9 ms·

Show HN: 0xFast – Faster Web3 APIs

63 points by mrjn 4y ago

Excited to showcase 0xFast to HN! Built using a new indexing system designed for Web3 data, 0xFast outperforms the most popular web3 API platforms, while also being 3x cheaper.

qwerty3344 4y ago
What are the cons of 0xFast vs Alchemy?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ignoramous 4y ago
Also: - Show HN: Outserv – GraphQL Search Engine [for the blockchain] (1 Aug), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32302368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32302368 (11 comments) - Show HN: I Built 0xFast Stream – 100x Faster Ethereum Block Downloads (22 Sep), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32940451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32940451 (8 comments) - Show HN: 0xFast Indexed Streams – Search and Stream Blockchain Data (16 Oct), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33220456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33220456 (0 comments)
- FeistySkink 4y ago
  So over the course of a few months, it went from 100x to 10x?
  - IanCal 4y ago
    Serving up raw block info is different from the various other apis offered.
FeistySkink 4y ago
The main page and the description is in a strange meme format, that creates a strawman Web2 Databases (cringe) and then argues that Web3 (but what is it?) is better without any concrete arguments. Is Web3 (or is it web3?) just a new way of saying web-scale, but now with blockchain? Edit: I feel like we need somebody like Coffeezilla to unwind the web3 mystery in a digestible format for the rest of the tech world.
- IanCal 4y ago
  It's not arguing about the difference between web2 and web3. It's arguing two main things 1. Web3 data is different from what most classic databases are optimised for, because of how it's accessed and the (mostly) immutable guarantees. 2. This service is better than other web3 api providers. FWIW I'm consulting in this space currently, specifically dealing with blockchain data itself and it makes perfect sense to me. If it helps, you can remove web3 entirely from the problem to understand it. The only thing relevant here is that blockchain data is almost exclusively append-only and so you can build something neater because you've got guarantees that many other problems don't have. The other main thing is that there is a standard API that people provide (read: sell) access to, which can be slow and/or expensive if you've got to pull a lot of data from it.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > The only thing relevant here is that blockchain data is almost exclusively append-only So, Apache Kafka. Edit: as anyone who actually does this for a living: you never use the append-only log as your source of data. Precisely because it's very expensive to reconstruct it > so you can build something neater because you've got guarantees that many other problems don't have. So, first you have to find problems for your solution
    - jacobr1 4y ago
      I think you identified the use case: For services that are using the "append-only log as your source of data" then you need a tool that manages the "expensive to reconstruct it" side of things. I think that is what this does: it materializes and abstracts interacting with the reconstructed view of the data.
    - IanCal 4y ago
      > So, Apache Kafka. Does that give access to the full history quickly? > Edit: as anyone who actually does this for a living: you never use the append-only log as your source of data. Precisely because it's very expensive to reconstruct it Yeah I don't want to do that, but I do need to in order to process the data. For those that don't want to do this, and want to quickly access just the latest state, that's exactly what services like this offer.
isawczuk 4y ago
How it's web3 when you "[..] build and run our own servers. In datacenters. [..]"? No centralized servers = no data?
billen 4y ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this. However - the bottleneck in the blockchain is not the read/writing of the APIs (which might be slow), but the main bottleneck is the settlement of the chain usually. For example, the settlement of a block on the Bitcoin blockchain takes about 10 mins. No matter how fast you make the throughput of all the APIs, settlement will still be slow. If this is strictly for the historical use case, then I can understand why this might be useful. Good luck regardless :)
- IanCal 4y ago
  This is a service for people building apps on top of the Blockchain state. So history and "what's the current state of X".
marban 4y ago
No matter how great the product, but if the pitch includes any Web version number, we won't make friends.
taywrobel 4y ago
"Web2 Databases were meant to deal with datasets that change frequently. They have to provide ACID guarantees to ensure correctness." Having dumped several large blockchains into Scylla with indexing in Elastic, I can't imagine a situation where there's enough value-add to justify building a custom database to store it.
labrador 4y ago
"web3" is a tainted term at his point. "Investing" in crypto has proven to be not a sound investment or perhaps not even an investment at all. So I think a rebranding is in order. I would suggest "the financial web" or the "internet of money" as a name with the potential to attract new people because it sounds like something with a lot of potential.
anonfunction 4y ago
Any docs for connecting to goerli vs mainnet?
dmitriid 4y ago
> The solution to this problem becomes more complex with scale. Distributed transactions, sharding, replication, and fault tolerance are notoriously slow. And yet, suprisingly (not) they power everything at scale unimaginable to anything happening in crypto. The "amazing scalable crypto" barely manages the complexity and scale you can easily run from a Raspberry Pi with a sqlite database. > We built a cheaper and simpler storage and indexing system from scratch that can scale to the heaviest blockchain workloads out there Translation: you are dumping blockchain data into traditional databases running on traditional servers and backed up by a traditional Elastic Search.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > Translation: you are dumping blockchain data into traditional databases running on traditional servers and backed up by a traditional Elastic Search. It's ironic that the solution to blockchain problems is so often re-centralization.
  - ChainOfFools 4y ago
    I would go as far as saying that the problem with blockchain is not even blockchain, but in the fokloric narratives around decentralization, which is treated as if it's a binary condition (X is/is not decentralized), rather than as a blind, innate and monotonic behavioral tendency of a network. And that's being generous, because very likely decentralization - in spite of any attempt to implement it - will turn out to have been a mirage all along, and blockchainism thus amounts to our century's version of ever-more-convoluted epicycle "tech" straining to reify a philosophical dead end. It's absurd to claim that something is decentralized when there is always team at the core of this so-called decentralized network whose self-appointed job is to maintain its state of decentralization. I would argue that there is no such thing as any intentionally decentralized anything, and all claims as such should be treated with extreme skepticism. "trust us, it's trustless." The only decentralized phenomena are ones that come to us from the universe itself. And even those can ultimately be traced to an origin so the decentralization is only a local phenomena anyway.
  - IanCal 4y ago
splix 4y ago
It doesn't seem that it's the correct metrics, none of them makes much sense. Something is definitely wrong with the "Queries per second", it doesn't look like something significant. My usual load for a single node is about 300 req/sec. That's just an average number. Sometimes I do up to 10K req/seq. That consumes some noticeable amount of CPU, but nothing special and the bottleneck seems to be not here. And I think the main issue is the "Latency" chart. Because my average latency is about 3.5ms. It's like 10x faster. They cannot be so slow. So I guess the real problem is that the author measures the network. Not the service. So a link to Alchemy happens to be slower than a link to his own server. And the network is the main bottleneck in both cases, because you can easily do 10x of those numbers with a good network.
egorfine 4y ago
I have played around. I love it! At 23gate.com we are not yet running our nodes for chainId=0x01, so I would love to switch our downloader to 0xfast. However it seems that there are minor incompatibilities between 0xfast and generic RPC so it fails with ethers.js one getTransactionReceipt. I will look into it in the coming days and get back to you.
abujazar 4y ago
Upgrade to web3 technology now and get 1000x the hosting bills and 1/1000000 the performance! Because… someone will get rich and blockchain is TEH FUTURE!
mort96 4y ago
Can we keep crypto scams off the main page of HN?
- karanbhangui 4y ago
  How is this a crypto scam? It's a fast index of the ethereum blockchain. It's infrastructure for engineers building against ethereum
  - pizzalife 4y ago
    It's infrastructure for scammers.
    - karanbhangui 4y ago
      Guess I better stop using email too, that's infrastructure for scammers.
      - pizzalife 4y ago
        Name one Web3 use case. There are more use cases for email than scamming.
        ianzakalwe 4y ago
        growing tulips in netherlands https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/cash-crops-dutch-use-bitcoin-mining-to-grow-tulips https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/cash-crops-dutch-u...
        karanbhangui 4y ago
        I could list examples like this[0] or convince you that I'm a pretty healthy web3 skeptic who still doesn't round the valid use cases to 0, but I suspect you've already made up your mind and are just trying to be a stubborn internet arguer [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-with-2000-in-bitcoin-on-usb-drive.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...
zavala55 4y ago
it is amazing
- CyberDildonics 4y ago
  This is your only comment after 4 months. What is amazing about it?
T3RMINATED 4y ago
LordHeini 4y ago
No sure what the purpose of this really is. But the pricing seems bizzare. Hetzner cloud costs 1€ per extra TB (20 included) while this costs 2$ per Gb. That is an order of magnitude so what am I paying for?
- IanCal 4y ago
  Access to managed and updated datasets that are a pain to do yourself with specific APIs, not just data transfer.
- Snawoot 4y ago
  That's actually generous offering. Infura charges $225 per mo for 1M reqs/day. For large quantities of requests it's better to self-host own blockchain nodes, though, sometimes it's not so easy in terms of hardware requirements for a single node.
joshuakelly 4y ago
This seems to implement the same JSON RPC interface as Geth, so it should be a drop in replacement RPC. I wonder how you are thinking about potential customers here? I wonder further if there is an intermediate solution in this space where chainstate was denormalized into sqlite. How much of the read-only JSON RPC could be implemented with a sqlite over http approach? Would also be curious to read more about the technical details here. What the application architecture is, for example.
dhalucario 4y ago
Every time I read about web3 it just reminds me what a pain all of this is and that I would prefer web0: https://web0.small-web.org/ https://web0.small-web.org/
redm 4y ago
Congratulations on the launch! Looking forward to more middleware to enable the app ecosystem to develop more rapidly. "We build and run our own servers. In datacenters." Is this a selling point today? Suddenly their background in on-prem architecture, operations, security, and network management becomes very important.
wesleyfsmith 4y ago
Dang, this look awesome, excited to try it out!

63 points by mrjn 4y ago

Excited to showcase 0xFast to HN! Built using a new indexing system designed for Web3 data, 0xFast outperforms the most popular web3 API platforms, while also being 3x cheaper.

qwerty3344 4y ago

What are the cons of 0xFast vs Alchemy?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ignoramous 4y ago

Also: - Show HN: Outserv – GraphQL Search Engine [for the blockchain] (1 Aug), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32302368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32302368 (11 comments) - Show HN: I Built 0xFast Stream – 100x Faster Ethereum Block Downloads (22 Sep), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32940451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32940451 (8 comments) - Show HN: 0xFast Indexed Streams – Search and Stream Blockchain Data (16 Oct), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33220456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33220456 (0 comments)

FeistySkink 4y ago
So over the course of a few months, it went from 100x to 10x?
- IanCal 4y ago
  Serving up raw block info is different from the various other apis offered.

FeistySkink 4y ago

The main page and the description is in a strange meme format, that creates a strawman Web2 Databases (cringe) and then argues that Web3 (but what is it?) is better without any concrete arguments. Is Web3 (or is it web3?) just a new way of saying web-scale, but now with blockchain? Edit: I feel like we need somebody like Coffeezilla to unwind the web3 mystery in a digestible format for the rest of the tech world.

IanCal 4y ago
It's not arguing about the difference between web2 and web3. It's arguing two main things 1. Web3 data is different from what most classic databases are optimised for, because of how it's accessed and the (mostly) immutable guarantees. 2. This service is better than other web3 api providers. FWIW I'm consulting in this space currently, specifically dealing with blockchain data itself and it makes perfect sense to me. If it helps, you can remove web3 entirely from the problem to understand it. The only thing relevant here is that blockchain data is almost exclusively append-only and so you can build something neater because you've got guarantees that many other problems don't have. The other main thing is that there is a standard API that people provide (read: sell) access to, which can be slow and/or expensive if you've got to pull a lot of data from it.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > The only thing relevant here is that blockchain data is almost exclusively append-only So, Apache Kafka. Edit: as anyone who actually does this for a living: you never use the append-only log as your source of data. Precisely because it's very expensive to reconstruct it > so you can build something neater because you've got guarantees that many other problems don't have. So, first you have to find problems for your solution
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    I think you identified the use case: For services that are using the "append-only log as your source of data" then you need a tool that manages the "expensive to reconstruct it" side of things. I think that is what this does: it materializes and abstracts interacting with the reconstructed view of the data.
  - IanCal 4y ago
    > So, Apache Kafka. Does that give access to the full history quickly? > Edit: as anyone who actually does this for a living: you never use the append-only log as your source of data. Precisely because it's very expensive to reconstruct it Yeah I don't want to do that, but I do need to in order to process the data. For those that don't want to do this, and want to quickly access just the latest state, that's exactly what services like this offer.

isawczuk 4y ago

How it's web3 when you "[..] build and run our own servers. In datacenters. [..]"? No centralized servers = no data?

billen 4y ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this. However - the bottleneck in the blockchain is not the read/writing of the APIs (which might be slow), but the main bottleneck is the settlement of the chain usually. For example, the settlement of a block on the Bitcoin blockchain takes about 10 mins. No matter how fast you make the throughput of all the APIs, settlement will still be slow. If this is strictly for the historical use case, then I can understand why this might be useful. Good luck regardless :)

IanCal 4y ago
This is a service for people building apps on top of the Blockchain state. So history and "what's the current state of X".

marban 4y ago

No matter how great the product, but if the pitch includes any Web version number, we won't make friends.

taywrobel 4y ago

"Web2 Databases were meant to deal with datasets that change frequently. They have to provide ACID guarantees to ensure correctness." Having dumped several large blockchains into Scylla with indexing in Elastic, I can't imagine a situation where there's enough value-add to justify building a custom database to store it.

labrador 4y ago

"web3" is a tainted term at his point. "Investing" in crypto has proven to be not a sound investment or perhaps not even an investment at all. So I think a rebranding is in order. I would suggest "the financial web" or the "internet of money" as a name with the potential to attract new people because it sounds like something with a lot of potential.

anonfunction 4y ago

Any docs for connecting to goerli vs mainnet?

dmitriid 4y ago

> The solution to this problem becomes more complex with scale. Distributed transactions, sharding, replication, and fault tolerance are notoriously slow. And yet, suprisingly (not) they power everything at scale unimaginable to anything happening in crypto. The "amazing scalable crypto" barely manages the complexity and scale you can easily run from a Raspberry Pi with a sqlite database. > We built a cheaper and simpler storage and indexing system from scratch that can scale to the heaviest blockchain workloads out there Translation: you are dumping blockchain data into traditional databases running on traditional servers and backed up by a traditional Elastic Search.

CharlesW 4y ago
> Translation: you are dumping blockchain data into traditional databases running on traditional servers and backed up by a traditional Elastic Search. It's ironic that the solution to blockchain problems is so often re-centralization.
- ChainOfFools 4y ago
  I would go as far as saying that the problem with blockchain is not even blockchain, but in the fokloric narratives around decentralization, which is treated as if it's a binary condition (X is/is not decentralized), rather than as a blind, innate and monotonic behavioral tendency of a network. And that's being generous, because very likely decentralization - in spite of any attempt to implement it - will turn out to have been a mirage all along, and blockchainism thus amounts to our century's version of ever-more-convoluted epicycle "tech" straining to reify a philosophical dead end. It's absurd to claim that something is decentralized when there is always team at the core of this so-called decentralized network whose self-appointed job is to maintain its state of decentralization. I would argue that there is no such thing as any intentionally decentralized anything, and all claims as such should be treated with extreme skepticism. "trust us, it's trustless." The only decentralized phenomena are ones that come to us from the universe itself. And even those can ultimately be traced to an origin so the decentralization is only a local phenomena anyway.
- IanCal 4y ago

splix 4y ago

It doesn't seem that it's the correct metrics, none of them makes much sense. Something is definitely wrong with the "Queries per second", it doesn't look like something significant. My usual load for a single node is about 300 req/sec. That's just an average number. Sometimes I do up to 10K req/seq. That consumes some noticeable amount of CPU, but nothing special and the bottleneck seems to be not here. And I think the main issue is the "Latency" chart. Because my average latency is about 3.5ms. It's like 10x faster. They cannot be so slow. So I guess the real problem is that the author measures the network. Not the service. So a link to Alchemy happens to be slower than a link to his own server. And the network is the main bottleneck in both cases, because you can easily do 10x of those numbers with a good network.

egorfine 4y ago

I have played around. I love it! At 23gate.com we are not yet running our nodes for chainId=0x01, so I would love to switch our downloader to 0xfast. However it seems that there are minor incompatibilities between 0xfast and generic RPC so it fails with ethers.js one getTransactionReceipt. I will look into it in the coming days and get back to you.

abujazar 4y ago

Upgrade to web3 technology now and get 1000x the hosting bills and 1/1000000 the performance! Because… someone will get rich and blockchain is TEH FUTURE!

mort96 4y ago

Can we keep crypto scams off the main page of HN?

karanbhangui 4y ago
How is this a crypto scam? It's a fast index of the ethereum blockchain. It's infrastructure for engineers building against ethereum
- pizzalife 4y ago
  It's infrastructure for scammers.
  - karanbhangui 4y ago
    Guess I better stop using email too, that's infrastructure for scammers.
    - pizzalife 4y ago
      Name one Web3 use case. There are more use cases for email than scamming.
      - ianzakalwe 4y ago
        growing tulips in netherlands https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/cash-crops-dutch-use-bitcoin-mining-to-grow-tulips https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/cash-crops-dutch-u...
      - karanbhangui 4y ago
        I could list examples like this[0] or convince you that I'm a pretty healthy web3 skeptic who still doesn't round the valid use cases to 0, but I suspect you've already made up your mind and are just trying to be a stubborn internet arguer [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-with-2000-in-bitcoin-on-usb-drive.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...

zavala55 4y ago

it is amazing

CyberDildonics 4y ago
This is your only comment after 4 months. What is amazing about it?

T3RMINATED 4y ago

LordHeini 4y ago

No sure what the purpose of this really is. But the pricing seems bizzare. Hetzner cloud costs 1€ per extra TB (20 included) while this costs 2$ per Gb. That is an order of magnitude so what am I paying for?

IanCal 4y ago
Access to managed and updated datasets that are a pain to do yourself with specific APIs, not just data transfer.
Snawoot 4y ago
That's actually generous offering. Infura charges $225 per mo for 1M reqs/day. For large quantities of requests it's better to self-host own blockchain nodes, though, sometimes it's not so easy in terms of hardware requirements for a single node.

joshuakelly 4y ago

This seems to implement the same JSON RPC interface as Geth, so it should be a drop in replacement RPC. I wonder how you are thinking about potential customers here? I wonder further if there is an intermediate solution in this space where chainstate was denormalized into sqlite. How much of the read-only JSON RPC could be implemented with a sqlite over http approach? Would also be curious to read more about the technical details here. What the application architecture is, for example.

dhalucario 4y ago

Every time I read about web3 it just reminds me what a pain all of this is and that I would prefer web0: https://web0.small-web.org/ https://web0.small-web.org/

redm 4y ago

Congratulations on the launch! Looking forward to more middleware to enable the app ecosystem to develop more rapidly. "We build and run our own servers. In datacenters." Is this a selling point today? Suddenly their background in on-prem architecture, operations, security, and network management becomes very important.

wesleyfsmith 4y ago

Dang, this look awesome, excited to try it out!