Deploy Your Own Own Fully-Decentralized Solana Indexer Using Aleph.im — Here’s How…
At Aleph.im, we are super excited to announce the first-ever, fully open-source, decentralized indexing framework that lets you deploy your own custom Solana indexer!
In August 2021, we introduced a decentralized, user-friendly, and cost-effective indexing solution for Solana. Leading Solana-based projects like Raydium and Serum soon became our partners, seeking an alternative to centralized and/or resource-intensive indexing services.
We are now taking our offering to the next level with our fully open-source release. You can now deploy your own high-performance Solana indexer tailored to your needs.
How To Deploy Your Own Indexer For Solana
Aleph.im is all for transparency and user-friendliness, enabling you to freely access bespoke, decentralized innovations. That’s why we designed our open-source indexer framework with two customization levels: no-code configurations and full customization.
Option 1: Configure Without Coding
Launch your custom indexer in minutes by simply changing the configurations to serve your project’s specific needs. You can retrieve only the data you want, and how you want it, using this option.
You don’t need any technical knowledge, experience, or coding skills to leverage our open-source indexers, thanks to no-code configurations. All you need to know are the addresses and data types you want your dApp to follow, retrieve, and serve. Specify these while configuring your indexer, and you’re good to go. You can thus deliver critical analytics to your users, completely hassle-free.
Option 2: Fully Customize Your Own Indexer
Web3 is an ever-evolving space where groundbreaking innovations happen every day, every minute. So we made an innovation-ready indexing framework that you can customize to meet your needs.
You get granular control over your Solana indexers because of our framework’s easy customizability. This lets you build freely on top of our robust, resilient, and flexible base.
The customization and deployment process:
- Download the source code from our repository on GitHub here
- Create a package with your project’s name using the indexers already available as examples
- Make the proper customizations and write your own data model
- Test it on your local device to ensure that everything works well and you have all the data you need
- Upload and run the custom program on the Aleph.im network using our quick guide here
- Connect to your brand new Indexer accessing through the GraphQL API (Guide on how to do that here)
Having said that, you might wonder if it’s possible to fork our open-source indexer to run outside the Aleph.im network.
It is possible, though often impractical. Most centralized cloud computing services cost upwards of $15K per month while our decentralized network is essentially free-to-use. You can deploy resources (e.g., your Solana indexer) simply by holding (not spending) ALEPH tokens in your wallet. Moreover, you can use our production-ready indexer framework right out of the box, minimizing setup costs. Most importantly, using the Aleph.im decentralized network of nodes, you get full access to the Solana history (RPC). If you choose to fork it and use your own custom networking solution, you won’t have access to the Solana history.
In the near future, we will also feature all Aleph.im-based Solana indexers on our website, which will serve as a marker of trust and transparency. It will assure users that the data is being indexed via a fully-decentralized node network rather than any centralized system prone to data manipulation or tampering.
Naturally, this list will only include custom indexers running on the decentralized Aleph.im network, vetted by our distributed community.
How Much Does It Cost To Run an Indexer?
Well, that depends on how much storage and computing power you need. We recommend holding 30,000 ALEPH tokens in your signing wallet for every 10gb of data stored. It’s important to note, ALEPH tokens are not spent in the process when using resources on our network, holding the tokens is all you need to do.
What Sets Aleph.im Apart From Other Indexing Solutions?
We provide services that none of our competitors do. We pioneered decentralized IPFS pinning services in 2021.
Now, we are the first fully open-source and decentralized indexing solution for the Solana ecosystem. So, you can stay ahead of the curve with our novel indexer framework that offers new levels of transparency and customization never before seen on the Solana network.
Not only that, you also get the following specific benefits and advantages:
- Save time and money. Running custom indexers on Aleph.im’s microVM network instead of using resource-intensive hardware cuts operating costs drastically. Plus our indexers serve the latest database first and then look for historical data. This is more practical than our peers’ method, i.e. indexing and serving entire blockchain databases at once.
- Experience decentralization, with enhanced security. Hosting indexers on our globally distributed node network using our fully-decentralized stack helps you eliminate single-points of failure. And you needn’t rely upon any centralized infrastructure, which is groundbreaking for indexing.
- Be(come) unstoppable. No government or centralized authority can stop your indexer once it’s up and running on Aleph.im. Even if one part of the network goes down somehow, other parts will keep running and so will your indexer.
- Get community support. Building with our open-source code will make you a member of the Aleph.im community, brimming with innovators and adopters. They will help audit your indexer so that it’s bug-free. You can also ask for all kinds of support, whenever you need.
- Do it yourself. Enjoy complete freedom while deploying custom indexers with our decentralized and hassle-free solutions that you can use on your own. You can reach the market fast, but without involving any centralized intermediary or external party.
Now you know why Aleph.im is the go-to choice for projects looking to index the Solana blockchain. But you might still wonder how (or why) you’ll need a custom indexer.
What Are Some Use-Cases For A Solana Indexer?
There are ‘x’ number of uses for decentralized indexers as Web3 matures. The possibilities are endless, particularly on high-performance networks like Solana.
Nevertheless, here are some common use-cases, most of which our partners are already leveraging…
Surface Trading Data and Price Charts
Data-driven insights is crucial for high-frequency crypto trading, which is also a sign of maturing markets. This, in turn, creates a strong demand for rich trading analytics.
You can meet this demand with custom indexers to retrieve, compile, and serve all kinds of trading data. This includes inter-day and intra-day trading volumes, token prices and price charts, and total volume locked (TVL) for token pairs.
We have already partnered with several leading Solana-based AMMs, who are using our indexers. For example, Raydium’s analytics dashboard is powered by Aleph.im. Serum is using our solution to index information like daily active users, open order accounts, and owner addresses.
Some of our other Solana-based exchange and marketplace partners include Saber, Orca, and PsyOptions.
Like traders, liquidity providers, yield farmers, and even retail investors need rich data to make informed choices.
You can serve them using custom indexers to provide information about total borrowed value and borrowing costs, fees, capital flows, liquidity ratios, deposits, withdrawals, profits, etc.
Compile DeFi Metrics and Lending Rates
Port Finance compiles metrics like loan-to-value ratio and flash loan fees using Aleph.im indexers. Swim indexes transaction history across multi-token liquidity pools. Friktion leverages Aleph.im indexers to ensure transparency around users’ deposits, withdrawals, and profits. Katana fosters well-informed investments using Aleph.im to index its options vaults.
Boost Interoperability and Scalability
For blockchain-based applications to interact seamlessly, developers must have a big-picture view of where things stand. This also applies to developing scalability solutions, except that it additionally requires micro-level data.
You can compile protocol-level data with custom Aleph.im indexers, such as node statistics, smart contract addresses and usage metrics, transactions per second (TPS), etc.
Neon is using Aleph.im to index the above data types. It also allows developers to access past events and transaction histories.
Mirror Gaming States and Asset Metadata
The GameFi and P2E space is expanding rapidly on Solana, thanks to its scalability and performance. And with the growing number of immersive and high-fidelity games, Solana’s data flow is also increasing significantly.
Gaming protocols have to constantly query on-chain states in sync with gameplay actions. This demands high-frequency, low-latency solutions that you can provide in a fully-decentralized manner using our open-source indexer framework.
Moreover, we previously partnered with Ubisoft to develop the first-ever dynamic non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for AAA games. Unlike ordinary, static NFTs, these Dynamic NFTs use Aleph.im microVMs to generate and store rich metadata, such as current and previous owner, asset description, etc.
You can use Dynamic NFTs in combination with a decentralized indexer for your Solana-based gaming project. This will help you achieve last-mile decentralization while efficiently retrieving on-chain information for generating metadata.
What’s In Store For The Future?
Web3 is still young, with infinite possibilities awaiting in the future. Thanks to its underlying technologies, such as blockchain and cryptography, we now have the tools to solve long-standing problems, especially those caused by centralization and corruptible systems.
Decentralized information retrieval, storage, and delivery is crucial for Web3’s formation and success. That’s why we are so excited to see all the interesting ways in which you will use our open-source indexer solution.
The sky is your limit, so don’t let anything (or anybody) stop you from innovating futuristic products and services. We at Aleph.im, will keep providing the technology and infrastructure necessary to help you build your project with transparency, flexibility and security in mind. The future, after all, is ours to build.
