Building High Speed and Low Latency Decentralized Apps on Hedera Consensus Service Using DragonGlass

The Hedera Consensus Service (HCS) is the first Distributed Ledger network service to provide both the validity and order of events. The power of HCS is apparent on Hedera’s testnet, where the transaction count increased to 87M from 34M in a month’s time. When combined with DragonGlass’ highly scalable (10,000+ TPS) architecture and audit capabilities, DApp developers get the ability to quickly access HCS messages using industry standards (RESTful APIs and Queue Services) without setting up their own mirror nodes and infrastructure to store, process, and publish the data for consumption by multiple users.

HCS

Distributed Ledger Technology allows communication between various parties using a secure and trusted pool on nodes to ensure transparency. Currently, utilizing a public ledger means waiting minutes or sometimes even hours before a transaction is actually executed by the network. This is due to the fact that in a public ledger, every transaction relies on agreement/validation from all the participating nodes in the network before it is executed, which requires communication with the nodes based on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake. This delay typically hinders development of applications like auction services, financial exchanges, and gaming marketplaces that would rely on the network.

Hedera Consensus Service is game-changing because it relies on Hedera Hashgraph’s high network performance, fair ordering, and ledger transparency to provide a truly decentralized solution where the Hedera Hashgraph public network and algorithm provide fast and secure consensus. DApps would now be able to receive and handle updates quickly without sacrificing ordering and transparency.

DragonGlass and HCS

HCS is an offering from Hedera Hashgraph that can be used to develop applications that require higher throughput and decentralized trust with fair ordering.

DragonGlass is a SaaS-based solution that provides both casual users and DApp developers with a rich set of tools for easy data access.

Below is a representation of how any DApp development team can utilize both HCS and DragonGlass toolset to enable HCS powered DApps:

Figure 1: DragonGlass+HCS

DragonGlass Explorer

Users and DApp developers can use the intuitive Explorer feature to quickly view historical and live transactions using freeform text and advanced search features,. The DragonGlass Explorer provides access to Hedera’s mainnet and public testnet for all transaction types, including HCS. The explorer provides many specific features such as a custom view for consenusSubmitMessage transactions, copying the message, viewing the sequence number, and running a hash separate from access to the raw transaction.

Figure 2: New transaction view for HCS messages

RESTful APIs

A rich set of DragonGlass APIs provides DApp developers easy access to historical transactions, HCS messages, accounts, and smart contracts.

At its core, HCS is about ordering and transparency. So even if you miss a message, you can easily fetch historical messages using the DragonGlass HCS API.

Figure 3: Sample JavaScript code to fetch HCS messages

Figure 4: Sample Response for the code from Figure 3

Subscription Service

Easy access to real-time data is now possible with DragonGlass’ event subscription service. By removing the hassle of setting up a message broker and mirror node, users get to subscribe to a highly resilient and scalable subscription queue that works particularly well when combined with HCS. This enables real-time messaging across multiple consumers with negligible infrastructure costs and zero maintenance headaches.

You can create dedicated queues (currently, we support 3 queues per user) and add filters to listen to only those messages which are applicable to your DApp without having to filter the noise on your end.

Figure 5: Java program to fetch from DragonGlass queue

Conclusion

In the end, everyone should ask themselves: what do I get using DragonGlass for my Hedera consensus service data requirement? To answer this DragonGlass provides:

1. Highly scalable and reliable architecture with enough redundancy in place so you will never miss your messages
2. A complete data integration solution, removing common integration hassle for DApp developers
3. Storage of all transactions in an indexed fashion for anyone to view or fetch using RESTful APIs
4. Low latency data access that enables use cases such as gaming, trading applications, and auction sites to become possible with DragonGlass
5. Auditing abilities that let you to go back to an actual transaction RecordStream file
6. Utilization of majority consensus (validating node signatures) amongst all the network nodes for every RecordStream file, so you can be ensured of quality data
7. Data security — we highly value data privacy and thus run our applications behind a private network with encrypted at-rest and in-flight data

We at OpenCrowd have leveraged our experience working directly with Hedera as development partners with our time spent designing and implementing solutions for DApp companies to create DragonGlass as a means to address real-world implementation problems faced by developers.

To get started on DragonGlass, visit us at dragonglass.me, or reach out to info@dragonglass.me with any questions or concerns.