Let us introduce BlockPI, officially.

Let Us Introduce BlockPI, Officially

A distributed multi-chain acceleration layer, providing high performance and reliable RPC services for Web3.

Some of you may have heard of BlockPI, some of you may not. Since the announcement of the seed round, we have made some progress over the last few months, probably nothing, BlockPI will be live momentarily. We are now introducing BlockPI and providing an update about how far we have come since the initial ideas.

Web 3.0 and Decentralization

Since the release of Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, blockchain has changed many people’s lives, from the way we talk to the way we think. Bitcoin, blockchain, smart contract, EVM and proof of stake, many of which have been taken for granted nowadays were silent revolutions back in the day. Some of us were participants and builders, even contributors. If history has taught us anything, innovations and building matter a lot. We’re now in the midst of another revolution: the web 3.0 (Web3)— the next generation of internet.

Everyone knows that it is unwise to put all eggs in one basket, especially for important data and digital assets. And that is exactly what we do in Web2. We’ve handed over our data to large internet companies and watched them extracting value from every user at the cost of privacy and valuable content. Unfortunately, this is the inherent characteristic of a centralized structure. The imbalance of power caused by the asymmetry of information was supposed to be eliminated by Web3, a promising decentralized world that gives power back to the end users. Decentralized applications allow users to take control over their own digital assets. We have been working on it, and it is huge. There are tons of decentralized applications on the market, yet many of them were built upon centralized infrastructure.

So many efforts have been devoted to building a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, in the meantime, most of us are just simply trusting information provided by centralized companies, allowing them to obtain every single request from users in all dApps. This was exactly what we were doing, in Web2, wasn’t it?

Another concern of flowing all data through a centralized cluster of RPC nodes is the vulnerability to outages. Users will lose access to their digital assets when the API service goes down. So you must pick the most reliable one to reduce the probability or just have to switch it whenever service outage occurs to your dApp user, whereas the privacy problem is still outstanding.

Unfortunately, running API servers is not a feasible option for most developers due to the laborious processes. It is a no-brainer that dApps should be built upon decentralized infrastructure, not to mention the drawbacks of a centralized infrastructure. The affordability of Web3 infrastructure, by dispelling rent-seeking intermediaries, makes the deal even better. The barrier to entry Web3 needs to be as low as possible to gear up the development.

Putting the D back in dApp

That is what we are doing. BlockPI solves the critical flaws in the Web3 stack by incentivizing a distributed network of RPC. We are engaging in an accessible and decentralized Web3 environment as a distributed multichain acceleration layer. A fully distributed network is now open to all Web3 developers, allowing them to focus on the development rather than the infrastructure. The nodes can be run by anyone in every corner of the world, instead of a single company. The distributed structure decentralizes the data and computing power, which not only protects user’s privacy, but also eliminates the single point failure that causes service outage.

Decentralization is the native feature of blockchain, it is our mission to implement it in infrastructure, putting the D back in dApps and giving the power and privacy back to users. Also, some new designs have been integrated into BlockPI, ensuring a stable, efficient and high performance API services. If a decentralized infrastructure is the foundation of dApps, BlockPI takes it to the next level by improving the efficiency, reliability and accessibility.

Why build BlockPI

There are API service giants in the market. Most of us have already used their API services, believe it or not, since they are so commonly used. However, the market is still suffering from single-point failures as mentioned before. And we heard or experienced the serious results caused by RPC service outages over the last two years since consequences were so widespread. The industry thirsts for stronger infrastructure providers.

1. Distributed Network Structure

A decentralized network architecture is designed to guarantee the fastest response and best availability for BlockPI users. The query requests are processed by distributed Gateways and routed to neighboring HyperNodes. A healthy HyperNode with low latency within the neighborhood will process those requests and return responses to the user.

The HyperNodes are open for third parties in the first phase of BlockPI testnet. The payments and incentives will be distributed by the service quality and processing volume among HyperNodes. Other than Gateways and HyperNodes, Validators and Fishermen are designed to counter malicious behaviors and punish potential faults in the BlockPI network.

2. High performance accessibility for global users

The total number of nodes is an important indicator of the capacity of the BlockPI network, but it is not the only measurement. As far as we know, there are tremendous imbalances in the network resources and the number of blockchain users. Building a lot of nodes in Europe doesn’t make it any easier for reducing latency of Asian users. To balance the load of nodes based on user requests, BlockPI has designed a node rating mechanism and a reward distribution mechanism, guiding the node operators to deploy nodes based on the request frequency of different areas.

3. Better privacy for dApps

BlockPI is committed to protecting and respecting user privacy. User requests are randomly processed through BlockPI network, so the developers can promise users a safer dApp without compromising the performance. Users can take their rights back since the asymmetry of information between users and service providers no longer exists in BlockPI network.

4. Self-hosted Gateway, lower latency

Self-hosted Gateway will be allowed to satisfy high performance requirements and privacy needs (e.g. dApps and High-Frequency Trading). Developers can deploy self-hosted Gateway in the neighborhood to ensure optimal performance and the lowest latency for their dApp. Since the first step of request processing is sealed to developers themselves, user privacy gets better protection by self-hosted Gateway within the BlockPI network.

Join us

We always say that we are a community, since we share the same vision of the Web3. As a native Web3 project, BlockPI is designed as a community-owned and community-built project. Anyone can run a node on the BlockPI network and contribute to the community. The profits will be redistributed back to people who host and deploy infrastructure, and projects are able to use a low-cost, trustworthy and high-performance decentralized infrastructure without compromise on privacy. To pay back the community and make the Web3 more accessible, BlockPI will provide communal and free infrastructure services for the start-up projects. Is there anything sweeter than free?

We are honored to have support from many investors and users. We’ll keep working on it. Welcome Web3 enthusiasts to join us and BUIDL together!

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