The Side of Crypto You Dont Know - QuickNode x vEmpire

Episode Description

Anthony Campolo of QuickNode explains blockchain nodes, APIs, and developer tools, breaking down how node infrastructure powers the Web3 ecosystem.

Episode Summary

In this conversation, Dom interviews Anthony Campolo, a developer advocate at QuickNode, a company that provides blockchain node infrastructure so developers don't have to run their own. Anthony shares his unconventional path from music teacher to coding bootcamp graduate to Web3 professional, explaining how he discovered crypto during the 2017 ICO boom before eventually joining QuickNode's developer relations team. The discussion covers the fundamentals of what blockchain nodes are and why they matter, using the BitTorrent analogy to illustrate how decentralized networks function. Anthony addresses the tension between centralization and decentralization, explaining how QuickNode maintains its own decentralized infrastructure across multiple clouds and regions while acknowledging the value of competing node providers. The conversation moves into QuickNode's product offerings, including enhanced APIs, the ICY Tools GraphQL acquisition, and a new marketplace allowing third-party companies to plug into their platform. Anthony also previews Quick Alerts, a real-time monitoring tool in beta, and fields audience questions about blockchain security, scalability, beginner resources, and investment opportunities. Throughout, he emphasizes QuickNode's commitment to beginner-friendly guides and its resilience during market downturns as an infrastructure company.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Introduction and Anthony's Background

Dom opens the show and introduces the topic of blockchain nodes, noting they are essential but often misunderstood components of blockchain technology. He brings on Anthony Campolo, developer advocate at QuickNode, who describes his role as sitting at the intersection of community, content, and product.

Anthony shares his journey from being a music teacher — where he taught classical bass, jazz, and rock band formats at summer camps — to discovering coding through bootcamps. He explains how he got involved in open source through the Redwood JS framework, worked at a GraphQL company called Stepzen, and eventually joined QuickNode after a friend recruited him to the developer relations team.

00:06:00 - What Is a Developer Advocate and Music Roots

Anthony breaks down the developer advocate role, explaining it spans community management, content creation, and product feedback. He notes the job suits people who enjoy wearing many hats, and that all three areas are deeply interconnected — you can't create good content without understanding the community and the product.

The conversation takes a fun detour into Anthony's music background, where he discusses the challenges of playing upright bass with a bow versus pizzicato, and his preference for jazz over classical performance. Dom shares his own pattern of picking up hobbies that his brother then adopts and surpasses him at, before steering the discussion back toward QuickNode's core business.

00:10:15 - Blockchain Nodes Explained

Anthony lays out the fundamentals of blockchain technology, comparing the concept to BitTorrent's peer-to-peer architecture. He explains that a blockchain is a network of computers maintaining a shared ledger, and each computer participating in that network is a node. Without nodes, there is no blockchain — they are literally the infrastructure that makes decentralized networks function.

He walks through a simple example using Bitcoin transactions to illustrate how nodes sync together and maintain a shared state. The explanation emphasizes that nodes communicate over the internet and their collective activity is what enables transactions, smart contracts, and everything built in Web3.

00:13:00 - Decentralization and QuickNode's Approach

Dom raises the important question of whether relying on a single node provider like QuickNode undermines decentralization. Anthony explains that QuickNode itself maintains a decentralized infrastructure by running across multiple cloud providers, bare metal servers, multiple regions, and multiple blockchain clients.

He acknowledges the philosophical tension openly, noting that developers can use multiple node providers for greater decentralization but will sacrifice the simplicity of a unified service. QuickNode doesn't aim to monopolize the node space — they believe competition is healthy for the ecosystem — but they offer advantages for developers who commit to their platform, including specialized APIs and dedicated support.

00:17:10 - Chain Partnerships and the Ethereum Merge

Anthony explains that QuickNode doesn't arbitrarily add blockchain support. They partner directly with chain foundations and teams, working through a thorough onboarding process to ensure full API coverage and documentation. Recent additions have included Avalanche, Harmony, and Stacks.

He uses the Ethereum merge as an example of the coordination involved, describing how QuickNode monitored Ethereum Foundation core team calls, tracked block numbers and test net deprecations, and worked closely with the foundation to ensure a smooth transition from proof of work to proof of stake. Adding a new chain is far more than flipping a switch — it requires deep collaboration.

00:21:00 - APIs, ICY Tools, and the Marketplace

Anthony defines APIs for the non-technical audience, then explains the difference between standard blockchain RPC APIs and QuickNode's enhanced APIs, which provide higher-level functionality for common developer tasks like fetching NFT data. He highlights the acquisition of ICY Tools, a GraphQL API that lets users query trending NFT collections with simple, readable queries.

He then introduces QuickNode's new marketplace, which allows third-party companies like CrossMint, Flashbots, and BlockTorch to plug custom functionality into the QuickNode platform. This marketplace model — similar to what DigitalOcean or Vercel offer — expands QuickNode's capabilities while supporting the broader ecosystem and giving developers access to a wider range of tools.

00:27:50 - Beginner Resources and Learning Solidity

Dom asks about resources for people just getting started with blockchain development, and Anthony highlights QuickNode's extensive library of beginner-friendly guides. He explains what Solidity is by first grounding the audience in what a programming language does, using the classic FizzBuzz exercise as an example before connecting it to smart contracts on the blockchain.

Anthony emphasizes that smart contracts are permanent once deployed, which is why careful vetting and auditing are essential. He encourages total beginners to create a free QuickNode account, spin up a node, and follow a step-by-step guide, noting that while some coding knowledge helps, the guides are designed to be accessible to bootcamp-level students.

00:33:00 - Community, Token Questions, and Quick Alerts

Anthony directs listeners to QuickNode's Discord for community interaction and support, and mentions weekly Twitter Spaces on Wednesdays. When Dom asks the classic "when token" question, Anthony says a QuickNode token isn't on the horizon, as the company is focused on supporting existing chains rather than building its own.

He then teases Quick Alerts, a real-time monitoring system currently in beta that lets developers set customizable alerts for events like gas price drops, NFT mints, or traffic spikes. The tool is designed to give developers observability into their applications and blockchain activity, and the team is actively seeking beta testers for feedback.

00:39:00 - Security, Scalability, and Audience Q&A

An audience member asks whether Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain is more secure, and Anthony explains that security isn't a simple binary — it depends on decentralization levels, time in production, user base size, and smart contract quality. He argues that Ethereum's long track record without being hacked is itself strong evidence of its security.

On scalability, he notes Solana as one of the more scalable options despite its occasional downtime, and mentions Avalanche's subnet architecture and Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap as promising developments. He emphasizes that QuickNode's multi-chain support lets developers choose chains based on whichever properties matter most to their specific use case.

00:44:30 - Benefits for Average Users and Investment Questions

Anthony addresses what non-developers might gain from QuickNode, acknowledging that as a dev tools company, casual users may not find immediate utility. However, he encourages curious people to spin up a free node and follow a guide to understand what's happening under the hood of their crypto investments, potentially sparking a deeper interest in blockchain development.

When asked about retail investment opportunities in QuickNode, Anthony explains the company is VC-backed with investors like Andreessen Horowitz and is not publicly traded. He notes the company has been hiring aggressively even through the market downturn, having nearly doubled in size since April, because infrastructure demand persists regardless of token prices — a sign of the company's resilience and anti-fragile business model.

00:53:00 - Hiring, Wrap-Up, and Final Thoughts

Dom begins wrapping up and directs viewers to QuickNode's website and social channels. A last-minute audience question about hiring prompts Anthony to confirm that QuickNode is actively recruiting across multiple departments worldwide, with team members spread across the US, UK, India, and beyond, all working remotely from their Miami base.

Anthony encourages anyone interested to check open positions on their jobs page and reiterates that the company's continued growth during a bear market reflects the strength of selling infrastructure rather than speculative assets. Dom closes out the episode with warm thanks, noting that one of the viewers may even end up as Anthony's new colleague.

Transcript

00:00:05 - Dom

But the coin I added to the portfolio today is called vEmpire, and they are the largest decentralized metaverse investment organization in the world. Hello, everybody, and what a lovely day it is. Let it kick off, and I'll do some button tapping in the background. You know what comes after: "When Binance?" Hello, everybody. I didn't realize how dodgy my old camera was until I was watching that back and saw I was all pixelated. It can't have been as dodgy as the signal we had on top of the Walkie Talkie building in London. If you watched mine and Jake Gaines' podcast, I'll tell you what, Americans are built different. I was sitting there, we had about 40 people on this balcony doing a live podcast, everyone staring. I had to keep my eyes fixed to the screen. Just the British embarrassment in me, I couldn't do it. Luckily, I wasn't with B Roots or he would have been attracting even more attention, I'm sure, especially with those dodgy sunglasses. But today we've got, I feel like I always say, an interesting guest. Then again, we wouldn't really have a boring one, would we? So we've got QuickNode, and nodes are something people don't really understand that much. They are essential to blockchain, in both keeping it decentralized or, in fact, centralized, depending on their placement.

00:01:31 - Dom

So yeah, very keen to hear a bit more on that. So if we could bring Anthony out.

00:01:37 - Anthony Campolo

Hello. How's it going?

00:01:38 - Dom

Very good. Yourself?

00:01:40 - Anthony Campolo

I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:43 - Dom

You're welcome. Yeah, I was saying, very little understood, however, massively important area of blockchain nodes. And I'll let you touch a bit more on that as we get in. If you'd introduce yourself and the company.

00:02:01 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, absolutely. My name is Anthony Campolo, and I am a developer advocate for QuickNode. QuickNode, as you've been saying, is a company that runs the node so you don't have to. Calling us a node provider can be a little bit confusing because we don't actually give you, like, a dedicated node. We give you access to the sum total of our platform with a global API. So we can kind of get into the distinction of what that means exactly. But yeah, I am someone who creates content, and I go out and do podcast interviews such as this one to help explain the company and what we do, our mission, and how we fit into the larger Web3 ecosystem. So really happy to be here and get a chance to talk about what we do.

00:02:47 - Dom

Good stuff. Seems like a good job, going out and talking to people. And again, I guess it depends on the type of person you're speaking with, but hopefully everyone's nice and friendly. I always like to check everyone's background on how they actually got into blockchain and crypto as an industry.

00:03:06 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about kind of how I got into coding itself. I have a bit of an interesting background. I was originally a music teacher before I got involved in all of this tech stuff, and I had a tough time making a living doing that, and eventually kind of found my way into the whole coding bootcamp world. So I learned regular old web development like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As I got into that, I ended up getting involved in some open source frameworks, one in particular called RedwoodJS, which is a really interesting full-stack Ruby on Rails-inspired framework from the creator of GitHub, Tom Preston-Werner. That was my entry point into the entire world of open source and how you contribute to projects and things like that. Then I started working at a GraphQL company called StepZen. I wasn't really doing Web3 stuff at all, just doing Web2 development and learning what is the front end, what is the back end, what's the database, how does all that stuff connect together. I really enjoyed it. But in the background, I had gotten involved in Web3 and kind of blockchain stuff quite a while ago.

00:04:22 - Anthony Campolo

It was before I knew how to code at all. It was around 2017, when the first big ICO boom happened. I just found it to be really fascinating, and I found it really interesting to think about the concept of money being a digital asset that's decoupled from fiat currency. It was something that I had never really thought about before. I started reading about the history and learning about the cypherpunks and Cryptonomicon and this whole history of crypto. It was really enticing to me and really interesting. At the time, I was, you know, dirt broke and could barely buy any Ethereum at all. I managed to buy a couple hundred dollars' worth that I thought I lost, then found recently and ended up making like 10 grand off of, so that was pretty cool. But the journey of me actually getting involved in it professionally goes back just six months now to a friend of mine, Noah Hein. He was working at QuickNode and he was like, "No, I know you're really interested in this stuff."

00:05:24 - Anthony Campolo

And at this point you're kind of established, and you're a developer advocate, and we're looking for developer advocates. We're building out a DevRel team." So I joined around April of this year and I've been doing it ever since, going out and doing stuff like this and kind of immersing myself more in the developer side of Web3 and learning about infrastructure and how to create smart contracts and how to create dapps. And that's kind of where I'm at now.

00:05:51 - Dom

And for those who aren't in depth with the industry and like terminology, what is a simple way to describe a developer advocate?

00:06:00 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, sure. So there's some controversy over what exactly a developer advocate does, but the way I describe it is that it sits at the intersection between community, content, and product. So you have the product, which in this case is QuickNode, could be whatever your company's product is, and then you have a group of people who are using that product, that is the community. Then you have content that is hopefully going to explain this product to that community and give them resources so that they can go further and build more and have a sense of what the platform is capable of. So a developer advocate can sit at the intersection of all three of those, and some will lean more heavily toward community management. Some spend more time organizing a Discord and getting that all set up with roles and permissions and alerts. Some people may spend more time creating content and creating videos and guides, and some people may spend more time getting product feedback and even working on the product itself. So it's a fairly cross-functional role, and it's good for people who like to do a million things and can never decide what they want to do.

00:07:10 - Anthony Campolo

So I tend to sit more in the content area, but I also think that to do the job successfully, you really have to touch all of those areas. Because if you aren't talking to the community, you won't know what content to create. If you're not touching the product, you also won't know what content to create. And if you're not working a little bit on the content, then you won't know how to explain things to the community. So they all kind of interrelate to each other. Even though a developer advocate tends to sit more heavily in one area or the other, it's kind of like the whole pie that makes up the job.

00:07:38 - Dom

Fair enough. And I got to ask, since you mentioned you're a music teacher before, was that music teacher as a. Teaching the subject of music or was there a particular instrument?

00:07:48 - Anthony Campolo

That's a good question. So I taught a couple different things. I got a classical education, so I learned how to play the upright bass with the bow and everything, and that was my main instrument. I also did jazz. During the summer, I would work for a summer camp and work with kids in a rock band format. That was actually what I enjoyed the most, and I found what worked best is that if you can get kids together and have them learn pop songs, songs they actually know, and songs that are simple, they'll enjoy it a lot more than if you try and get them to play Mozart. I found that that was actually the best way to teach because then they would have something easy enough to learn in the span of a week, but that still gave them the ability to perform something really fun, and it's music they know. So that was what I enjoyed teaching the most. But I did it all. I also did the whole classical thing, and I taught, you know, just "Hot Cross Buns" and piano lessons and everything.

00:08:47 - Dom

You like Chuck. Chuck the actual. I'm sure there's a different name for it, but chuck the bow out and just do proper, like, bass slapping, like.

00:08:55 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, pizzicato. Yeah, yeah. The bow is hard. Playing with the bow is one of the most challenging things with any instrument because there's so much fine-grained control. And then also you have to be right on the nose, whereas if you're doing pizzicato, you can kind of flub it a little bit. So yeah, I didn't really enjoy playing classical that much because I kind of came into it late in the game. So I was never that great at playing with the bow. But I really enjoy playing jazz. That was something I really got down with.

00:09:22 - Dom

Fair enough. My brother's more the music player. I think he's got bass guitar, but he was always more into classic. No, actually, saying that, I always have a joke with my brother that I started doing MMA, he took up wing chun kung fu. I started doing jitsu, then he started doing jiu-jitsu. I started playing guitar, then he started playing guitar.

00:09:54 - Anthony Campolo

You're a trendsetter.

00:09:56 - Dom

Exactly. But I am one of those all-or-nothing people, so once I got bored, I just stopped doing it. So he actually went on and is definitely a better guitar player than I ever was. He could definitely have more of a conversation on that angle. Again, back to QuickNode, yeah, what is a node, and what is involved with running a node? I'd like to also know any differences that have been made or that you face from the...

00:10:28 - Anthony Campolo

Sure, yeah, it's a good question. So let's talk about what a blockchain is first. A blockchain is a group of computers that together make up a shared network. When I usually explain this to people who've never heard of it or don't know anything about it, I usually compare it to BitTorrent. Because with BitTorrent, you have a peer-to-peer network where there's not a single database or a single server somewhere that is the program. It's a protocol of multiple people connecting their computers together. Those computers synced together are the network itself, and that is the thing. So you can kind of think of it like a shared BitTorrent-like thing for a database because it's a whole bunch of stuff synced together to save data. But it's very different from a database at the same time. So you don't want to lean too much into the database comparison, because a blockchain is not a database. It's something very different. But it's a shared network of computers that together make up a ledger. A ledger can just be thought of as a whole bunch of transactions, like a history of transactions.

00:11:36 - Anthony Campolo

And this was originally with Bitcoin. It was a way for a bunch of people to have some arbitrary number of things, bitcoins, on their computer. And those computers synced together would make up the shared state. When you transacted, when you sent bitcoin from one computer to another, then all the computers would update together and say, "Hey, I have $5. Dom has $5. I want to give Dom a dollar. Now I have $4 and Dom has $6." Everyone records those transactions, and everyone updates together. It's a whole bunch of computers synced together. So each of those computers that has that shared state of the world, that is what a node is. A node is really just a server out there in the world, or a computer like you and I have, running a program. Those programs communicate together over the internet, and then the sum total of all those computers is what makes up what we call the blockchain. And so the node is really important because without the nodes, there is no blockchain. That is literally what the thing is. It's a whole bunch of these nodes together communicating, and their communication is what allows the shared state and what allows us to transact and build programs and do everything that we do in Web3.

00:13:00 - Dom

So I presume that people will. Well, if a protocol is aiming for full decentralization, and you can touch on this a bit in your support of it, but would they place nodes across multiple. I presume that if everybody gave their nodes just a quick node, that wouldn't necessarily be fully decentralized. So do you encourage people to, you know, split them across multiple providers or. I'm just wondering on that process and how you try and keep projects that want to be anyway. Decentralized. Decentralized, yeah.

00:13:37 - Anthony Campolo

So this is a really important part of blockchain. The reason why we want this kind of architecture is because it means there's no single point of failure, because it's decentralized. So you can't take down a single computer and take down a blockchain, because a blockchain is a whole bunch of computers together. If you have 10 nodes all over the world, you take one down, the other nine keep talking to each other and they keep going. So if all of the nodes were being run by one company, that is not really a blockchain. It's something more akin to Amazon. With Amazon, if Amazon goes down, then it's just down. That's it. There's nothing you can do. You wait for Amazon to come back up. So this question of centralization versus decentralization is a perennial philosophical discussion around what level of decentralization is necessary. For QuickNode, we have our own system, which is itself decentralized. So we run on different clouds, we run some on bare metal, we run some on actual services like the equivalent of EC2 or something like that. We also are in multi-region, we run different regions, and then we even run multi-chain.

00:14:58 - Anthony Campolo

So if you want to build a smart contract and you want to build it across multiple chains, you could even do that. Then we have multi-clients, we have different clients, so we're contributing to having not just a single client running for each of these. So in that sense, we do our best to ourselves be decentralized. If you want to go one step further and run nodes on us and another company, then you could decentralize yourself as well. So there's always going to be trade-offs. Because if you want to build across multiple different node providers, then you're adding more overhead for yourself because you have to connect all those together. You're kind of giving up some of the benefits of having a single unified service that makes things simple and easy for you. You're introducing more challenges. It's a question of how much effort you want to put into making yourself as decentralized as possible. For us, we don't want to run the whole game. We think it's good and healthy for other node providers to be out there. We think that makes us all better and stronger to compete with each other and have different options.

00:16:07 - Anthony Campolo

So we're not trying to run the whole game, but we are our own system. And if you want to buy into just using us and go in a slightly more centralized direction, then we think you'll get benefits for that, because then you'll be able to buy into our own specific APIs and our own developer tooling, and we offer things that make the developer experience nicer if you go all in on us. Then the deal is that we ourselves will do our best to keep our own system decentralized. But the great thing about blockchain is that there's always going to be options, there's always going to be other companies out there, and there's always going to be other ways to do this. So we don't think that we should be the sum total of all nodes out there. We think that wouldn't be good for the ecosystem. But we do think that if you want to lean into using a centralized service, we'll be there for you and we'll be able to provide support for you. If you have this crazy multi-service thing that's connecting other things, then we can't really help you when stuff breaks because we don't know how the other team's stuff works.

00:17:08 - Anthony Campolo

We only know how our stuff works.

00:17:11 - Dom

I wonder, because whenever I think of nodes, I think of nodes like validators and miners. I'd be interested, I don't know if it's relevant or not, it could just be that area and I'm confusing it, but what would it take for a... because maybe it's more miners and validators, and node providers obviously make money from... a standard miner makes money from being first to mine bitcoin and gets bitcoin, but that's very different from a node operator. Are there profitable ways to run nodes without contacting the party? For example, to run nodes for Ethereum, are you guys able to profit from that without another human there? Can you decide at a whim, "We're going to start running nodes for X person because it's profitable for us to do so," or will it only be where you've been contacted, or there's a human that you can talk to and then come to an agreement? Or would you ever start running nodes just off your own back because you think it makes sense as a business?

00:18:31 - Anthony Campolo

Sure. And you also asked about the merge, and I'll get to that right after this. So what we do is we partner with the actual teams that are running any specific chain. We don't just pick any chain willy-nilly and say we're going to add this tomorrow and then build it in. We have partnerships with each of the chains. Since I've started here, we've added chains like Avalanche, Harmony, and Stacks. For each of those processes, we're working in lockstep with the foundations or with the companies that created these chains, and we're figuring out basically, how do we support this, and how do we make sure it's as supported as all of our other chains? That means having docs, having all of the methods worked out, so that anyone who wants to interact with this can do it exactly as if they were running their own chain. So that's really the main idea, that when you pick a chain on QuickNode and you get an endpoint from it, you should be able to interact with that endpoint exactly the way you would if you spun up that node yourself.

00:19:39 - Anthony Campolo

And we're running it. No matter what you want to do, what you want to build on it, you will have access to the exact same API methods that you would have if you were running it yourself. We are always very careful to work with chains that we think are reputable, that we think are going to be good for our customers, and that we think are going to be stable. And that's a whole process that goes along with adding a chain. So if you think about the merge, that was this huge coordinated effort to upgrade Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake. As that was going on, we were watching the Ethereum Foundation core team calls and seeing when the merge was going to happen, what the block number was, what new clients we needed, what testnets we needed to deprecate. There's this whole list of things that needs to be done. We are working with the Ethereum Foundation to make sure that's smooth and clear. So there's a lot of coordination that needs to happen between us and the different foundations.

00:20:48 - Anthony Campolo

So adding a chain isn't just a simple "turn on a new chain, then you have a chain." There's a whole process that goes along with it.

00:20:58 - Dom

Fair enough. The next one is kind of a mixture. A lot of it is, if I say it, people won't sort of understand, but it's a bit of a picture of a few things I've seen: that you have different levels of APIs, you also recently acquired, I don't know if it was another company or another technology, and you guys are building some tools.

00:21:24 - Anthony Campolo

I got my Icy tool shirt on right now.

00:21:27 - Dom

Yeah, so there's a good few things. Just for those who won't know, well, there's a lot of people watching this who I know won't know what nodes are, let alone the rest of it. But if you could go into more about your APIs, your tools, and the marketplace you're building, that would be brilliant.

00:21:46 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. Let me just define what an API is. Some of that, if you're not a developer, could be a little confusing. When you have a piece of software, the way you communicate with it is through what's called an API. API is Application Programming Interface. The actual terminology is not that important, but it's the way computers talk to each other. So this could be literally just a regular old database, not a blockchain at all. A database will be connected to a server, and that server will expose some sort of API. You could just go to a link like jsonplaceholder.com, that's an API, and you can get back blobs of data. This is the way all programmers work with these programs, through APIs. With every blockchain, there's what's called an RPC API, remote procedure call. This is how you interact with the blockchain. You can send what's called RPC methods, remote procedure call methods. Those are like eth call, and there are specific things that expect certain inputs and give certain outputs. There's a contract there in terms of what inputs you give and what outputs are given back.

00:23:07 - Anthony Campolo

Now every blockchain has an API, and that API is usually fairly low-level. With QuickNode, we have what are called our enhanced APIs. This is where you kind of lean more into a centralized service, in that we can build higher-level APIs on top of these blockchains. So for common things that you're going to do in your applications, like say you want to get the NFTs in Vitalik's wallet right now, figuring out how to do that will require knowing what the RPC methods are, what Vitalik's specific wallet address is, what inputs are required to get that response back, and then how you're going to format that response in your own application in whatever programming language you use. Whereas we offer APIs to make it very simple to ask for a specific piece of information like that. So we have an NFT API and we have a token API. Then you mentioned Icy Tools. Icy Tools is a GraphQL API. What GraphQL is is not super important. But as I was saying, I was working at a GraphQL company before I did this.

00:24:22 - Anthony Campolo

So for me this was super exciting, because I thought I was leaving the GraphQL world behind, kind of why I came here, and then we immediately bought a company with a GraphQL API. Like, "Oh cool, I know how this works." It's a very small, specific language built around APIs. It's a query language for APIs. But all it means is that you can write, even someone who's not a developer can write, a GraphQL query that's just like, "I want the trending NFT collections right now, and I want to know their name, and I want to know what the floor price is right now." Then you can get back the 10 trending NFTs on Ethereum right now and their floor price and their names, and it'll just give you that information. So it's a way to cut through needing to know what Ethereum RPC method you'd need to figure that out. You just ask for the specific piece of information you want. This is really nice for developer velocity because we're always building stuff all the time.

00:25:22 - Anthony Campolo

We're always trying to build better user interfaces with more functionality that's more stable and gives users what they want. So by building these higher-level APIs, it allows developers to go further, faster, with the resources they have.

00:25:39 - Dom

Fair enough. And the marketplace.

00:25:44 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, so the marketplace is actually a fairly new thing that we have started doing. This just came out within the last week or two. The marketplace is our chance to make us even more decentralized and more able to support the wider ecosystem because we're now providing the ability to add in functionality for anyone. In the past, as I was saying, we'd have to onboard chains and it'd be this long process, and there'd only be some chains that we would support. But now with our marketplace, we allow companies to just plug in and build whatever they want. So we're partnering with companies like Crossmint and Flashbots and BlockTorch, and they're offering things like: Crossmint has an NFT minting API so you can create and send NFTs to users and do that with a single line of code, or with BlockTorch, they're an observability platform so you can get observability into your smart contracts. Then with Flashbots, you can do front-running-related workflows or seeing what's happening when you want to make a trade right away. So with the marketplace, you now have this whole range of different companies that are able to plug into our system and provide this custom functionality. You'll see this with companies like DigitalOcean or Vercel. This whole marketplace idea is about taking the total of QuickNode's platform and allowing other companies to plug in their own specific functionality and do that even if they're not a whole chain.

00:27:37 - Anthony Campolo

So it allows us to support the wider ecosystem, it allows other companies to get a piece of what's happening, and then our developers and users get access to a much wider array of functionality.

00:27:52 - Dom

So it might be the same answer to this question, but I would love to say this is me when I ask this. Unfortunately, I just would never. I haven't even tried to learn coding because I know for a fact I just wouldn't be able to concentrate enough. I know my brother's looking to and is learning a bit of Solidity. For people who are getting started building dapps and smart contracts, do you guys have a place for those people?

00:28:35 - Anthony Campolo

So this is one of the things that really excited me about QuickNode, and actually made me really passionate about working here, is that we put a lot of attention and care and resources into beginner guides. So if you go to quicknode.com/guides, I believe is what it is, you're going to find a whole array of guides for doing a whole bunch of different stuff. If you think about what I like to talk about, like a "Hello, World" smart contract, so you mentioned Solidity, let's talk about Solidity for a second. Solidity is a programming language, but it's a programming language that is native to the blockchain. A programming language is just a way to specify instructions and logic. If you think of the simplest program that most people learn to write in coding bootcamp, it's FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz is: you need to print out a list of numbers 1 through 15, but when you have numbers divisible by 3, you need to say "fizz," and when you have numbers divisible by 5, you need to say "buzz."

00:29:56 - Anthony Campolo

And when you have numbers divisible by 3 and 5, you need to say "fizzbuzz." So you need to print out 1, 2, fizz, 4, buzz, 6, fizz, 7, 8, fizzbuzz. That's a program. It's like the simplest program you can possibly think of. You can write that program in any programming language you can think of. So with Solidity, or let's say with JavaScript: JavaScript is a programming language built into the browser. So anytime you're in your browser, like right now, we're both in a browser, we're here on StreamYard, and a browser has JavaScript in it. JavaScript right now is what allows us to have this whole video interface that's happening right now as a programming language running behind the scenes to create this program that we're using. With Solidity, it's a programming language for the blockchain. So that means it does the same thing every other programming language does. You can write FizzBuzz in Solidity if you want, but the difference is that it's a program written into the blockchain itself. So this means it's a program that can't be altered and can't be changed once it goes out there, because the blockchain saves transactions.

00:31:08 - Anthony Campolo

You can't go back and rewrite a transaction. You can't go back and rewrite a program. This is why you need to be very careful when you write these programs and make sure they're carefully vetted and all that. Because if you put a program out and it does something different than what you thought it was going to do, then you're kind of screwed. So you have all these ways of vetting it and auditing it and stuff. But that's all it is. A program is just a series of instructions, and a program on the blockchain is a series of instructions written into the blockchain. So if you wanted to write a "Hello, World" Solidity smart contract, you could find a guide for that on QuickNode, and you could find a guide that starts you off totally from scratch, saying if you have a blank project, you need to create this file, write this code, run these commands, and it'll walk you through step by step how to do that. We have a whole technical content team that works on these, and then we have our DevRel team, which includes myself, and we write guides as well.

00:32:10 - Anthony Campolo

So if you want to get started with this stuff and you have no idea what to do, you've never done any of this before, you can pick whichever chain you're interested in learning, then go look up our available guides and find some that will walk you through the process. Even if you're a total beginner who has never done it before. If you've never written any code before, you might still be a little bit confused. But if you're someone who's like a bootcamp student who is maybe just learning, someone fresh out of a bootcamp, our guides should be workable and usable for you because we do try to make it as comprehensible and beginner-friendly as possible.

00:32:49 - Dom

Fair enough. Hopefully I can see my brother's been in the comments, so hopefully still, still watching, they can log in. By the way, everybody still got a couple of questions left. But make sure that if you do have any questions that come up whilst we're talking, put them in the chat so that I can ask them towards the end. Yeah. Oh, two things. First, when Token. And second, where does the community live at the moment? Are you guys Discord? Are you Telegram? Are you just Twitter?

00:33:23 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, we are on Discord. So if you go to quicknode.com, you should be able to find a link to our Discord at the very bottom of the page, and we have many channels there if you want to just kind of meet some people and chit-chat and get connected to the industry. You can do that if you're looking to get started. Like if you're interested in the guides, and you're like, "Okay, well, that sounds cool, but I don't really know what guide to do," feel free to hop in the Discord and be like, "Hey, I'm looking to get started. Can you point me in the right direction?" If you're already using QuickNode and you need help, like "Hey, something's broken, I don't know why," then feel free to hop into the Discord. We have a whole support team there ready to help out. We also have a Twitter as well, so that is just twitter.com/quicknode, and I do weekly Twitter Spaces. So if you're interested in kind of hanging out and listening to some of these conversations, we do those every Wednesday.

00:34:27 - Anthony Campolo

The community is really cool. The community aspect of Web3 is one of the things that really draws me to it, because it's about decentralization. It's about giving power back to the people, not necessarily the platforms. We are here for the community, and we really want to help out. There's another question there.

00:34:48 - Dom

Yeah, When Token?

00:34:50 - Anthony Campolo

When Token? Yeah, I don't see us having a token anytime soon. I think that we want to support as many chains as possible, and so building our own chain is a little bit out of scope right now. I mean, I don't want to say never, but it's definitely not currently something we are discussing. But if the right opportunity comes around, you never know. But I wouldn't hold your breath right now.

00:35:15 - Dom

Fair enough. Ruined my next token, which was when Binance.

00:35:18 - Anthony Campolo

But there we go.

00:35:18 - Dom

There we go.

00:35:19 - Anthony Campolo

Well, we do support Binance Smart chain, actually, so we. You can. You can use that.

00:35:24 - Dom

So when Binance now.

00:35:27 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, there you go. It's already there. It's actually one I'm learning more about right now, and I'm kind of getting spun up with. I'll probably go to one of their hackathons in October, so excited to dig more into that one.

00:35:41 - Dom

I've been invited to one in Georgia. I think it's in October. Still need to clear it with the wife. That's always a problem.

00:35:53 - Anthony Campolo

That's what I do. Yeah.

00:35:56 - Dom

Is there anything, any alpha you can tease, Anything coming up that we should be looking out for?

00:36:04 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. So when you have a system like this, one of the most important things is alerts and, in more technical terms, what we call monitoring or observability, because you want to observe what your system is actually doing. If you can't observe what your system is doing, then how are you going to know when it's broken or when it's slow, or when it's just not performing how it should be? We're currently working on something called Quick Alerts, and Quick Alerts is going to be a real-time monitoring system. This is something that my boss right now, Carl, is actually presenting today, I believe. This is still in the works, it's beta, but we are looking for early beta testers. If you're curious, reach out and we'd love to give you access to it and get your thoughts on it. But the main thing is that it gives you the ability to set alerts for all sorts of different stuff. So if you want to know when your chain is slowing down, or when you're having a spike in traffic, or if you want to know when someone is searching for a particular piece of data, you can create whatever kind of alerts you want.

00:37:16 - Anthony Campolo

And the idea is that when whatever you set happens, you get an alert. So it's very customizable. It's very much about giving you the ability to monitor whatever is important to you and your application and specify exactly what that is. So with Quick Alerts, you can think of a wide array of things. Like if you want to see when gas drops to a certain level, if you want to see when an NFT is minted, if you want to see when something hits a certain floor price. The space of things you can imagine doing with this is actually quite wide. So that's kind of what we're working on right now, what we're testing, and what we're looking for beta testers to give us feedback on.

00:38:07 - Dom

Fair enough. See, I'm getting. I thought I'd got sick of the word gas just with Ethereum, but now being over in Europe, I didn't think I could get more sick of the word gas. And now I now every, every part of my life is talking about gas.

00:38:23 - Anthony Campolo

We've had a couple... Yeah, I'm very lucky working from home. I barely drive anywhere anymore. So for me, the [unclear], I'm

00:38:32 - Dom

talking about rather than gasoline. We're talking about what's been blown up from the pipelines coming across from Denmark.

00:38:41 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, well, not quite up on my, my European news.

00:38:47 - Dom

Fair enough. Just had Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 blown up under the water by somebody.

00:38:54 - Anthony Campolo

I wonder who.

00:38:56 - Dom

Well, saying that, I don't know, it's Russia's the one asking to convene the Security Council on it, so. Interesting.

00:39:08 - Anthony Campolo

Above my pay grade.

00:39:10 - Dom

Yeah, I reckon could easily be a false flag, but there we go. We have had a couple of questions in awesome. We've had one. Which blockchain is more secure? E4Binance and a follow up which I'm not sure makes sense I guess in terms of scalability, Binance is better. Question mark.

00:39:32 - Anthony Campolo

So, I mean, what do you mean by secure? I think define your terms a bit more clearly there, because security is a multifaceted thing. Security is not a binary on or off, like "this is secure, this is not secure." Security is this huge multifaceted, multi-matrix thing of: how decentralized is it, is there a core team of people with multi-sig wallets that control this thing, what is the underlying hexadecimal code? There's so many questions that go along with security, so I'm not really sure how to answer a question like that. I would say that the longer a chain has been around, the more decentralized it is, and the more battle-tested it is, it tends to be more secure. So if I'm going to ask what is the more secure blockchain, I'm usually going to ask which one has more users, which one has more nodes, and which has been around longer. Because if you think about it, if anyone could hack the sum total of Ethereum, that's like the largest bug bounty you could ever imagine, that means you get all the money. So if you have a chain that's been around for close to a decade and has $500 billion, a trillion dollars, of value locked into it, every day that it is not hacked is proof of its security.

00:41:06 - Anthony Campolo

So I feel pretty confident that Ethereum is pretty dang secure. Now Binance is also a very large chain that's been around for a decent amount of time. It's not quite as large as Ethereum, it hasn't been around quite as long, but it's very established. I would say any of the chains that are running on QuickNode, you could feel pretty secure about, because we only bring on chains... We support around 15 chains right now. And if you look at CoinMarketCap, there are over 10,000 blockchains out there. So unless you've already been around for a while and you already have a decent amount of users, you're not going to get on QuickNode at all. So I feel pretty confident in the security of all of our chains. If you want to get more granular and say which of these 15 chains we support are more secure than others, you're going to have to really dig into the question, like what do you mean by security, and what security properties specifically are you looking for? Because there's the security of the chain itself. There's also the security of the smart contracts you write, because you could have a chain that's very secure, but if it has a programming language built into it that's very buggy and is easy to write error-prone code, then maybe you'll have a dapp that's insecure on top of that chain.

00:42:20 - Anthony Campolo

So this is why I say, just asking, "Is this chain more secure?" The question fundamentally doesn't make sense.

00:42:26 - Dom

Solana, talking about a buggy coding language.

00:42:31 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, Solana is an interesting one. We have one of the largest group of Solana nodes anywhere, possibly the largest. So we're very intimately familiar with Solana and all its quirks and we make sure it is staying up and running. Fair enough.

00:42:50 - Dom

Well, if you don't want to take responsibility for that job. Yeah, I guess that also answers in terms of scalability as well. That's the same answer, right?

00:43:03 - Anthony Campolo

With scalability, this one's a little easier to answer because it is more of a binary on/off question. There's a question of how much information can go through this blockchain at one point in time. You can think of it as transactions, you can think of it as block space, you can pick whatever kind of number you want, but there is going to be a clearer answer to what is more scalable. And like you were saying, Solana, even though it may go down every now and then, Solana is one of the more scalable blockchains around. Then you have newer ones that are more decoupled, like Avalanche with their whole subnet thing, and they are also working on being more scalable. But then you also have Ethereum. The merge didn't necessarily make it more scalable, but it's setting them up to be more scalable because it's getting them ready for this more rollup-centric world. We also support layer twos like Optimism and Arbitrum. And yeah, I think the great thing about having a multi-chain world like this is that you can decide which properties are more important to you.

00:44:18 - Anthony Campolo

If you want something that's highly secure, you can do that. If you want something that's going to be more highly scalable, you can do that. So you can look at the different chains we offer, compare those different properties, and decide what's going to be more important to you.

00:44:34 - Dom

Fair enough. We've had. What benefits would the average person get from running a node? Obviously it depends on the node, but let's just say Ethereum, for example.

00:44:46 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, well, I guess it depends, like what does this average person want to get out of Web3 and blockchain? The thing we're really beneficial for is developers who want to build applications. If you're someone who's not a developer and you have no interest in coding or creating anything, a service like AWS wouldn't really be that useful to you, because AWS gives you the ability to run servers or databases or front ends or any of that kind of stuff. But if you're not someone building applications, you wouldn't really know what to do with that stuff. So we are a dev tools company, and this is really what appealed to me about it because I love dev tools. I think dev tools are super cool. For us, the quote-unquote average person might not get a whole lot of benefit from us. But if you're someone who just wants to understand how this stuff works, maybe you're not really that interested in building this whole huge... maybe you're not interested in building Uniswap, you don't want to create a whole DeFi thing, but you're curious about it.

00:46:00 - Anthony Campolo

Maybe you use Uniswap and you're like, "What would it actually take to build something like this?" You can go on QuickNode, spin up a node, check out some of our DeFi guides, and learn how to do that, and it will cost you $0. We have a free plan. You can spin up a node completely for free, and you can learn how this stuff works. So if you're the average person and you're naturally curious and want to get a better sense of where your money is actually going, people put so much money into this stuff and they may have no clue what any of it's doing. So I think that's one benefit an average person can get, they can get a taste of what's actually happening under the hood here. What is all this stuff doing? Why am I putting my money into this? Why do I believe this is something that's actually going to be worth money one day? You can figure out how to create a very simple dapp and figure out what it means to interact with a node or an endpoint or any of that stuff.

00:46:55 - Anthony Campolo

You'll probably be very confused along the way, but you'll also learn a lot. This is why I say our guides are actually really good and well thought out and can be useful for beginners. So if you don't know what any of this stuff means, but you're still like, "Okay, what can I do with this?" try creating an account, spinning up a node, and following a guide. Just see what happens. You might be surprised by what you learn. You might actually get hooked and all of a sudden become a blockchain developer.

00:47:20 - Dom

So what you're saying is Quick Node is the crack of Ethereum. It's getting people hooked.

00:47:29 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, it's the gateway drug or the stepping stone if you want a more family friendly metaphor.

00:47:36 - Dom

Not interested in those. We got one here which is a good, good one to be honest. Does Quicknode also provide computing and memory resources in brackets platform to run a node for any chain or is it just blockchain analytics, API and other infra to bootstrap multi chain dapps quicker?

00:47:56 - Anthony Campolo

So we just offer specific chains themselves, if that's what the question is getting at. You can't just spin up a generic server and run any node you want for any chain. If you wanted to do that, you're really looking more at using AWS or DigitalOcean and spinning up a server and loading up your own software. With us, you are going to have a bunch of chains to pick from, and you start by picking a chain. That's the very first thing you do: create an account, then spin up a chain. It'll give you a list of all of our chains, and you'll pick one and go. So right now we do not offer generic server space. I won't say we never will, but as of now we do not. And offering generic server space is really more the purview of server companies themselves, so it's a little bit of a different vertical.

00:48:52 - Dom

Fair enough. So is it like you mentioned that you only support like 15 blockchains and if it's with you guys, you know, it's probably not financial advice, but fairly decent enough. So are like node providers like the, the listings of layer ones? Like for example, will they announce it as a bullish thing that our blockchain is now on Quick Node? And also like who are your competitors? Is it like, because I'm imagining like Quick Node like Binance and then there's going to be an FTX and a Coinbase and a Kucoin out there. Is that how it works or am I just making shit up?

00:49:33 - Anthony Campolo

No, you're right on the money. I mean, with anything in software, software itself is such a highly competitive field, and there's always going to be, for every Amazon, a Google and an Azure going up against them. So for us, almost anyone who gets involved in dev tooling for blockchain will know about Alchemy, they'll know about Infura, there's a whole host of others that people talk about. I could list off 10 node providers honestly, there's a whole bunch. For us, that's a really strong signal. That actually shows this is a very healthy ecosystem, that there is a lot of competition. There's a lot of people who have slightly different ideas of how to go about this problem. Traditionally, in the past, you would have providers that kind of aimed for a certain ecosystem. You would have some that would be really heavy into EVM chains, which are Ethereum-compatible chains. Because you have Ethereum, and then you have chains that are using Ethereum's virtual machine to bootstrap their chain.

00:50:37 - Anthony Campolo

So that's traditionally what you'd see. Then you have Solana providers, and they would be completely separate. So our niche is that we offer infrastructure for many different chains, and we're not just saying you have to use this kind of chain and that's going to be the only thing we offer. We try to offer a wide variety of different chains, and any chains that we think are interesting or valuable we're going to look at onboarding. So that's kind of where we're at right now in terms of where we sit versus the ecosystem. Then obviously we're highly focused on reliability and availability and performance. So if you want to look at some of these different providers, you can do speed comparisons between them, and we think that we do pretty well stacking up against the competition there.

00:51:25 - Dom

Otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned it.

00:51:27 - Anthony Campolo

That's right.

00:51:29 - Dom

Another interesting one, which is, yeah, typical crypto. Is there a way for retail to get exposure if they think you guys will do well? Their exact words. Well, I feel like a quick note will be the AWS of blockchain. Is there a way for retail to invest somehow? Token NFT is stock.

00:51:49 - Anthony Campolo

So right now, I mean, the best way to invest would be to get a job here. Right now we're VC-backed, we've done a Series A, and Andreessen Horowitz is one of our investors, and we have a team of people who've invested in us. Right now we're not a public company, so you can't invest in us. But if you do kind of believe in the QuickNode vision, then feel free to get in touch with us, and if you want to see how we can collaborate, we can figure out how we can collaborate. There's no way to directly invest in us. As I said previously, there's no QuickNode token yet, so you can't really buy in that way. But with stuff like that, it can be very risky, and you never really know exactly what you're going to be getting involved in. So we're kind of playing more of the VC company model. People have invested in us, and that stuff's all pretty standard, you know what you get.

00:52:47 - Anthony Campolo

And so for me, I work here, and there's vesting and all that kind of thing, but unfortunately there's not really a good way to get exposure to it if you're kind of outside the company right now, just because you know how VC works.

00:53:01 - Dom

Fair enough. Well, you're gonna have to wait. That's why I said when tokens. See, I'm asking the right questions here. But no, I mean, yeah, that's great. That's all the questions that we've had from, from the audience, as always, guys like. And subscribe. You can check out quicknode@twitter.com Quicknode what's the website is it again quicknow.com quicknow.com.

00:53:20 - Anthony Campolo

Yep. And same with our Twitter, and from our website you can find our Discord and anywhere else that we reside on the internet. We have a YouTube as well, and we even have a Twitch, QuickNodeHQ. Every now and then we do some live streams where I build out some examples and do some live coding. We have a lot of different places where you can find us, and we would love to get in touch with you. We'd love to know what you're building, what you're interested in building, and hopefully we can help you out.

00:53:48 - Dom

Nice one. Perfect. Thanks so much. I'm sure there's plenty of people gonna reach out. I've even thought of something myself. Let's see how long my attention span can hold to see if I remember to reach out on it.

00:53:58 - Anthony Campolo

But.

00:53:58 - Dom

But yeah, thanks so much for joining and. Oh damn, there we go. See as soon as I wrap up, somebody comes in. Is QuickNote hiring at the moment by the way? If so, do you hire in the U.S. absolutely, yeah.

00:54:11 - Anthony Campolo

So we are hiring. If you go to, let's see, QuickNode or jobs.lever.co/quicknode, you can find our current open positions. We hire all over the world. I am currently in St. Louis, and we have people in India, we have people in the UK, we have people all over the place. We are based in Miami, but we're worldwide. We all work remotely, and yeah, we'd love to chat with you. We're hiring across multiple departments, and even throughout this downturn we were still hiring. This is something that made me even more bullish on the company I'm working for, that even as the market was tanking, we're still going strong because for us, we're selling infrastructure, we're just selling compute space. So even if all the coins are going down, people still need to run these servers, people still need to keep the blockchains running. So we feel like we're pretty antifragile in that respect, and we're pretty resilient to these market downturns. Since I started at the company in April, we've almost doubled.

00:55:21 - Anthony Campolo

So we are growing and we are hiring and we would love to speak with you if you find this stuff interesting and want to learn more and are curious to work with us.

00:55:29 - Dom

Good stuff. And I, I happen to know who sits behind the bear market 2022 survivor mask of which is their username on YouTube. So I'll I'll sling you a telegram ID over to him so that he can give you a little pitch.

00:55:45 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, please do. Definitely would love to talk to you, like, genuinely. Yeah.

00:55:48 - Dom

I've even met him in real life, so. Can't say that about most people in crypto, but there we go. Thanks so much, everybody. Thanks for joining. Anthony. Really interesting. And, yeah, looks like you might have a. A new colleague from it. So there we are. Yeah.

00:56:04 - Anthony Campolo

Thank you, Dom. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is a really good time. I always enjoy these conversations.

00:56:09 - Dom

Nice one. Brilliant. Thanks so much, everybody. See you later.