said, making everyone's lives easier to build the applications that they want.

Paul:
I mean, blockchain data is unruly. It's big and there's a lot going on and I'm sure when you say, "oh, we have all this stuff going." There's like layers and layers of caching and subnetting things out to faster places and edge and all those glorious optimizations that are coming into the spotlight now. Speaking of optimization, right? If I ran a company and I would switch to QuickNode, I would expect a safe money, right? Because it takes a whole team to run this stuff. Do you have any cool stories of the type of costs that can get saved if you take this piece as an infrastructure and offload it onto provider? Just to kind of put it into perspective of what it really takes to run a node and how QuickNode can step in there.

Noah Hein:
Yeah. Anthony, I'll take this one too, if you don't mind. I think, immediate use cases that you want to think about and kind of like as far as cost saving goes is if you want this data, someone needs to run the nodes and that can be you if you want. But that also means that you're going to hire a DevOps team and you are going to have a very, very high churn rate, if you just have one DevOps guy that's hosting all of your blockchain nodes for whatever your application is. It's going to be a very sad engineer and I don't imagine that they're going to last too long. And so I imagine like for most startups that are looking to like, Hey, we're scaling pretty quickly. We have a decent user base that are using our application and we want to host all of our nodes internally and we want to have full control over it.

Noah Hein:
That's probably like a four or five person team that is running all of these nodes and so DevOps engineers are expensive. And so whatever salary you want to put on, like whatever, four or five DevOps engineers is monthly, you can usually replace that, if you're using quite a lot for about $300 for, I would say like the average user, so if you're replacing your four person DevOps team for a monthly QuickNode subscription, it's a very similar value proposition to using AWS or GCP, in the Web2 world. And like, Hey, I don't want to run all of this myself. I want other people able to kind of offload that for me, in the traditional sense that people don't want to run servers, they don't want to have a server rack in their back room to keep their application running.

Paul:
Unless you have a special type. They're out there.

Noah Hein:
They are out there. But I would say that, that's the general value prop and the general dollar amount that you're going to save. It's going to be several people salaries in exchange for just a monthly bill that we're going to send you.

Anthony Campolo:
And if you're coming in from someone who is just kind of testing it out and doesn't necessarily have a ton of people, you can start on just the $10 a month plan. And that's really great, because just spinning up like a Kubernetes thing on AWS will usually cost you more than that. So it's a really good way to just get your foot in and start using it.

Paul:
A few months ago, I was running a very light Kubernetes cluster to host a web app, which totally could have been one of those cloud run things and I would've paid nothing for it, but yeah, the cluster ran me like $250 a month and I had no idea. It was just going there bake and they're very expensive. I think cloud infrastructure is underestimated very frequently, not just in the upfront cost, but you have the personnel to run it. It's multiple salaries and if you have one guy, yes, he's going to be sad, sad man. Or woman, that's a difficult job to run all that. QuickNode is consolidating this into a team of really seasoned professionals that can run this. What do you say to the people out there who argue that this is really bad for decentralization?

Paul:
I think in all industries, we see centralization of infrastructure pieces slowly conglomerate because it's just an efficiency and a cost thing. That's how we as people operate. So totally expect it to see it in the crypto space. There are a lot of interesting comments you'll find online and on Reddit though about this general movement and the way that we do nodes today. Is QuickNode a big consensus player? How does QuickNode plan to continue to support decentralization? And yeah, I'm also curious how many protocols you guys are in now, if that's even something you have a figure on.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah. I think this is a really interesting part of the conversation, because if you try and go purist on anything, I think that that's always where you're going to start running into problems when it comes to technology is because technology is always going to be about trade offs and compromises and trying to find some that actually works. So I think that there's like this blockchain trilemma they talk about where you have the trade off between decentralization and security and throughput. Is that the three of them, Noah?

Noah Hein:
Scalability, but throughput gets the idea.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah and so the thing you get by having a centralized solution is you get to kind of boost yourself into one of those areas where you may be weak. I've played around with IPFS, which is like this peer to peer, get kind of content thing and you can put a website on it and you can have it be accessed through there's like CloudFlare has a gateway and there's like a decentralized ones you .link or .limo and they are significantly slower and less reliable than just using like Fleek, which is a service that kind of does it for you. So I see it as kind of a, in one sense, it's like a stop gap for getting us there quicker, basically kind of filling in the challenges that the technology still has.

Anthony Campolo:
And then as these things grow and get better, they can become more decentralized. Then we can find other ways to kind of add value as it becomes easier to do. But I don't think it's really like an inherent contradiction because we're not the only company doing this. There's other people, you have multiple different solutions, so you're still not necessarily locked into one centralized thing in that sense, you can choose to do this if you want to get the benefits of it, but you don't have to. You can still run your own node if you really want to.

Paul:
I think one paramount thing to advertise to the people who are concerned about this centralization problem is that this is one of the only pieces of infrastructure tied to monetary gain, where anybody in anywhere in the world can join at any time with very little red tape or no red tape, right? If somebody wants to come be part of the American banking system in another part of the world, you either have to have a lot of money or the right friends. So, here you can really just get in and that's open source to me. It has the ability for anybody to enter to any time, that red tape is kind of evaporated.

Noah Hein:
Yeah. I would like to add that QuickNode is a business first and foremost and so it is entirely centralized. And so if you're thinking about trade offs, as far as decentralization goes, there is an entire possibility, QuickNode is just like other US based company and has to comply with US based laws and is vulnerable to government sanctions, et cetera. However, there's also, like you mentioned, there's no red tape involved and that anyone can access the data that we are providing. So if you're thinking about us as like a data provider and all the performance benefits on like, Hey, if you spin up a node, that's like running on your Linux machine and your closet over there, you can run it, but you're not going to be able to serve a bunch of requests like QuickNode is.

Noah Hein:
However, you can still get all of the data and so there's no vendor lock in, in that sense. And that if for some God forbid what reason, you get locked out of your QuickNode account and your app starts failing. It's like, okay, you can go somewhere else. All of that data is still there. It's not like, oh yeah, it's still there. Everyone still agrees that all of that data still belongs to your application. All of your funds are secure and you can go somewhere else and still get all of the same data elsewhere and even if that means spinning up your own team. So that's always been my biggest thing is like, yes, there are vulnerabilities as any centralized company is, but the world in general has been working on entirely centralized services for an incredibly long time.

Noah Hein:
And outside of extreme edge cases, things are going well. But even in the worst case scenario, you still have literally everything. You're just going to have a bit of downtime as you migrate to a different provider or spin up your own. And so that's been a big part of why I feel good working here. And I don't really see it as a contradiction of still spreading decentralized technology because we need to get further, faster and I think companies are naturally going to be really good at providing that experience and that launchpad for other people to innovate off of.

Paul:
Absolutely. There needs to be some powers that be bringing together the discombobulation of this space, because it's pretty discombobulated. Well, depending from where, what angle you're coming in, but it can be really daunting to get into things. So I would love to circle back real quick and talk about your NFT API, that you mentioned because when I learned about QuickNode, QuickNode was the L-1 solution. It's like, all right, if I'm building something and I need to get my data, I'll go to QuickNode, so I don't have to spin up something. Then there's these, I'd call them analytics companies, so we're talking Flipside Crypto, Dune Analytics, Rabbithole, these companies that sort of work on the data, cache it, arrange it, build tables and then either sell it directly to protocols or make it available for users. So with the NFT API, is QuickNode stepping into that realm? Is it going to start offering more products that are analytics driven?

Noah Hein:
Yeah. So I would say that NFT API, is it necessarily so much about analytics? You mentioned Dune Analytics, they're like a key customer of ours and like they are pooling a lot of data from us on any given point in time and there are huge consumers of blockchain data and any analytics company is going to be massive, have a really veracious appetite for all of the blockchain data that they can get. And so we want to make that job, that's a lot to take on and we'll continue to let them do their thing because that's like... It would take quite a lot for us to start doing something like that, where we're really seeing is, how do you make data that is really common, as far as use cases go and giving them a higher level API.

Noah Hein:
So the NFT API specifically right now, we have to some Fetch-NFTs method that you can call and so that's a very similar request to like eth_call or eth_blockNumber. It's just like Fetch-NFTs and it takes in specifically a wallet address and then it can also filter by specific contracts like, Hey, I want to check if this particular wallet owns any Bored Apes. And so then I can go through and send that request over there and our API handles the rest and kind of allows you to scale a little bit faster because it offers performance benefits because we have a caching layer and some pagination involved. And so I think Anthony would probably have some insights on, being newer to the space, how these APIs really leverage new people to the space to start building.

Paul:
And Anthony, when you answer that, could I just also ask if you could maybe mention some of the ways that these analytics or APIs that Noah is talking about empower developers? because I know QuickNode does have some features for that. If it flows into the explanation.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah, we should talk about what is in NFT also, because I feel like a lot of people are getting into this space through NFTs and it's gotten a lot of hype and it is something that if you're completely divorced from the tech industry entirely, you chance are you've probably heard of an NFT. And so NFT is a non fungible token, which is, basically the idea is that it's something that represents ownership, something individual on the blockchain. And so a lot of people use it to map to a piece of art. So you have these people who are creating these art galleries and then selling them as NFTs. And you also have things like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is you'll have a set that will be minted with different kind of characteristics. It's like a generative art kind of thing. And so it's really interesting and, but it generates a lot of data and then you have like...

Anthony Campolo:
It can be just kind of complicated and messy. So what we do is we just basically give you easy ways to get things like who is the creator of the artwork, who is the owner and then that lets you kind of cut through having to know so much of the underlying kind of blockchain architecture, because especially if you're an artist, you want to be able to understand what is actually happening with your art? What is this thing? Because there's also things like rug pulls where people will sell something and then change what the picture is and so if people aren't empowered to actually see what is on the chain itself, then you can talk about ownership all you want, but it's not really that and so I find that giving access to really easy high level APIs to just get this information out of NFTs is where the value really comes in.

Paul:
Right. And I mean, that data's also... There's an audience for it that as you mentioned might not be very inclined towards blockchain. So, how do I sort through these nodes? How do I figure out, oh, this is the owner, the sender, the result of the transaction? I don't know. This NFT API would be the perfect sort of first place to look. If you were building a more traditional app, just QuickNode, I'm just thinking about Firebase, right? They have some very, very light things like my requests, how often somebody comes to my site, does QuickNode do anything in that sort of realm or rate limits, right? I'm sure there's some basic rate limit, how much I ping my node, but anything in that realm for people going out and trying to build today, what are some features that they can look out for?

Anthony Campolo:
We got all the metrics you want, but yeah, no, you can probably talk more about the specific kind of the most high value metrics that we get.

Noah Hein:
Yeah. So, I mean, for anything, if are a user of QuickNode and you sign up, you have a node, that's kind of the first point of access that you have. You have your dashboard that has all of your different endpoints that you have registered, so whether you have like, oh, I have a Mainnet node or I have a Testnet node or I'm on Ethereum or I'm on Solana. You have that first kind of high level microcave, what actually do I have access to currently? And then you can break down for each node. We have metrics that are going to show you like, Hey, what are your most common requests? It will also pull some relevant blockchain info just on your dashboard. So for example, you can test to make sure like, Hey, is my node up to date right now? Without making a request, we're going to show you the latest block height by default.

Noah Hein:
And then we'll also show you some stuff around the client. So it's like, Hey, what version of Geth are we on? Geth is like a implementation of Ethereum using Go. It's one of those clients that we talked about earlier. So we give you some version info and just really breakdown of how are you using your node, what methods are you calling, whether are they on a web socket or HTTP, what time did you send them, what does your average latency. But then we also do have to your point like kind of security measures, we have like authentication tokens. So that's similar to like the API keys that I was talking about earlier, that's how we track your usage of the nodes. But you can also keep that secret so that if your endpoint gets exposed, it's still not the end of the world because they don't have that token. We have like JWTs, if anyone is familiar with them, JSON web tokens, they're another form of security.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah. This is where you're talking about. If you're talking about Firebase having that authentication there and that's where you really want to be able to not just have this open end point that anyone could do anything with, but have those more fine grain permissions.

Noah Hein:
Yeah. And so many things like that. We've got referral whitelisting and domain masks and obviously we try to be transparent about like, "Hey, here's all of the usage, how much is that going to cost you." And you can even access information like that before signing up for a node. Like, "Hey, I'm expecting to plug in two million requests every single month, how much does that cost me?" And we have some pages that have the ability to show you like, "Hey, here's the methods that you're going to be using, how much it would cost you to do all of those things," because I think QuickNode is first and foremost about transparency. I'm like, "Hey, this is blockchain, you could get all of this data yourself." We're upfront about that, there's nothing stopping you from booting up your own node and getting all of the data that QuickNode is providing you. You could do that for free outside of your time and tears that you will spend spinning up the node yourself.

Anthony Campolo:
Because there will be tears.

Noah Hein:
Yeah, there will be tears. And just making sure that we give you as many insights as you can onto like, "Hey, how are you actually using this? And trying to give everyone the same amount of control that they would have if they were running their own node and being able to get the insights out of that." That's really how we approach creating our dashboards. It's like if someone had access to this node themselves, what insights would they want and what would they put on their page and then creating dashboards that reflect that so that they don't have to build out all of those monitoring and analytics tools themselves.

Paul:
It's great to know about some of these and for people listening because there's... Like we said, at the beginning, there are quite a few node providers, but there's stark differences between them. And I think this is one of the ones that kind of track new developers, especially to the ecosystem system at QuickNode, it's really easy to run up cost and it's really easy to see what you're doing versus what you're not doing. And that can inform not only your billing, but your software and infrastructure design. So it's really important to tackle those problems when you have such an unruly data set at your hands and speaking of some of these features, quickly delving into competition. There are a lot of these people who would you say one of your number one competitors are? Personally I've used DataHub, right? To get an Osmosis node, which has been interesting experience. So I'm wondering if you guys know about DataHub, how are you different from DataHub or really any other arbitrary node provider out there and why should a developer come to QuickNode? Besides the great reasons we just mentioned.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah. I'm not super familiar with DataHub. I'd be curious to know if you've heard that one.

Noah Hein:
I haven't heard DataHub. I haven't.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah. The ones that I usually hear are Alchemy and Infura, but there's actually over a dozen of these, if you really go deep, but those are probably the ones that like when I was going through tutorials to learn this stuff, I would usually see those three kind of group together, you can use Infura or Alchemy or a QuickNode. And then there'd be kind of a quick little comparison between the three of them. I think the main things that we have is that were across different clouds. So we're actually multi-cloud so that I think will make us more resilient in the long run.

Anthony Campolo:
And then we also have a wide variety of different chains that we integrate with. So we're really very multi chain and just on a performance basis, I think that we do really well there, but the thing with the multi chain is that what you have to watch out for is, if someone is highly optimized for a specific chain, like just Solana, then it could be more challenging to kind of compete with that. But in terms of having a wide breadth of chains that we can interact with, we do a really good job on that I think.

Paul:
And who would you say is the number one Solana provider out there? Because Solana's like the craziest one for anybody listening, like a Bitcoin does one block every 10 minutes, you have to download Ethereum does, please correct me if I'm wrong, but one every 12 seconds or something, right? And Solana's one every 400 milliseconds on average. So that's a crazy data set. You guys have Solana, right? We could get a Solana node over a QuickNode?

Noah Hein:
Yeah. You can get a Solana node. There are a couple different Solana providers, every QuickNode is actually, I'm always hesitant to say that we're number one at anything, because obviously I'm a bit biased. But QuickNode is definitely the largest RPC provider on Solana as far as I'm aware, as far as number of users, the number of calls that are generated, I think QuickNode represents the majority of people that are not running their own nodes. And those are a really hardcore folk because if you're running a Solana node, first of all, that you're not going to be able to buy any consumer grade hardware machine that can run Solana. And I looked into it myself, I'm like, Hey, what if I wanted to run my own Solana node over on some cloud like AWS or GCP and the monthly cost for that for the bare minimum is about $600 a month to run Solana nodes.

Noah Hein:
So there's the value out of like, Hey, we're really cheap. But I would definitely say we're the largest one. And there are a couple of others in the game that are just now coming up. And so I don't want to speak to them on how they're performance is or what their value ads are, because I don't know what they are. And honestly, I haven't been too aware because it's just been very much heads down on like, Hey, this is Solana takes a lot and is a different programming model than Ethereum is. So it's been a lot of heads down and building guides and tutorials to make development on it easier. So I actually don't have the greatest idea on any competition that's there.

Paul:
But even at a minimum, the fact I find it super interesting, you guys mentioned your multi-cloud. That's huge. I think a lot of people who aren't super familiar with how enterprise deployments usually go up might not immediately see the value in this, but if you work in cloud you'll know, things go down. Actually a lot of people might be familiar recently, AWS has had issues. We all know like Slack's gone down the past six months, 2022 has been kind of a rocky time. So the fact that your multi-cloud is unique. And for me as a consumer, that gives me a lot of confidence that the data's going to be there. Maybe it'll be slower, but it's going to be there. My stuff's not going to go down. So that's really, really neat. Thank you for sharing that. We're kind of coming up on time here. So is there anything you would like to point our listeners at, if they wanted to get started with QuickNode or any blockchain resource in general for people trying to develop and get their hands wet?

Anthony Campolo:
I think you're going to find a sparse amount of good resources. I think overall compared to something just like the React World, but I'm seeing a lot more just within the last year, so it's like Nader Dabit has a lot of great stuff and you'll find actually some really useful guides on QuickNode.com. Actually I found that when I was trying to learn things, I was finding guides that Noah or other people on the team had written. And so QuickNode.com/guides and then the docs, what's the...

Noah Hein:
Yeah, it's QuickNode.com/docs will be like an API reference for any of the chains that are available over there. We'll give you the actual RPC methods that we were talking about early on, like, Hey, here's the specific example on how do you get the block number and JavaScript and Python and Ruby and Coral as for the documentation.

Paul:
Having those examples is a really awesome way to bootstrap your projects. I'm a huge fan of those. I love logging onto a backend as a service copying pasting it and then doing what you got to do, it's the fastest way to get something working. So, QuickNode.com/docs and we had Nader Dabit on a few months ago and thanks for bringing up his name again. So you could go check out our PodRocket episode on that, or he has countless awesome, awesome YouTube videos, like full stack. If you want to do the full stack, writing a dApp, you could follow his tutorial and then have your node run with QuickNode so we can link his channel as well.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah. I really liked his stuff, because it came from a very similar perspective to me because like Nader, I was someone who was doing JavaScript, React, AWS, serverless, GraphQL. We kind of came from the exact same kind of set of technologies. And so he was creating tutorials for people with that kind of background. So for me, I was able, really get up and running really quickly. So it was like, you can just separate out what is the really specific stuff here learning about things like Hardhat or some sort of library like ethers.js and then how do you interact with a Testnet?

Anthony Campolo:
And so if long as everything else around that is kind of familiar, then it's a lot easier to kind of just figure out those little pieces instead of also having to learn a whole new frontend kind of language. If you know React, React is very comfortable and I found Ethers actually integrated really well with it, just getting it to have these kind of hook kind of things, it pretty much worked just how I would expect it to. So yeah, it's like everyone's going to be coming from this from a different place, but that in particular really just clicked for me as someone coming from a quote unquote traditional web2 kind of background.

Paul:
Great. Hopefully some viewers relate to that.

Noah Hein:
I do want to say I'll keep it really short. We would be remiss on listing educational resources without shouting out Patrick Collins. He has a video over on freeCodeCamp teaching you Solidity. It's a 16 hour course that takes you kind of from zero to hero on Solidity development. So if you're looking to build your own dApp and actually deploy a smart contract and you're really looking to learn Solidity specifically, that would be my go to resource.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah. Yeah. Because solidity is its own thing entirely because that's the language you'll write your smart contracts in, so you can go really deep on just Solidity or you can kind of go more broad and also include things like Hardhat, which is how do you actually deploy your smart contract that's written in Solidity. For me, I found it easiest to first figure out how to deploy a "Hello World" smart contract and then once I got that whole kind of end to end process, then I started going deeper into like, okay, what is actually Solidity and what can you do with Solidity because then I was able to interact with the blockchain fairly easily, but then it's like, okay, well, then you get all these questions of security and vulnerabilities and like that as an entire own special specialization really.

Paul:
Well great. We'll have those resources linked below and the QuickNode docs and hopefully somebody who's listening or viewing can hop over QuickNode, get a node running and deploy something on their own infrastructure. That always feels cool when you deploy your first hello world and something's real like that. So hopefully we'll help empower some people to do so today. Well thank you so much for your time, Anthony and Noah, it was really great having you guys on, if you want to come in the future and help share some more awesome knowledge about blockchain, we'd be happy to have you, but until then we will see you guys around.

Noah Hein:
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

Anthony Campolo:
Yeah. Thanks a lot. Oh, a fan of the PodRocket.

Speaker 6:
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