Don’t Trust, Verify. A motto within crypto we are all familiar with. But how do we actually check blockchain data? Thanks to infrastructure providers like Liquify, all our favourite tooling is able to give us the insights we are looking for.
Many of us Web3 users will be familiar with analytical tools such as Nansen, Dune Dashboards and TokenTerminal. They give us nice infographics on all types of interesting data regarding NFTs, DeFi, LSTs, you name it. If you want to take your research one step further, block explorers are great places to dive into all the different transaction data and see what is happening in real time.
Both of the above still require you to trust that the companies providing these user interfaces are showing you actual blockchain data. This is why some dedicated people and projects run their own node. Running a node in general has many trade offs, which we discussed here, however most people run ‘normal’ nodes. These nodes are what is called ‘pruned’ to be synced quickly and are capable of most basic node functionality. In order to have a full overview of all of the blockchain’s history and all of its data however, we need Archival Nodes.
A look into Liquify’s Archive
Since these archival nodes are complete nodes with all state, these nodes often grow with Terabytes each year, and in case of Solana-type blockchains, even Petabytes. They are quite a handful to maintain, but all of us data interested people rely on them. On-chain analytics companies, explorers, indexers, DeFi DApps that require historical data, all these will need to run an archival node in order to work. In order for these companies to focus on their own research and development, most opt for partnering with the likes of Liquify to run their archival nodes for them.
What makes Liquify the right choice for running archival nodes all comes down to its hardware setup and vision. Liquify makes sure all of its services are non-custodial and are run on self-owned bare metal servers. Not only does this mean steady and reliable uptime of your node, it also means that Liquify can set up big new archival nodes relatively quickly, due to owning our own hardware. Most projects that need historical data RPCs would have to pay a lot of cloud costs due to the size of archival nodes, which are truly massive, some taking up 8 Terabyte. To set up your own archival node means overhead, high costs and a lot of time maintaining it. As Liquify is already running nodes on more than 60 blockchains, Liquify can easily scale and add new nodes in no time, often 30–40% more cost effectively than cloud alternatives.
Powering The Fuse Explorer and Beyond
As an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider, Liquify runs archival nodes on a variety of chains such as multiple EVM chains and also archival nodes for testnets of Polygon, Avalanche and Ethereum. One of our long term partners is the Fuse Network, an EVM L1, which Liquify supports in many ways, with validators, RPCs and archival access for their official explorer!
Liquify can offer Web3 projects looking for archival nodes any of our live nodes that are already running, and for the real power users we offer dedicated nodes to accommodate the highest of traffic throughput. Making sure all the tools we all use to check the blockchain have no downtime. If your project needs a lot of RPCs with historical data or you have had unreliable results with your cloud nodes, let us know! Liquify is ready to help.
Our History Allows Us To Have A Trustless Future
For most daily user activities, light nodes are more than sufficient. As long as we have archival nodes running in the back, providing us with the data to truly verify which account owns what. Without archival nodes, our blockchains lack the foundation to be trustless and permissionless.
Since most DeFi DApps and on-chain analytics and explorers are in need of these types of nodes, we do not have to fear too much for not having enough parties caring about this historical data. What we should fear is how much most crypto projects rely on centralised cloud servers to host their archival nodes on.
Liquify has a mission to provide cost effective, reliable alternatives for the ecosystem to tap into. We believe that with our global non-custodial bare metal setup we can do our part in maintaining blockchain’s history and helping all users verify individually, as these decentralised systems were meant to.
About Liquify
Founded in 2021, Liquify Ltd is a certified UK-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) company servicing institutions and foundations. We have over $200M in staked assets and do more than 500M RPC requests per day.
Follow us on X and Warpcast or subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date with our infrastructure news within Web3. For real-time updates, follow our Telegram.
