Vox Nodi aka Voice of the nodes
Vox Nodi aka voice of the nodes. 🕶️🔮
the name sounds cool. Right? Not only the name. this is some really cool tech.
And u should have an idea about what this is if you’re someone building on “Web3”, a founder, or simply interested in blockchain tech. Why I’m saying this? Recently I asked for a quotation for a blockchain-based project from a freelance software agency. They suggested using an AWS EC2 for node setup and have included recurring costs for maintenance + AWS payments. Well unless you have a specific need for running your own node and know what you’re doing, this is a bad deal. Let’s see why is that, and a better deal where you’ll pay only a fraction of the cost.
First of all, let me shortly tell you what Vox Nodi is. Simply put this is a solution developed by Alchemy to address the shortcomings of a single-node setup / homegrown multi-node setup for blockchain applications. Hmm. So what are the shortcomings? Let’s say u’re building some kind of application and u need to serve data read from Eth blockchain to your users. You’re using a single-node setup. So maybe an EC2 instance is the node. ( Or something like AWS managed blockchain )
Then what if u needed to horizontally scale? or need to make the application fault-tolerant.
Well, the first instinct in this case is to use a load balancer and have a multi-node setup. Well not so fast. Why? because using a load balancer to scale in a decentralized context, is not the same as using a LB to scale a service that fetches data from a centralized data source. Blockchain nodes are computers running a piece of standardized software that allows them to communicate with other fellow computers connected to a peer-to-peer network. Due to this decentralized nature, not every node is on the same page at any given time.
For example, if you’re using a multi-node setup with a LB, your API might return incorrect nonce to users causing their txes to fail. Or worse.
Stuff like this leads to pretty severe UX. From the below Alchemy article, ‘A well-known NFT team lost tens of thousands of users because they were showing their users conflicting information. One of the largest DeFi protocols lost $2M from troubleshooting bugs that were creating frontend errors for users.’
Also, here’s another pretty interesting read about how DapperLabs, creator of Crypto Kitties struggled with data inconsistency issues, leading to both confused users and developers.
So how does Vox Nodi help solve this exactly? Well, Vox Nodi is a consistency layer that achieves consensus among the fleet of infrastructure that Alchemy has in place, called Supernode.
From the Alchemy blog.
Supernode is much more than just a bunch of connected nodes — in fact, that’s just a fraction of what the Supernode system is. Supernode is a combination of custom, scalable and distributed systems that essentially allow our API to act as a single node, which solves all of the accuracy issues we’ve discussed.
Ok, so to wrap things up, when it comes to setting up your blockchain nodes, u have two options. Either use a third-party node provider, that handles Data accuracy and scalability issues for you. Or set up your own infrastructure. Even though you’re going with a single-node setup or a multi-node setup it’s not without challenges. If multi-node, u would need to put together a bunch of centralized infra alongside your node setup to make sure your users won’t see conflicting information. And the amount of engineering hours and money you burn at the initial stages will be a lot higher compared to a third-party provider like Alchemy.
( This is not sponsored by Alchemy btw ) 🤷🏼♂️
If your concern is vendor locking, I don’t think that will be a big problem as well. Because if you only use Alchemy as the node provider, and you want to switch later, you just have to change the RPC Node URL.
Ok, that being said, DYOR and consider data accuracy among other metrics, when picking a node provider. The wheel has been invented already. So u know what to do.
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