PodRocket on QuickNode with Anthony Campolo
A conversation about QuickNode’s role in blockchain infrastructure, development tools, decentralization concerns, and guidance for building Web3 apps
Episode Description
Anthony Campolo and Noah Hein from QuickNode explain how their infrastructure platform simplifies blockchain development and why RPC providers matter.
Episode Summary
This episode of Pod Rocket features Anthony Campolo and Noah Hein from QuickNode discussing the role of infrastructure providers in the Web3 ecosystem. The conversation starts with foundational explanations of blockchains as shared, tamper-resistant databases and dapps as permissionless applications built on smart contracts, before zeroing in on what an RPC provider actually does — exposing blockchain APIs so developers don't have to run resource-intensive nodes themselves. Noah and Anthony walk through the developer experience, from choosing JavaScript libraries like ethers.js to using QuickNode's dashboard for metrics, authentication tokens, and cost transparency. They highlight the recently launched NFT API as an example of higher-level abstractions that reduce the number of raw calls a developer needs to make. The discussion also tackles the centralization critique head-on: QuickNode is a centralized business, but because blockchain data is inherently open and portable, there's no vendor lock-in, and developers can always migrate or self-host. Cost comparisons illustrate the value proposition, with a multi-person DevOps team potentially replaced by a modest monthly subscription. The episode closes with recommended learning resources, including Nader Dabit's tutorials and Patrick Collins' Solidity course on FreeCodeCamp, offering listeners a clear on-ramp to start building.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Introductions and What Is DevRel
Paul introduces his two guests from QuickNode, Anthony Campolo and Noah Hein, and sets up the episode's focus on Web3 infrastructure. Anthony explains that he's only in his second week at the company, joining a growing developer relations team that also includes Noah and another advocate named Sahil.
The group briefly unpacks what DevRel means in practice — creating content, gathering feedback, and helping developers interface with tools — and Noah mentions they're actively hiring for more developer advocates. The conversation establishes the collaborative dynamic between the two guests and frames the episode as an accessible entry point into understanding what QuickNode offers.
00:03:09 - Blockchains, Dapps, and Decentralization Explained
Anthony breaks down what a blockchain is in plain terms: a shared, tamper-proof database where every participant agrees on the current state. He traces the evolution from simple currency transactions to smart contracts, which allow arbitrary code to run on-chain, producing what are known as dapps or decentralized applications.
Noah picks up the thread by highlighting the key benefit of dapps — they are permissionless. Unlike traditional APIs that require keys and can revoke access, a deployed dapp is available to anyone forever, similar in spirit to open-source software. Paul ties it together by noting that the blockchain's core innovation as a decentralized database enables a wide range of human interactions and business models beyond just financial transactions.
00:07:32 - What Is an RPC Provider and How QuickNode Works
The conversation shifts to QuickNode's core product. Anthony and Noah define RPC providers as services that expose blockchain API methods — like eth_call — so developers can read and write data without running their own nodes. Anthony emphasizes that running a node is essentially a DevOps task, and QuickNode provides the autoscaling, dashboards, and tooling that Web2 developers already expect.
Paul shares his own experience trying to run a testnet node on a gaming laptop and running into severe resource constraints, underscoring why offloading to a provider makes sense. The group discusses how developers can use familiar libraries like ethers.js or Web3.js, pointing their code at a QuickNode URL instead of a local instance, and everything works the same — just faster thanks to backend optimizations.
00:13:09 - Higher-Level APIs and the NFT API
Noah reveals that QuickNode is moving beyond raw RPC exposure to offer higher-level APIs, with the NFT API on Ethereum and Solana as a flagship example. He explains that fetching all NFTs owned by a wallet sounds simple but actually requires multiple low-level calls, which QuickNode collapses into a single request with built-in caching and pagination.
Anthony adds context by explaining what NFTs are and why easy access to on-chain metadata matters — not just for developers, but for artists who need transparency about ownership and provenance. Paul connects this to how the NFT API could serve as an approachable entry point for developers coming from traditional web backgrounds who aren't comfortable navigating raw blockchain architecture.
00:18:59 - Decentralization, Cost Savings, and the Centralization Debate
The episode takes on one of the most common criticisms of managed node providers: that they undermine blockchain decentralization. Anthony frames it through the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, security, and scalability, arguing that centralized services act as a practical stopgap that accelerates adoption. Noah is candid that QuickNode is a US-based centralized company subject to regulations, but stresses there is zero vendor lock-in because all blockchain data remains publicly accessible.
Paul and Noah also discuss the cost savings QuickNode delivers. Noah estimates that replacing a four-to-five person DevOps team with a QuickNode subscription can bring costs down to around $300 a month for heavy users, and Anthony notes that entry-level plans start at just $10. The analogy to AWS and GCP resonates: most teams don't want to maintain their own server racks, and the same logic applies to blockchain nodes.
00:29:15 - Dashboard Features, Metrics, and Security
Noah walks through the QuickNode dashboard experience, from high-level views of registered endpoints across mainnets and testnets to per-node breakdowns of request methods, latency, and WebSocket versus HTTP usage. He highlights built-in security measures including authentication tokens and JWT support, plus features like referrer whitelisting and domain masks.
The group draws parallels to Firebase's monitoring and auth capabilities, emphasizing that QuickNode aims to give developers the same level of control and insight they'd have running their own node — without the operational burden. Noah underscores the platform's commitment to transparency around pricing, noting that prospective users can estimate costs before even signing up.
00:33:40 - Competition, Multi-Cloud, and Solana
Paul asks about the competitive landscape, and Anthony names Alchemy and Infura as the most commonly referenced alternatives, while noting there are over a dozen providers in the space. He highlights QuickNode's multi-cloud architecture as a key differentiator that improves resilience, especially given recent high-profile outages at major cloud platforms.
Noah discusses QuickNode's strong position on Solana, noting it is likely the largest RPC provider on that chain. He explains that running a Solana node independently costs at least $600 a month on cloud infrastructure and requires non-consumer-grade hardware, making managed providers especially valuable. Paul points out that being multi-cloud gives consumers confidence their data will remain available even during partial outages.
00:37:58 - Learning Resources and Getting Started
Anthony and Noah close the episode with practical recommendations for developers entering the Web3 space. Anthony points listeners to QuickNode's own guides and docs, and credits Nader Dabit's tutorials as particularly helpful for developers coming from a React and JavaScript background. Noah highlights Patrick Collins' 16-hour Solidity course on FreeCodeCamp as the go-to resource for learning smart contract development from scratch.
Anthony shares his personal learning path — starting with deploying a Hello World smart contract to get the end-to-end flow, then going deeper into Solidity and security. Paul wraps up by encouraging listeners to spin up a QuickNode node and deploy something themselves, thanking both guests and inviting them to return for future episodes on blockchain development.
Transcript
00:00:16 - Paul Mikulskis
Hello and welcome to Pod Rocket. Today we have two exciting and great guests with us from QuickNode. We have Anthony Campolo and Noah Hein. Is that how you say your last name, Anthony?
00:00:28 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, yeah. I say it's camp, like camping, and Olo, like water polo. Campolo.
00:00:33 - Paul Mikulskis
Campolo. Great, thank you. So we have Anthony Campolo and Noah Hein. They're both from QuickNode. We're going to be talking about some of the infrastructure that helps run the Web3 ecosystem that's being built today, some of the challenges that companies face, and how QuickNode can help you as a developer by providing a big piece of infrastructure to bring it to fruition.
Anthony, we had Noah on a little earlier, like one, two, or three months ago, and we were talking about QuickNode and accessing blockchain data. Noah, you are a developer advocate. Is that the correct title for your role?
00:01:15 - Noah Hein
Yeah, the developer advocate.
00:01:17 - Paul Mikulskis
Developer advocate. Great.
00:01:18 - Anthony Campolo
He's basically running DevRel, which is awesome.
00:01:22 - Paul Mikulskis
Okay, before we hop into it, what does that mean, running DevRel? What is DevRel?
00:01:28 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. DevRel would be the different parts of working with the developer community in terms of how they interface with their tools. That can involve speaking with people who are using it, creating content for them, and that whole feedback cycle.
I'm fairly new to QuickNode. This is only my second week so far. Noah is one of the people who's part of this DevRel team that we have now at QuickNode, which is really great because I think DevRel is a lot for one individual to do. It really takes a couple people to do it well.
00:02:03 - Paul Mikulskis
So you guys are tag teaming this whole effort to really get people indoctrinated into the space, understand what QuickNode does, and make it accessible.
00:02:13 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I don't know if I'd use the term indoctrination, but that's kind of what it is a little bit. Who else would you put in this bucket of DevRel at the company?
00:02:22 - Noah Hein
Yeah. Right now we have Sahil at the company. He's also a developer advocate. For anyone listening, we are hiring for more. If you are interested in doing developer advocacy for Web3 companies, please hit me up in the DMs.
00:02:39 - Paul Mikulskis
Yeah, you might be right. Indoctrination is not the best word, but it's a really confusing field. It's hard to find people that can really understand the needs of businesses and how QuickNode can help.
So jumping right into that, how can QuickNode help? Let's talk about one of the number one things that either Anthony or Noah, you guys will step into and somebody says, well, what does QuickNode do? What's like the 30-second version? We can boil it down from there.
00:03:09 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it's infrastructure for blockchains. There are a couple of terms we should define here because most people who have heard of Web3 may know it has something to do with blockchains, but they may not necessarily know what a blockchain actually is.
The easiest way I've found to describe it is that it's like a shared database that a bunch of different people have on their computer at the same time, all synced together and agreeing on the current state of the world. That can have a lot of different use cases. The main one at first was transactions. That database could have everyone's account balance and how much money they have for a unit, whatever you call it. When you want to transact and move balance from one account to another, every node in the chain has to agree on that. You also have it be one long linked list that makes sure you're always appending to it, so you can't tamper with it or change it. If you could change it, you could make yourself have $1 million, and you don't want to be able to do that.
00:04:17 - Anthony Campolo
So that's why it started out as a thing for currencies, and it's expanded out to now have what are called smart contracts. A smart contract is basically code, arbitrary code, that can be executed on the blockchain. That can be any sort of logic you could think of that you could write in a programming language like JavaScript or Python, but there are usually specific programming languages like Solidity. There are also other ways to actually write JavaScript.
The main thing is that it allows you to have a program embedded into the blockchain. That is what's called a dapp, a decentralized app. The thing you really have to explain is why it is important to be decentralized. Noah, how would you explain the benefit of decentralization?
00:05:06 - Noah Hein
Yeah, the benefit of a dapp versus a regular application would really be, there's a lot of hype around the word, but permissionless is the word that I would use around decentralization.
If you're thinking in terms of APIs, which is a term and paradigm that everyone is familiar with, like, hey, if I go over to some arbitrary company, I get an API key and I start using this API that they gave me, and I get some benefits, and I don't have to write all of my code. It's nice to use libraries that do really hard things for you in just a couple lines.
A dapp could, in theory, do the same thing and unlock the same kind of functionality that a traditional app would, but at that point you don't have to have that API key. It's fully permissionless. No one can stop you from using this API.
00:06:01 - Noah Hein
Once someone deployed this dapp, everyone is free to use it and incorporate it into their application, whatever their application may be and whatever original use case the author had for it. Once it's out there, it's just kind of out there. Similar to open source software, it's infinitely enforceable. Anyone can do whatever they want with it. That's the main benefit to a decentralized application versus a traditional one.
00:06:29 - Paul Mikulskis
It really rests on the shoulders of the main use case and product of the blockchain, which is a decentralized database. Like you were saying, Anthony, if we take the general idea of what to use a database for, what kind of interesting human interactions can we foster? Whether it be a dapp, a coin, or anything, what kind of human interaction can this new piece of permissionless infrastructure foster, as you said, Noah?
There's a lot of cool stuff coming out, even beyond dapps. There are networks for sharing computing and stuff that aren't necessarily a platform that you would build off of. We could talk for hours about what's going on in the blockchain space and what a dapp is and how they're fitting into business models. But I'd love to take a second and wrap this up into a neat package.
So we're talking about permissionless distributed blockchains, and QuickNode is an infrastructure provider that can help people access those tools and start building things today.
00:07:32 - Paul Mikulskis
So how does QuickNode fit in there? How does QuickNode help me as a developer trying to build a dapp tomorrow?
00:07:40 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So we should define what an RPC provider is because that's essentially what QuickNode is. When you have these blockchains that are out there, they have an API that you can use to access it. It's just like method names like eth_call or eth_estimateGas.
00:08:03 - Noah Hein
Eth_call is the big one. There are various implementations. If you're thinking about a decentralized database, that's not too useful without methods to access and manipulate that data in some form or manner. Pretty much every single chain has clients that expose a number of methods that are useful for interacting with the blockchain. That's what I would consider an RPC provider to be: someone that exposes this API to you without having to run the client on your own computer.
00:08:36 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, because that's another thing. If you think about it, a blockchain is a bunch of computers all connected to each other. It's like running a server. So it's a big DevOps task.
Most developers have this whole wave of really nice dev tooling companies: all these different ways to deploy things and all these tools to deploy stuff. If we want to get developers from Web2 who are comfortable with that kind of tooling into Web3, we need to give them similar tooling in terms of autoscaling, a nice interface, and a dashboard. All that stuff is going to allow you to interface with the blockchain in a way beyond just making a cURL request.
That's a good way to start, but there are lots of different libraries that you can use to interact, and Noah has done a really good job of documenting all the different ways you can interact.
00:09:29 - Anthony Campolo
So you can see how to do it with a cURL request, how to do it with ethers.js or Web3.js. There's a Ruby one as well. That's also what we provide: not just the infrastructure, but also the education, the guides, and the knowledge you need to actually interact with these applications.
00:09:50 - Paul Mikulskis
Right, because as a developer, if I want to build something that makes a call request or debug trace transaction to get information or whatever, I need somebody running a big piece of hardware that's ready to accept my request.
I know from my own experience there are some calls you can make that get megabytes or more of data from one call. This is nothing light. I've tried personally to run one. I used a 16-gigabyte gaming laptop and it was using all of the power. It was ridiculous for a testnet.
QuickNode doesn't make me do that. QuickNode lets me go run something with you guys. You mentioned libraries and stuff, so there are a lot of easy SDKs. I'm thinking like Firebase, where I can download a package, interact with this backend as a service right away in the language that I'm familiar with.
00:10:47 - Paul Mikulskis
What are some of the most popular ones? I'm guessing JavaScript, obviously, because that's the Babel language.
00:10:55 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I've been learning ethers.js. That's one that is really common. You'll see it in a lot of tutorials. Noah has used quite a few of them by this point.
00:11:05 - Noah Hein
Yeah, I would say JavaScript is probably the main one. I think that's a testament to how web development and software development has been as a whole. You mentioned solutions like Firebase in the Web2 world, which is very indicative of how software has been iterating. It's been very much focused on making someone who is coding HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, and providing this front-end experience for users, giving them all of the data they need in the easiest way possible.
A fairly accurate summation of the last ten years or so of web development is: how can we make it super easy to get the dynamic data that we want and to a React application? I'd say JavaScript has been the main driver for most of these libraries, with ethers.js being probably the most prominent one currently. There's also Web3.js, and there are a number of other solutions. Most blockchains offer both Java and Go SDKs, and Rust is also kind of on the come up.
00:12:13 - Noah Hein
If you're just getting into things, JavaScript is probably the way to go and is where you'll find the most documentation as well.
00:12:21 - Paul Mikulskis
One of the cool things about crypto here, mentioning the libraries and SDKs that we're working with, is that they're not specific to QuickNode, unless you guys have some that I don't know about. The general idea, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that you guys are running infrastructure, right? I could ping an Ethereum node just randomly on mainnet, and I could expect to take all that code I'm writing in my prototype or investigative research and bring it over and point it at anything that QuickNode would host for my Ethereum node, and it would just work because it's all the same protocol. It's the same blockchain.
Is there any higher-level libraries on top of that, or do you see most of the activity happening with people just booting up these RPC nodes and hitting them to power their applications?
00:13:09 - Noah Hein
Yeah. I would say that three months ago the answer would have been yes: we were purely exposing the API and were really just an infrastructure provider. You're still correct in the sense that if you write a bunch of code using any one of these libraries and you're testing it locally on your machine, then you just change your URL from localhost, whatever port you've put it on, and exchange that for a QuickNode URL. Everything will just work, albeit a little bit faster, because we have some optimizations on our end that are going to speed up a couple of specific methods that are a little bit heavier.
We're also starting to add higher-level APIs. The NFT API is one that we launched recently that's both on Ethereum and Solana. That's a high-level API that will get you a lot of NFT data, whether it be, like, I want to get all of the NFTs that a wallet owns.
00:14:04 - Noah Hein
That seems like a really simple use case, like I have some random wallet address and I want to get all of the NFTs from it. While that sounds easy, if you were to actually implement that yourself, you would end up making several requests. We're starting to offer these higher-level APIs that offer abstractions and make your life a lot easier because you're just making the one request. There are also performance optimizations that we're making on our end, and we are continuing to make those so it's easier for everyone to build the applications they want.
00:14:43 - Paul Mikulskis
I mean, blockchain data is unruly. It's big and there's a lot going on. I'm sure when you say, oh, we have all this stuff going on, there are layers and layers of caching and subnetting things out to faster places, at the edge, and all those glorious optimizations that are coming into the spotlight now.
Speaking of optimization, if I ran a company and I switched to QuickNode, I would expect to save money, right? It takes a whole team to run this stuff. Do you have any cool stories of the type of cost that can get saved if you take this piece of infrastructure and offload it onto a provider, just to put it into perspective of what it really takes to run a node and how QuickNode can step in there?
00:15:32 - Noah Hein
Yeah. Anthony, I'll take this one too, if you don't mind.
The immediate use case you want to think about as far as cost savings go is that if you want this data, someone needs to run the nodes, and that can be you if you want. But that also means you're going to hire a DevOps team and you are going to have a very high churn rate. If you just have one DevOps person hosting all of your blockchain nodes for whatever your application is, that's going to be a very sad engineer, and I don't imagine they're going to last too long.
For most startups that are looking to scale quickly, with a decent user base using their application, and they want to host all of their nodes internally and have full control over it, that's probably a four or five person team that is running all of these nodes.
00:16:22 - Noah Hein
DevOps engineers are expensive. Whatever salary you want to put on four or five DevOps engineers monthly, you can usually replace that, even if you're using quite a lot, for about $300 a month for the average user. If you're replacing your four-person DevOps team with a monthly QuickNode subscription, it's a very similar value proposition to using AWS or GCP in the Web2 world. It's like, hey, I don't want to run all of this myself. I want other people to offload that for me.
In the traditional sense, people don't want to run servers. They don't want to have a server rack in their back room to keep their application running.
00:17:04 - Paul Mikulskis
Unless you're of a special type, you know, they're out there.
00:17:07 - Noah Hein
They are out there. But I would say that's the general value prop, and the general dollar amount you're going to save is several people's salaries in exchange for just a monthly bill that we're going to send you.
00:17:17 - Anthony Campolo
And if you're coming in as someone who is just kind of testing it out and doesn't necessarily have a ton of people, you can start on just the $10 a month plan. That's really great because just spinning up a Kubernetes thing on AWS will usually cost you more than that. It's a really good way to get your foot in and start using it.
00:17:39 - Paul Mikulskis
A few months ago I was running a very light Kubernetes cluster to host a web app, which totally could have been one of those Cloud Run things, and I would have paid nothing for it. The cluster ran me like $250 a month, and I had no idea it was just going there. They're very expensive. I think cloud infrastructure is underestimated very frequently, not just in the upfront costs, but you have the personnel to run it. It's multiple salaries. If you have one person, they're going to be a sad man or woman. It's a difficult job to run all that.
So QuickNode is consolidating this into a team of really seasoned professionals that can run this. What do you say to the people out there who argue that this is really bad for decentralization? I think in all industries we see centralization of infrastructure pieces slowly conglomerate because it's just an efficiency and a cost thing. That's how we operate as people, so I totally expect to see it in the crypto space.
There are a lot of interesting comments you'll find online and on Reddit about this general movement and the way that we do nodes today. So, is QuickNode a big consensus player? How does QuickNode plan to continue to support decentralization? How many protocols are you guys in now, if that's something you have a figure on?
00:18:59 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting part of the conversation. If you try and go purist on anything, that's always where you're going to start running into problems when it comes to technology, because technology is always going to be about tradeoffs and compromises and trying to find something that actually works.
There's this blockchain trilemma they talk about where you have the tradeoff between decentralization, security, and throughput. Is that the three of them, Noah?
00:19:34 - Noah Hein
Scalability, but throughput gets the idea.
00:19:38 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. The thing you get by having a centralized solution is you get to boost yourself in one of those areas where you may be weak.
I've played around with IPFS, which is this peer-to-peer content thing. You can put a website on it and you can have it be accessed through gateways. Cloudflare has a gateway, and there are decentralized ones where you can do .link or .limo. They are significantly slower and less reliable than just using something like Fleek, which is a service that kind of does it for you.
I see it as kind of a stopgap for getting us there quicker, filling in the challenges that the technology still has. As these things grow and get better, they can become more decentralized and we can find other ways to add value as it becomes easier to do. I don't think it's really an inherent contradiction because we're not the only company doing this. There are other people. You have multiple different solutions, so you're still not necessarily locked into one centralized thing. You can choose to do this if you want the benefits, but you don't have to. You can still run your own node if you really want to.
00:20:52 - Paul Mikulskis
I think one paramount thing to advertise to the people who are concerned about this centralization problem is that this is one of the only pieces of infrastructure tied to monetary gain where anybody anywhere in the world can join at any time with very little red tape or no red tape. If somebody wanted to be part of the American banking system in another part of the world, you either have to have a lot of money or the right friends.
Here you can really just get in, and that's open source to me. It has the ability for anybody to enter at any time. That red tape has kind of evaporated.
00:21:28 - Noah Hein
Yeah. I would like to add that QuickNode is a business first and foremost, and so it is entirely centralized. If you're thinking about tradeoffs as far as decentralization goes, QuickNode is just like any other US-based company and has to comply with US-based laws and is vulnerable to government sanctions, etc.
However, there's also, like you mentioned, no red tape involved, and anyone can access the data that we are providing. If you're thinking about us as a data provider and not all the performance benefits, you can spin up a node that's running on your Linux machine in your closet, but you won't be able to serve a bunch of requests like QuickNode. However, you can still get all of the data. There's no vendor lock-in in that sense.
00:22:24 - Noah Hein
If for some, God forbid, reason you get locked out of your QuickNode account and your app starts failing, you can go somewhere else. All of that data is still there. It's not like it's gone. Everyone still agrees that all of that data still belongs to your application. All of your funds are secure, and you can go somewhere else and still get all of the same data elsewhere, even if that means spinning up your own team.
That's been my biggest thing: yes, there are vulnerabilities as any centralized company has, but the world has been working on entirely centralized services for an incredibly long time, and outside of extreme edge cases, things are going well. Even in the worst case scenario, you still have literally everything. You're just going to have a bit of downtime as you migrate to a different provider or spin up your own.
00:23:19 - Noah Hein
That's been a big part of why I feel good working here. I don't see it as a contradiction of still spreading decentralized technology because we need to get further, faster. I think companies are naturally going to be really good at providing that experience and that launch pad for other people to innovate off of.
00:23:39 - Paul Mikulskis
Absolutely. There need to be some powers that be bringing together the discombobulated parts of this space, because it's pretty discombobulated, depending on the angle you're coming from. It can be really daunting to get into.
I would love to circle back real quick and talk about your NFT API that you mentioned. When I learned about QuickNode, QuickNode was like the L1 solution. It's like, all right, if I'm building something and I need to get my data, I'll go to QuickNode so I don't have to spin up my own node.
Then there are these analytics companies. We're talking Flipside Crypto, Dune Analytics, RabbitHole, these companies that sort of work on the data, cache it, arrange it, build tables, and then either sell it directly to protocols or make it available for users.
So with the NFT API, are you stepping into that realm? Is QuickNode going to start offering more products that are analytics-driven?
00:24:41 - Noah Hein
Yeah. So I would say that the NFT API isn't necessarily about analytics. You mentioned Dune Analytics, and they're a key customer of ours. They are pulling a lot of data from us at any given point in time. Any analytics company is going to be massive and have a really voracious appetite for all of the blockchain data that they can get. We want to make that job easier. That's a lot to take on, and we'll continue to let them do their thing because it would take quite a lot for us to start doing something like that.
Where we're really seeing is how to make data that is really common as far as use cases go and give them a higher-level API. The NFT API specifically right now, like we have this fetch NFTs method that you can call. That's a very similar request to eth_call or eth_blockNumber. It's just fetch NFTs and it takes in a wallet address. It can also filter by specific contracts like, hey, I want to check if this particular wallet owns any Bored Apes. Our API handles the rest and allows you to scale a little bit faster because it offers performance benefits, with a caching layer and some pagination involved.
00:25:34 - Noah Hein
I think Anthony would probably have some insights on being newer to the space, and how these APIs really help new people in the space start building.
00:26:19 - Paul Mikulskis
Anthony, when you answer that, could I also ask if you could mention some of the ways that these analytics or APIs that Noah is talking about empower developers? I know QuickNode does have some features for that if it flows into the explanation.
00:26:36 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, we should talk about what an NFT is, because I feel like a lot of people are getting into this space through NFTs. It's gotten a lot of hype, and it's something that if you're completely divorced from the tech industry, chances are you probably heard of an NFT.
An NFT is a non-fungible token, which is basically the idea that it's something that represents ownership, something individual on the blockchain. A lot of people use it to map to a piece of art. So you have these people who are creating art galleries and then selling them as NFTs. You also have things like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, where you have a set that will be minted with different characteristics. It's a generative art kind of thing.
It's really interesting, but it generates a lot of data, and it can be complicated and messy. So what we do is we basically give you easy ways to get things like who is the creator of the artwork and who is the owner. That lets you cut through having to know so much of the underlying blockchain architecture. Especially if you're an artist, you want to be able to understand what's actually happening with your art.
There are also things like rug pulls where people will sell something and then change what the picture is. If people aren't empowered to actually see what is on the chain itself, then you can talk about ownership all you want, but it's not really that. So I find that giving access to really easy, high-level APIs to get this information about NFTs is where the value really comes in.
00:28:32 - Paul Mikulskis
Right. That data also has an audience that might not be very inclined toward blockchain. If you're asking, how do I sort through these nodes? How do I figure out who the owner is, the sender, the result of the transaction? I don't know. This NFT API would be the perfect first place to look if you were building a more traditional app.
Thinking about Firebase, they have very light things like my requests, how often somebody comes to my site. Does QuickNode do anything in that realm or rate limits? I'm sure there's some basic rate limiting of how much I ping my node. But anything in that realm for people going out and trying to build today, what are some features that they can look out for?
00:29:15 - Anthony Campolo
We've got all the metrics you want. Noah can probably talk more about the most high-value metrics that we get.
00:29:23 - Noah Hein
Yeah. So if you are a user of QuickNode and you sign up, you have a node. That's your first point of access. You have your dashboard that has all of your different endpoints that you have registered. Whether you have a mainnet node or a testnet node, or you're on Ethereum or Solana, you have that first high-level view of what you currently have access to.
Then you can break down for each node. We have metrics that are going to show you your most common requests. It will also pull some relevant blockchain info just on your dashboard. For example, you can test to make sure your node is up to date without making a request. We're going to show you the latest block height by default.
00:30:15 - Noah Hein
We'll also show you some stuff around the client. It's like, hey, what version of Geth are we on? Geth is an implementation of Ethereum using Go. It's one of those clients that we talked about earlier. We give you some version info and a breakdown of how you're using your node: what methods are you calling, whether they are on WebSocket or HTTP, when did you send them, and what is your average latency.
We also have security measures like authentication tokens. That's similar to the API keys I was talking about earlier. That's how we track your usage of the nodes. You can keep that secret so if your endpoint gets exposed, it's not the end of the world because they don't have that token. We also have JWTs, if anyone is familiar with them. JSON Web Tokens are another form of security.
00:31:09 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, this is where you talk about Firebase having that authentication there. That's where you really want to be able to not just have this open endpoint that anyone could do anything with, but have those more fine-grained permissions.
00:31:23 - Noah Hein
Yeah, and so many things like that. We've got referrer whitelisting and domain masks. We try to be transparent about usage and how much it's going to cost you. You can even access information like that before signing up for a node. If you're expecting to plug in like 2 million requests every single month, how much does that cost you? We have pages that show you the methods you're going to be using and how much it would cost you to do all of those things.
I think QuickNode is first and foremost about transparency. This is blockchain. You could get all of this data yourself. We're upfront about that. There's nothing stopping you from booting up your own node and getting all the data that QuickNode is providing you.
00:32:04 - Noah Hein
You could do that for free outside of the time and tears that you will spend spinning up the node yourself.
00:32:11 - Paul Mikulskis
There will be tears.
00:32:13 - Noah Hein
Yeah, there will be tears. We make sure to give you as many insights as you can about how you're actually using this and try to give everyone the same amount of control that they would have if they were running their own node and being able to get the insights out of that.
That's really how we approach creating our dashboards. If someone had access to this node themselves, what insights would they want and what would they put on their page? Then we create dashboards that reflect that so they don't have to build out all of those monitoring and analytics tools themselves.
00:32:44 - Paul Mikulskis
It's great to know about some of these. For people listening, there are quite a few node providers, but there are stark differences between them. I think this is one of the ones that can attract new developers, especially to the ecosystem. At QuickNode, it's really easy to track costs, and it's really easy to see what you're doing versus what you're not doing. That can inform not only your billing, but your software and infrastructure design.
It's really important to tackle those problems when you have such an unruly data set at your hands. Speaking of some of these features, quickly delving into competition, there are a lot of these providers. Who would you say one of your number one competitors is? Personally, I've used DataHub to get an Osmosis node, which has been an interesting experience. I'm wondering if you guys know about DataHub. How are you different from DataHub or any other arbitrary node provider out there?
00:33:40 - Paul Mikulskis
And why should a developer come to QuickNode besides the great reasons we just mentioned?
00:33:45 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I'm not super familiar with DataHub. I'd be curious to know if you've heard of that one.
00:33:49 - Noah Hein
I haven't heard DataHub.
00:33:51 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, the ones that I usually hear are Alchemy and Infura, but there's actually over a dozen of these if you really go deep. Those are probably the ones that, when I was going through tutorials to learn this stuff, I would usually see those three grouped together. You can use Infura or Alchemy or QuickNode, and then there would be a quick comparison between the three of them.
The main things that we have are that we're across different clouds. We're actually multi-cloud, so I think that will make us more resilient in the long run. We also have a wide variety of different chains that we integrate with. We're very multichain. On a performance basis, I think we do really well there.
The thing with multichain is that you have to watch out for someone who is highly optimized for a specific chain like just Solana. It can be more challenging to compete with that.
00:34:51 - Anthony Campolo
But in terms of having a wide breadth of chains that we can interact with, we do a really good job on that.
00:34:58 - Paul Mikulskis
Who would you say is the number one Solana provider out there? Solana is the craziest one for anybody listening. Bitcoin does one block every ten minutes. Ethereum does one every 12 seconds or something, right? Solana's one every 400 milliseconds on average, so that's a crazy data set.
You guys have Solana, right? We could get a Solana node from you.
00:35:28 - Noah Hein
Yeah, you can get a Solana node. There are a couple different Solana providers. QuickNode is actually, I'm always hesitant to say that we're number one at anything because I'm a bit biased, but QuickNode is definitely the largest RPC provider on Solana as far as I'm aware.
As far as number of users and the number of calls that are generated, I think QuickNode represents the majority of people that are not running their own nodes. Those are really hardcore folks because if you're running a Solana node, you're not going to be able to buy any consumer-grade hardware machine that can run Solana.
I looked into it myself: what if I wanted to run my own Solana node over on some cloud like AWS or GCP? The monthly cost for the bare minimum is about $600 a month to run Solana nodes.
00:36:21 - Noah Hein
So there's value in, like, hey, we're really cheap. I would say we're the largest one. There are a couple others in the game that are just now coming up. I don't want to speak to them on how their performance is or what their value adds are because I don't know what they are.
Honestly, I haven't been too aware because it's just been very much heads down on Solana. It takes a lot and is a different programming model than Ethereum. We've been heads down building guides and tutorials to make development on it easier, so I don't have the greatest idea on the competition that's there.
00:37:03 - Paul Mikulskis
Even at a minimum, I find it super interesting you guys mention your multi-cloud. That's huge. People who aren't super familiar with how enterprise deployments usually go might not immediately see the value in this, but if you work in cloud, you'll know how things go down. A lot of people might be familiar recently: AWS has had issues. We all know Slack has gone down in the past six months. 2022 has been kind of a rocky time.
The fact that you're multi-cloud is unique. For me as a consumer, that gives me a lot of confidence that the data is going to be there. Maybe it'll be slower, but it's going to be there. My stuff's not going to go down. So that's really neat. Thank you for sharing that.
We're kind of coming up on time here. Is there anything you would like to point our listeners at if they wanted to get started with QuickNode or any blockchain resource in general for people trying to develop and get their hands wet?
00:37:58 - Anthony Campolo
I think you're going to find a sparse amount of good resources overall compared to something like the React world. But I'm seeing a lot more just within the last year or so.
Nader Dabit has a lot of great stuff, and you'll find some really useful guides on QuickNode.com/guides. I found those when I was trying to learn things, and they were guides that Noah or other people on the team had written. The other one is QuickNode.com/docs.
00:38:33 - Noah Hein
Yes, QuickNode.com/docs will be like an API reference for any of the chains that are available. It will give you the actual RPC methods that we were talking about earlier. Like, here's the specific example on how to get the block number in JavaScript and Python and Ruby and cURL.
00:38:54 - Paul Mikulskis
Having those examples is a really awesome way to bootstrap your projects. I'm a huge fan of those. I love logging on to a backend as a service, copying and pasting, and then doing what you have to do. It's the fastest way to get something working quickly.
QuickNode docs. We had Nader Dabit on a few months ago, and thanks for bringing up his name again. You could go check out our Pod Rocket episode on that. He has countless awesome YouTube videos. If you want to do the full stack writing a dapp, you could follow his tutorial and then have your node run with QuickNode. We can link his channel as well.
00:39:31 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I really liked his stuff because it came from a very similar perspective to me. Like Nader, I was someone who was doing JavaScript, React, AWS, serverless, GraphQL. We came from the exact same set of technologies. He was creating tutorials for people with that kind of background.
For me, I was able to get up and running really quickly because it was like, you can separate out what the really specific stuff here is: learning about things like Hardhat or a library like ethers.js, and then how do you interact with a testnet?
As long as everything else around that is familiar, it's a lot easier to figure out those little pieces instead of also having to learn a whole new front-end language. If you know React, React is very comfortable. I found ethers integrated really well with it. Just getting it to have these hook-type things, it pretty much worked just how I would expect it to.
Everyone's going to be coming from a different place, but that in particular clicked for me as someone coming from a quote unquote traditional Web2 background.
00:40:44 - Paul Mikulskis
Great. Hopefully some viewers can relate to that.
00:40:47 - Noah Hein
I do want to say, I'll keep it really short. We would be remiss on listing educational resources without shouting out Patrick Collins. He has a video over on FreeCodeCamp teaching you Solidity. It's like a 16-hour course that takes you from zero to hero on Solidity development. If you're looking to build your own dapp and deploy a smart contract and you're really looking to learn Solidity specifically, that would be my go-to resource.
00:41:12 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, because Solidity is its own thing entirely. That's the language you'll write your smart contracts in. You can go really deep on just Solidity, or you can go more broad and also include things like Hardhat, which is how you actually deploy your smart contract that's written in Solidity.
For me, I found it easiest to first figure out how to deploy a Hello World smart contract. Once I got that end-to-end process, then I started going deeper into what Solidity is and what you can do with Solidity. Then I was able to interact with the blockchain fairly easily, but then you get all these questions of security and vulnerabilities. That is its own specialization, really.
00:41:59 - Paul Mikulskis
Well, great. We'll have those resources linked below and the QuickNode docs. Hopefully someone who's listening or viewing can hop over to QuickNode, get a node running, and deploy something on their own infrastructure because that always feels cool when you deploy your first Hello World and something's real like that. Hopefully we'll help empower some people to do so today.
Thank you so much for your time, Anthony and Noah. It was really great having you guys on. If you want to come in the future and share some more awesome knowledge about blockchain, we'd be happy to have you. Until then, we will see you guys around.
00:42:37 - Noah Hein
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
00:42:39 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, thanks a lot. Always a fan of the Pod Rocket.
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