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Cloudflare's Ethereum Gateway

143 points by jgrahamc 7y ago

machbio 7y ago
If I am understanding - Cloudflare is suggesting that we use IPFS hashes ( https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gateway/automated-deployment/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gatew... ) - hence the need to update DNS records everytime you deploy... So disregard of IPNS
- mattober 7y ago
  IPNS is currently pretty slow when it comes to retrieving content. Updating DNS records ensures a faster user experience for those retrieving the content from gateways. That being said, Protocol labs is currently working on speeding up IPNS so hopefully IPNS can be relied on more in the future.
- swiley 7y ago
  Their gateway supports ipns but the DHT is so slow that for most people it’s just going to time out. If you try accessing ipns content you just published via ipfs.io it will take ~5 minutes to resolve which is a pretty long time. I think at that point you don’t really care about using something like cloudflare, for the cases where it’s faster it just works the way it is now.
megadeth 7y ago
Using Cloudflares centralized node defeats the purpose of a blockchain. Cool feature though that adds to the Ethereum network.
- huehehue 7y ago
  FTA: "But Jonathan," I hear you say, "by providing a gateway aren't you just making Cloudflare a centralizing institution?" That’s a fair question. Thankfully, Cloudflare won’t be alone in offering these gateways. We’re joining alongside organizations, such as Infura, to expand the constellation of gateways that already exist. We hope that, by providing a fast, reliable service, we can enable people who never previously used smart-contracts to do so, and in so doing bring the benefits they offer to billions of regular Internet users. ----- I wouldn't say it defeats the purpose. Unless you expect every user to run their own node you really have no choice but to provide one for them or rely on a trusted service like Infura. It also makes nontrivial transaction/history lookups possible by providing a more performant search layer, the results from which you can cross reference against the actual on-chain data. Further, client-side libraries like Ethers.js use a quorum w/ multiple centralized services to help guard against censorship/errors/etc. at that level. It's an okay middle ground.
easymodex 7y ago
From what i know about cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has so many more use cases and functionalities built in than Bitcoin. It seems like this is what blockchain tech is all about, not just transacting money. Is there some real reason why Ethereum coin market cap is so much lower? Is it just the hype and Bitcoin being first?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- RIMR 7y ago
  Ethereum has been around for nearly 4 years now, and despite some wacky smart-contract experiments, the most compelling use of it as a platform has been CryptoKitties. Other than that, it is mostly just a cryptocurrency. Ethereum is novel, but it doesn't solve the right problems.
  - cdiddy2 7y ago
    I think the defi movement with MakerDao/Dai, uniswap, and compound finance have eclipsed cryptokitties as the most compelling use.
    - lawlessone 7y ago
      Ok i just looked up DAI I'm watching a video on it and all this financial babble about collateralized debt. This just sounds a lot like someone selling equity in their home.. only instead of getting cash they get some weird crypto. Ok so the Dai is kept stable by users who are some how incentivized to keep its value at one dollar... but it that fails another token called Maker comes in.. I;m sorry but this sounds over complicated and insane, almost like it was put together to baffle people into buying it because they feel stupid.
      - magnamerc 7y ago
        That's what you got out of it? Keep researching, because Maker has been building since 2015. The more you read into it, the more you understand these design decisions and the way the system works. There's nothing overly complicated about it. You need to understand that you've likely just started thinking about crypto and blockchain design, but these guys have been living, breathing and thinking of smart contracts/blockchain since at least 2012. You need MKR tokens for governance, like to control the interest rates as well as the price oracle whitelist. Maker is a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).
achingtooth 7y ago
"But Jonathan," I hear you say, "by providing a gateway aren't you just making Cloudflare a centralizing institution?" The problem is the market share of these institutions. Google could argue that they aren't the sole gatekeeper to search since services like DuckDuckGo exist. This isn't really valid when you control a huge amount of the market share. I'm worried about how the internet is becoming super homogeneous, it really hurts startups. I'm not saying what Cloudflare is doing is bad, but the amount of control Cloudflare has is increasingly worrying based of all the services they are launching. Look at what it did to The Daily Stormer (I think they are disgusting and have zero support for them), it's clear that they aren't unbiased. If Cloudflare blocks your service on their VPN, DNS, DDoS protection, IPFS site, Ethereum, etc you are majorly screwed. Most people aren't willing to change their setup just to visit your one service. I still think what Cloudflare does is awesome, not trying to be too negative, just a little worried.
- swiley 7y ago
  I think with tools like ipfs the situation is similar to git and GitHub. Yes github could screw you over but it takes very little work to get off their platform. With ipfs you just change your DNS (which is something you do every time you update the content anyway.)
  - achingtooth 7y ago
    Yeah you're right, I might just be a little alarmist. Having these services is better than not.
- Kalium 7y ago
  For most purposes, Cloudflare is a DNS provider and CDN. There is no lack of other providers for these services, most of which would be happy to onboard another paying customer. Unless you've structured your startup around Cloudflare's workers, I would expect ready pluggability.
- envolt 7y ago
  Providing a gateway is not making Ethereum centralized. It's just an interface to read (or interact) with a running geth node. It's not mining/validating or contributing to the network.
saurik 7y ago
So as someone who is working in this space (on distributed applications using Ethereum), I want to call everyone's attention to a very important API that Cloudflare thankfully did implement: eth_getProof. As far as I am concerned, this is the most important API offered (and if anything, it is mostly sad no one has built out a few more APIs designed to make getting to the point where this is useful). For those who don't know much about the inner workings of Ethereum, every account has state associated with it: not just its balance, but in the case of a contract its memory and its code; the memory of a contract is pretty much a sparse 256-bit addressable hash table, with everything from a single contract hashed into the same address space. This makes directly working with the memory of a contract really trivial; and, if/once you know of a specific storage slot you want, you can get it using eth_getStorageAt. Now, what most people know is that each block contains a hash of the previous block, and "the contents of the block"; but, the setup is actually way more useful than that: each block "contains" (by hash reference) the entire current state. So, given a block header you trust, you can work off of a merkle tree of the entire Ethereum state that is rooted at that block and obtain a proof that some specific account state value is valid. This means that light clients can opt to sync only block headers and then request proofs of the specific tiny bits of information they need from other nodes. Instead of using eth_getStorageAt to pull a storage slot from the memory of a contract, or eth_getBalance to find out how much money the account is storing, you can use eth_getProof to get a merkle path demonstration that "given the block headers you trust, you can now trust this random value you wanted to pull". A really light client might alternatively sync some subset of block headers to some total amount of difficulty into the past (similar to people who wait for "confirmations" on Bitcoin blocks), to say "someone who is trying to fool me about this event having happened would have had to spend a million dollars of electricity to target me with fake information here, which wouldn't be worth it given the relatively small amount of my transaction I am verifying". Another way of doing this is to correlate the current block hash from multiple providers to make sure that it is the same, and then use that opaque agreement as the root of trust for calls to eth_getProof. (An important detail: doing it like this, as opposed to correlating the thing you wanted to check, happens before any of the providers know what you are looking for, so if they are colluding they wouldn't be able to target you and the information you want to read with corrupt data.) Essentially, since Cloudflare has implemented this specific key API (which is notable as it is a newer one that has greater resource usage on their end than other APIs, and so I have seen providers decide not to bother as they just don't get it), you don't actually have to trust them all that much when you are using this API: it feels more like working with IPFS, where "well, I asked for the file with this hash and they gave me a file that in fact does have this hash... I guess I would be shocked if it weren't the right file".
yashh 7y ago
Any idea if cloudflare supports test networks like rinkeby to start developing?
- saurik 7y ago
  FWIW, the API they provide here is a subset of the API provided by a local Ethereum node, and also the same general API surface (with the exact same protocol) as the APIs provided by Infura, AlchemyAPI, and myEtherWallet. While I also went looking for a testnet endpoint from Cloudflare (and didn't find one), it is arguably superfluous as it is drop-in compatible for things that do have testnet endpoints.
envolt 7y ago
Can it be used as a full-fledged Infura replacement?
- pat2man 7y ago
  Yes

143 points by jgrahamc 7y ago

If I am understanding - Cloudflare is suggesting that we use IPFS hashes ( https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gateway/automated-deployment/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gatew... ) - hence the need to update DNS records everytime you deploy... So disregard of IPNS

mattober 7y ago
IPNS is currently pretty slow when it comes to retrieving content. Updating DNS records ensures a faster user experience for those retrieving the content from gateways. That being said, Protocol labs is currently working on speeding up IPNS so hopefully IPNS can be relied on more in the future.
swiley 7y ago
Their gateway supports ipns but the DHT is so slow that for most people it’s just going to time out. If you try accessing ipns content you just published via ipfs.io it will take ~5 minutes to resolve which is a pretty long time. I think at that point you don’t really care about using something like cloudflare, for the cases where it’s faster it just works the way it is now.

megadeth 7y ago

Using Cloudflares centralized node defeats the purpose of a blockchain. Cool feature though that adds to the Ethereum network.

huehehue 7y ago
FTA: "But Jonathan," I hear you say, "by providing a gateway aren't you just making Cloudflare a centralizing institution?" That’s a fair question. Thankfully, Cloudflare won’t be alone in offering these gateways. We’re joining alongside organizations, such as Infura, to expand the constellation of gateways that already exist. We hope that, by providing a fast, reliable service, we can enable people who never previously used smart-contracts to do so, and in so doing bring the benefits they offer to billions of regular Internet users. ----- I wouldn't say it defeats the purpose. Unless you expect every user to run their own node you really have no choice but to provide one for them or rely on a trusted service like Infura. It also makes nontrivial transaction/history lookups possible by providing a more performant search layer, the results from which you can cross reference against the actual on-chain data. Further, client-side libraries like Ethers.js use a quorum w/ multiple centralized services to help guard against censorship/errors/etc. at that level. It's an okay middle ground.

easymodex 7y ago

From what i know about cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has so many more use cases and functionalities built in than Bitcoin. It seems like this is what blockchain tech is all about, not just transacting money. Is there some real reason why Ethereum coin market cap is so much lower? Is it just the hype and Bitcoin being first?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RIMR 7y ago
Ethereum has been around for nearly 4 years now, and despite some wacky smart-contract experiments, the most compelling use of it as a platform has been CryptoKitties. Other than that, it is mostly just a cryptocurrency. Ethereum is novel, but it doesn't solve the right problems.
- cdiddy2 7y ago
  I think the defi movement with MakerDao/Dai, uniswap, and compound finance have eclipsed cryptokitties as the most compelling use.
  - lawlessone 7y ago
    Ok i just looked up DAI I'm watching a video on it and all this financial babble about collateralized debt. This just sounds a lot like someone selling equity in their home.. only instead of getting cash they get some weird crypto. Ok so the Dai is kept stable by users who are some how incentivized to keep its value at one dollar... but it that fails another token called Maker comes in.. I;m sorry but this sounds over complicated and insane, almost like it was put together to baffle people into buying it because they feel stupid.
    - magnamerc 7y ago
      That's what you got out of it? Keep researching, because Maker has been building since 2015. The more you read into it, the more you understand these design decisions and the way the system works. There's nothing overly complicated about it. You need to understand that you've likely just started thinking about crypto and blockchain design, but these guys have been living, breathing and thinking of smart contracts/blockchain since at least 2012. You need MKR tokens for governance, like to control the interest rates as well as the price oracle whitelist. Maker is a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).

achingtooth 7y ago

"But Jonathan," I hear you say, "by providing a gateway aren't you just making Cloudflare a centralizing institution?" The problem is the market share of these institutions. Google could argue that they aren't the sole gatekeeper to search since services like DuckDuckGo exist. This isn't really valid when you control a huge amount of the market share. I'm worried about how the internet is becoming super homogeneous, it really hurts startups. I'm not saying what Cloudflare is doing is bad, but the amount of control Cloudflare has is increasingly worrying based of all the services they are launching. Look at what it did to The Daily Stormer (I think they are disgusting and have zero support for them), it's clear that they aren't unbiased. If Cloudflare blocks your service on their VPN, DNS, DDoS protection, IPFS site, Ethereum, etc you are majorly screwed. Most people aren't willing to change their setup just to visit your one service. I still think what Cloudflare does is awesome, not trying to be too negative, just a little worried.

swiley 7y ago
I think with tools like ipfs the situation is similar to git and GitHub. Yes github could screw you over but it takes very little work to get off their platform. With ipfs you just change your DNS (which is something you do every time you update the content anyway.)
- achingtooth 7y ago
  Yeah you're right, I might just be a little alarmist. Having these services is better than not.
Kalium 7y ago
For most purposes, Cloudflare is a DNS provider and CDN. There is no lack of other providers for these services, most of which would be happy to onboard another paying customer. Unless you've structured your startup around Cloudflare's workers, I would expect ready pluggability.
envolt 7y ago
Providing a gateway is not making Ethereum centralized. It's just an interface to read (or interact) with a running geth node. It's not mining/validating or contributing to the network.

saurik 7y ago

So as someone who is working in this space (on distributed applications using Ethereum), I want to call everyone's attention to a very important API that Cloudflare thankfully did implement: eth_getProof. As far as I am concerned, this is the most important API offered (and if anything, it is mostly sad no one has built out a few more APIs designed to make getting to the point where this is useful). For those who don't know much about the inner workings of Ethereum, every account has state associated with it: not just its balance, but in the case of a contract its memory and its code; the memory of a contract is pretty much a sparse 256-bit addressable hash table, with everything from a single contract hashed into the same address space. This makes directly working with the memory of a contract really trivial; and, if/once you know of a specific storage slot you want, you can get it using eth_getStorageAt. Now, what most people know is that each block contains a hash of the previous block, and "the contents of the block"; but, the setup is actually way more useful than that: each block "contains" (by hash reference) the entire current state. So, given a block header you trust, you can work off of a merkle tree of the entire Ethereum state that is rooted at that block and obtain a proof that some specific account state value is valid. This means that light clients can opt to sync only block headers and then request proofs of the specific tiny bits of information they need from other nodes. Instead of using eth_getStorageAt to pull a storage slot from the memory of a contract, or eth_getBalance to find out how much money the account is storing, you can use eth_getProof to get a merkle path demonstration that "given the block headers you trust, you can now trust this random value you wanted to pull". A really light client might alternatively sync some subset of block headers to some total amount of difficulty into the past (similar to people who wait for "confirmations" on Bitcoin blocks), to say "someone who is trying to fool me about this event having happened would have had to spend a million dollars of electricity to target me with fake information here, which wouldn't be worth it given the relatively small amount of my transaction I am verifying". Another way of doing this is to correlate the current block hash from multiple providers to make sure that it is the same, and then use that opaque agreement as the root of trust for calls to eth_getProof. (An important detail: doing it like this, as opposed to correlating the thing you wanted to check, happens before any of the providers know what you are looking for, so if they are colluding they wouldn't be able to target you and the information you want to read with corrupt data.) Essentially, since Cloudflare has implemented this specific key API (which is notable as it is a newer one that has greater resource usage on their end than other APIs, and so I have seen providers decide not to bother as they just don't get it), you don't actually have to trust them all that much when you are using this API: it feels more like working with IPFS, where "well, I asked for the file with this hash and they gave me a file that in fact does have this hash... I guess I would be shocked if it weren't the right file".

yashh 7y ago

Any idea if cloudflare supports test networks like rinkeby to start developing?

saurik 7y ago
FWIW, the API they provide here is a subset of the API provided by a local Ethereum node, and also the same general API surface (with the exact same protocol) as the APIs provided by Infura, AlchemyAPI, and myEtherWallet. While I also went looking for a testnet endpoint from Cloudflare (and didn't find one), it is arguably superfluous as it is drop-in compatible for things that do have testnet endpoints.

envolt 7y ago

Can it be used as a full-fledged Infura replacement?

pat2man 7y ago
Yes