Decentralization is a spectrum. After years of relatively centralized critical infrastructure in the node space, the industry is making progress toward achieving a more Web3-native vision.
Lava Network rolled out its Software Development Kit (SDK) Beta on Tuesday, moving the page into a new phase of its testnet. The project serves as a marketplace for powerful, decentralized blockchain Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and APIs.
RPC nodes are essential for users interacting with blockchains, but when offered by a few centralized companies they represent a single point of failure. They can also pose issues related to privacy, censorship, and data accuracy.
Read more: Consensys invites Big Tech to a decentralized infrastructure network
Unlike most testnets, Lava’s already serves two hundred node providers, operating on the respective mainnets of their blockchain.
CEO Yair Cleper calls it ‘a kind of Uber for nodes’.
To date, Lava has seen rapid organic growth in demand for the network to replace current public RPCs that are often managed by ecosystems themselves.
“We call it an incentivized public RPC,” said Cleper, or IPRPC. “We offer our community – our node runners – the opportunity to join the IPRPC in its special chain, and the ecosystem rewards them.”
The protocol, which is backed by leading crypto-native investors such as Tribe Capital, Jump Capital, AlphaLab, Hashkey and Alliance DAO, already supports 30 active chains.
Lava Network itself is a modular layer built as a sovereign app chain using the Cosmos SDK and acts as a distribution channel for node providers. It automatically routes requests to the most optimal node available, based on the service quality score.
These scores, tallied by Lava based on latency, availability and “newness” of the data, ensure the network can deliver reliable and fast data providers to developers and users. This is all done programmatically, strictly based on market forces rather than as a result of off-chain agreements.
The Lava chain maintains service scores and payouts distributed monthly, eliminating the need to locate nodes and contract with them separately.
On a mission
Cleper and technology agency chief Gil Binder both served in the Israeli army. Cleper is based in Tel Aviv, while Binder moved to New York about five years ago. The 2021 edition of the Solana Breakpoint conference was the pair’s first foray into crypto.
They found infrastructure shortcomings across the sector.
“There is a natural evolution in the way blockchain data is consumed,” Cleper told Blockworks. “From the beginning – everyone manages their own nodes – and then to the centralized provider; they really remove the barrier to consuming, reading and writing data, but at the same time introduce new problems.”
There have been attempts to decentralize the infrastructure stack, including among the large centralized players, but Lava’s approach to the problem is new.
First, the Lava SDK is “a peer-to-peer communication protocol, directly from the browser, that only accesses the top provider without any intermediary layer,” Cleper explains, sidestepping the drawbacks of the more centralized status quo.
Second, there’s a new blockchain primitive, which Lava calls “specs.”
inspect “specifications”.
The introduction of specifications allows anyone to add support for new chains, APIs and data services to the network without permission, significantly expanding Lava’s capabilities.
“Anyone can join Lava, clear their own lava, introduce and build their own specs while supporting the new emerging chains,” Cleper said.
In a modular multichain world with potentially hundreds or thousands of app chains and rollups, centralized node providers simply won’t be able to keep up, he said.
“And we thought, how can we leverage the power of community to create a kind of Amazon algorithm that automatically gives you the best provider that continually scores the session and the service you provide.”
The specification is analogous to the categories of items in the Amazon store. Lava collects all providers that adhere to a certain specification, and the Quality of Service algorithm connects the user directly to the best available option.
To use another analogy, “a specification is like a menu in a restaurant,” Binder said. “It tells you what the specifications are, what data you can get and what the interface is to get the data.”
Node providers are like franchisees of a restaurant chain with all the same dishes on the menu.
RPC nodes are just the first step, but Binder expects a stream of data APIs to leverage the network and provide structured, indexed data for all kinds of Web3 use cases. The team is in discussions with indexing providers such as Subsquid.
Node providers, such as Blockdaemon, Chainstack, and hundreds of others, receive a prorated share of rewards based on service quality. Lava facilitates reputation on-chain, based on verifiable data from the provider’s service.
“We use that reputation to increase how often a provider can access users,” Binder said. “It’s a market – for providers, for consumers, for champions – to bring in these opportunities and then compete around quality, which ultimately results in better service.”
It is no longer necessary to argue for decentralized infrastructure. “Everyone agrees with this message that decentralizing RPC is the way to go, and now the question is the best platform for these providers to compete on,” he said.