Can This Web3 Cloud Platform Ease Solana’s Downtime Woes?

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Solana has been hit by a series of tech­no­log­i­cal fail­ures since its launch two years ago. But that’s not the only prob­lem. The pop­u­lar net­work also suf­fered from a lack of what is being called “prop­er blockchain index­ing pro­to­cols.” Now, web3 firm Aleph.im wants to change all that.

On Oct. 6, the cross-blockchain decen­tral­ized stor­age and com­put­ing net­work launched its open-source index­ing tech­nol­o­gy for the Solana blockchain. It is a decen­tral­ized tool that enables dApp devel­op­ers to “effi­cient­ly index and query blockchain data.”

“The index­er allows a project to query spe­cif­ic data on the Solana blockchain so that projects built on top of it can get the infor­ma­tion they need to func­tion,” Clau­dio Pas­cariel­lo, cofounder of Aleph, told Be[In]Crypto.

“For the retail user, this means a much more stream­line user expe­ri­ence when inter­act­ing with a dApp [decen­tral­ized appli­ca­tion] that is using our index­er and less issues like outages/exploits etc.,” he added.

The key­word here is decen­tral­iza­tion. dApps already depend on cen­tral­ized index­ers such as Ama­zon Web Ser­vices or Google Cloud to obtain on-chain data. But that devi­ates from the cryp­to ideals of trustlessness.

Also, cen­tral­iza­tion can cause “seri­ous secu­ri­ty flaws and out­age issues,” accord­ing to Aleph CEO Jonathan Schemoul.

What is Aleph?

Aleph.im describes itself as “a decen­tral­ized, dis­trib­uted, server­less plat­form that offers com­pu­ta­tion ser­vices, stor­age facil­i­ties, and index­ing solu­tions.” It is a cross-blockchain that uses “Vir­tu­al Machine” tech­nol­o­gy to deal with issues of cen­tral­iza­tion in cloud computing.

In August 2021, the com­pa­ny released its decen­tral­ized index­ing tech­nol­o­gy for the Solana blockchain ecosys­tem for the first time. Then, index­ers ran in a closed envi­ron­ment. Now projects can cre­ate cus­tom index­ers run on Aleph’s infrastructure.

“This is ground­break­ing for the web3 space,” Pas­cariel­lo claimed. “If a project uses Anchor, for exam­ple, they will be able to get their index­er up and run­ning in less than 10 mins. There is noth­ing out there that even resem­bles this.”

Since the ini­tial launch, Aleph has indexed more than 3,000 mar­ket pairs with­in the Solana DeFi ecosys­tem. It claimed to be han­dling “14 mil­lion trans­ac­tion requests per day on 220 inde­pen­dent­ly run resource nodes on the network.”

It said that its index­er on Solana “runs on cost-effi­cient vir­tu­al machines, which adds more flex­i­bil­i­ty and makes data retrieval eas­i­er.” A num­ber of projects on Solana have plugged in to Aleph’s tech.

That includes auto­mat­ed mar­ket mak­ers (AMM) Ray­di­um, Orca and Saber, lend­ing pro­to­col Port Finance, liq­uid­i­ty pro­to­col Swim, and others.

What is an indexer and how does it work?

Accord­ing to Aleph, “index­ers fetch raw data from a blockchain net­work, and effi­cient­ly store it for easy access.” It adds that blockchain index­ing pro­to­cols “facil­i­tate the col­lec­tion, pro­cess­ing, and access of rel­e­vant blockchain data that is oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult to obtain.”

This is impor­tant. On-chan data index­ing is the foun­da­tion of decen­tral­ized finance (DeFi) and non-fun­gi­ble token appli­ca­tions. This allows users to access “port­fo­lio aggre­ga­tors, TVL dash­boards, wal­let pro­fil­ing, and more,” said Aleph in a state­ment.

But gain­ing access to data his­to­ry on the Solana blockchain in its cur­rent form is chal­leng­ing. It is cost­ly and requires “incom­pre­hen­si­ble com­put­ing pow­er for indi­vid­ual projects that wish to chal­lenge the his­to­ry of the blockchain and build use­ful data points for their apps.”

Clau­dio Pas­cariel­lo, the Aleph cofounder, said devel­op­ers on Solana using the company’s tech are able to improve, cus­tomize or fork the open-source decen­tral­ized indexer.

“This means you can now set up an index­er for your dApp in min­utes depend­ing on your needs,” he told Be[In]Crypto. “With oth­er index­ers on Solana, they’re all closed source and thus can­not be cus­tomized to pull the data you need.”

Con­tin­u­ing, Pas­cariel­lo said: 

“Each project has very spe­cif­ic needs when it comes to query­ing the Solana blockchain and with oth­er index­ers most projects are hav­ing to work around the lim­i­ta­tions. With our frame­work, there won’t be any lim­i­ta­tions on what data you want to pull and how you use it.”

Easing Solana’s frequent outages

Solana is the ninth largest cryp­tocur­ren­cy by cap­i­tal­iza­tion, with a mar­ket val­ue of $11.96 bil­lion, as per Coin­mar­ket­cap data. But the blockchain, which uses a token of the same name, or SOL, has been blight­ed by recur­ring tech fail­ures since it was launched in 2020.

This has caused huge incon­ve­niences for mil­lions of Solana users. SOL’s marked decline may also be traced to the reg­u­lar out­ages, eight in total. 

As of writ­ing, the token is down 1.1% at $33.67. SOL has slumped 87% since peak­ing at $260 on Nov. 6, 2021, CoinGecko reports.

When the Solana net­work is down, on-chain data will not avail­able for any­one. This affects users who may be look­ing for such sort of data at that point.

Pas­cariel­lo said Aleph’s decen­tral­ized index­ing tool could help bring sta­bil­i­ty to the Solana ecosys­tem by mak­ing his­tor­i­cal data avail­able even dur­ing peri­ods of net­work blackouts.

“Until the down­time is resolved no new data will be able to be fetched,” he said of the Solana out­ages. “But when you have an index­er deployed on Aleph, his­tor­i­cal data that already has been fetched, will still be available..”

He added: “From a user expe­ri­ence per­spec­tive, this is high­ly valu­able as the data is still there. While projects not index­ing will have no data to show until Solana is back online.”

Even with­out net­work fail­ures, Solana users have had to endure peri­ods of delays in get­ting data feeds “due to inad­e­quate tech­ni­cal infra­struc­ture,” often the result of an increase in “data requests dur­ing high net­work activ­i­ty, [which] clogs the network.”

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