(Re)introducing Gelato — Web3’s Decentralized Backend
Before we share what we’ve been working on, let’s revisit where it all began…
How we got here
As builders back in 2019, we were frustrated with the limitations of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) — more specifically with the limitations of smart contract functionality and how decisions about when logic should be executed had to be handled outside the network itself.
The process of automating smart contracts was massively less efficient than it is today; every web3 project was required to run and maintain their own complex and costly centralized infrastructure to deal with the necessary computation to automate their smart contracts. The need was clear for a generalized network that didn’t force web3 developers to choose between development speed, reliability and decentralization.
The solution was obvious: Gelato. Our battle-tested network empowers developers by providing them with reliable infrastructure to power the next generation of DeFi, NFT and gaming applications in web3. In short, merging web2 functionality with web3’s democratization of data.
The impact of building web3’s underlying automation protocol is often underestimated. For web3 apps to fulfill their potential of building systems that go beyond the reach of traditional intermediaries, institutions and nation states, an unstoppable, decentralized computation network is vital.
Gelato’s New Vision
After years of building and working with top tier projects in web3, we’d like to share our vision for how we’re aiming to build exactly that. You may know us as an automation protocol, but we have evolved into:
“Web3’s decentralized backend, empowering the world to run on smart contracts”
And to go with this new direction, we’ve also got a new look!
Gelato enables builders to create Augmented Smart Contracts: smart contracts that are reliably automated, provide a gasless user experience, and leverage off-chain data and computation. In short, they can help you create apps capable of onboarding the next billion users to web3.
Our evolution has already started
The introduction of Gelato Relay solidified Gelato’s evolution from being an automation protocol to expanding into additional core web3 backend services.
With Gelato Relay, web3 front ends can offer their users a fully gasless UX and web3 backends can outsource their transaction management to a decentralized relay network. Gelato abstracts away all the complexities of interacting with blockchains in a simple, reliable and scalable manner across all major EVM chains.
This has enabled cross-chain messaging protocols such as Connext and NFTrade to scale and serve thousands of users without the need to run any custom centralized relaying infrastructure themselves.
What’s next?
Enabling Augmented Smart Contracts requires not only reliable automation and transaction relaying, but also the ability to leverage off-chain data and computation. This is why we are excited to announce our highly anticipated feature that will hit production later this year: Off-Chain Resolvers.
Off-Chain Resolvers
Many web3 projects rely heavily on off-chain data and computation from centralized servers to augment their smart contracts. This is due to two major limitations: smart contracts only have access to data available on their native blockchain and the expense of on-chain computation.
Using Gelato’s Off-Chain Resolvers, projects can finally overcome these limitations by writing simple Typescript files that are stored on IPFS or private data storage solutions and are continuously run by Gelato on their behalf, similar to web2 cloud functions. Leveraging data available on other web2 servers or decentralized data storage systems enables projects to access data which is not available on-chain (e.g. NFT data), connecting smart contracts to the real world. For example, on-chain music royalty payments based on how often songs on platforms like Spotify have been listened to.
This new feature turns Gelato into a lightweight Oracle provider, giving users the flexibility to tailor the level of data validation to the needs of their web3 application, e.g. selecting from various off-chain first-party Oracle services.
For a sneak peek, check out the “Off-chain Resolver” section in our docs.
Join us and stay tuned
We will release more information on our decentralization roadmap and other upcoming releases soon.
In the meantime, here’s how you can be the first to hear about new updates:
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Want to decentralize your web3 backend with Gelato? Reach out to us here!
