You’re Either First or You’re Last — Why Blockchain Node Latency Matters.

What does Latency mean to the Blockchain Industry?

Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize various industries by providing a secure and decentralized platform for data storage and processing. As a result, there has been a surge in the development of blockchain-based applications in recent years. However, the performance and scalability of these applications are heavily dependent on the underlying blockchain network. The network is composed of nodes that are responsible for processing and validating transactions, as well as storing and replicating the blockchain data.

What is Latency?

When a user sends a request to the blockchain network, it is processed by a node and returned as a response. The time it takes for the node to process and return the request is known as the RPC API latency.

RPC API latency is a crucial factor to consider when building and scaling blockchain applications as it directly affects the performance and user experience of the application. A high RPC API latency can lead to slower processing times and a frustrating user experience, while a low RPC API latency can ensure a smoother and more efficient experience.

Use Cases

There are various use cases where lower node latencies can provide a competitive edge in application performance, such as decentralized exchanges, decentralized finance platforms, and gaming platforms.

Decentralized Exchanges

One such use case is in decentralized exchanges (DEXs). As mentioned earlier, DEXs rely on the blockchain network to match and execute trades. If a DEX has a low RPC API latency, it can process and execute trades more quickly, resulting in a faster and more efficient trading experience for users. This can give the DEX a competitive edge over other DEXs with higher latencies, as users are more likely to prefer a faster and more efficient trading platform.

Decentralized Finance Applications

Another use case is in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. DeFi applications often rely on the blockchain network to facilitate financial transactions, such as lending and borrowing. If a DeFi application has a low RPC API latency, it can process and complete transactions more quickly, resulting in a more convenient and user-friendly experience for users. This can give the DeFi application a competitive edge over other DeFi applications with higher latencies, as users are more likely to prefer a faster and more efficient platform.

Blockchain Gaming

Gaming platforms also benefit from low RPC API latencies, as it allows for seamless, real-time gameplay. If a blockchain-based gaming platform has a high RPC API latency, it may take longer for players to complete actions or make moves, leading to a slower and less enjoyable gaming experience. On the other hand, a low RPC API latency can ensure that gameplay is smooth and seamless, resulting in a more enjoyable experience for players.

Nirvana Nodes — Fastest in the Galaxy

Nirvana Labs offers the fastest nodes with the lowest global average latency times, making it an excellent choice for developers looking to build high-performance blockchain applications.

Nirvana Labs has built a cloud agnostic, scalable infrastructure as a service model, which enables us to offer the fastest nodes at the most affordable prices. Our infrastructure is designed to eliminate the need for centralized middlemen, such as AWS and Google Cloud, allowing us to pass on cost savings to our customers. In addition, our team of expert engineers has optimized our systems for speed and efficiency, ensuring that our nodes deliver lightning-fast performance. By choosing Nirvana Labs, you can enjoy the benefits of a high-performance, cost-effective solution that doesn’t rely on expensive and slow centralized providers. If you’re looking to improve the performance and cost-efficiency of your cloud infrastructure, we encourage you to visit our website at https://nirvanalabs.io or reach out to sales@nirvanalabs.ai to learn more about how we can help.

Nirvana Labs maintains a global average latency of 28 milliseconds which is 3x FASTER than the closest competitor. Beyond that, our WebSocket APIs have been able to achieve latency response times as low as 3 milliseconds! Some may say its impossible to get any faster than this but you try telling that to Nirvana Labs’ secret R&D wing working on Project Neutrino. 🤫

Check out our API Status Monitor to see global latency and health checks. We’ve been able to achieve massive latency improvements and cut our operating expenditures to a fraction of the what our competitors spend because of our immense focus on vertical integration and our strong beliefs in virtualization. Nirvana Labs will continue to support more blockchains and build supporting products and services that help web3 developers build better products with lower operating costs.

The Nirvana Labs Product Suite

Our Nirvana Nodes remain our flagship product and we will continue to improve it as we progress. In order to get our nodes as fast and as cost efficient as they are today, we had to design everything from the bare metal up to DNS ourselves. We have abstained from using conventional scaling tools such as AWS and Docker. These are “one-size-fits-all” solutions that add extra layers of complexity, cost and introduce bottlenecks into the technical stack.

Nirvana Cloud

Our expertise and research has allowed us to build using more advanced tooling that serves its exact purpose while still contained within our control plane. We have in fact, become our own cloud provider in order to provide the level of services that we offer therefore it only makes sense to allow all web3 developers to experience the scalability and performance of Nirvana Cloud. Compare Nirvana Cloud with AWS, GCP and Linode to see how we stack up.

Nirvana Storage

A huge problem with decentralized storage today is the inability to serve sparsely or even moderately pinned IPFS data quickly and to many users at once. We’ve solved this problem with what we call the .50 caliber solution, which was to deploy an auto-scaling cluster of high-performance IPFS nodes into our 33 (and growing) datacenter regions around the world. Because of this our IPFS Storage Solution uploads and serves images, videos and files faster than Cloudflare, Pinata, Infura, Filebase, Web3.Storage and the rest. All for a fraction of the costs too since it all runs on Nirvana Cloud! It’s a win-win situation.

Nirvana AI

Ah yes, the buzzword of 2023, Artificial Intelligence. Our data science team noticed throughout 2022 that the web3/blockchain space lacked accurate and specialized machine learning models to analyze and improve on-chain and off-chain data. The little access to models that exit aren’t readily available for widespread use and most if not all are generalized models. Our focus at the Nirvana Labs Data Science team is to research and develop highly trained machine-learning and deep-learning models as a service. Data such as the total market sentiment of a certain token based on media coverage and models that can identify malicious transactions or wallets could massively improve the user experience and security for the entire web3 industry. This product is in Beta and offered through our ChainQuery API which is the last product we’ll cover.

ChainQuery API

ChainQuery API was built because before Nirvana Labs, we were using 4–5 other web3 APIs mashed together to get the on-chain and off-chain data we needed. Blockchain nodes allow you to send and receive blockchain data through the standard RPC libraries but deciphering human readable transaction data out of raw EVM logs has been proven to be a challenging task. We spent twelve months perfecting our ChainQuery Indexer to identify and categorize all on chain data as well as utilize our top-secret metadata fetching utility that queries, saves, re-pins and saves all NFT metadata into our global CDN. This results in near instant API response times for millions of smart contracts, tokens, NFTs and transactions. All through a multi-language API. Checkout the ChainQuery API Documentation or use the ChainQuery JavaScript SDK to get started for free.