30s Summary

Decentralised apps (DApps) could become faster through indexing blockchain data, according to Maxim Legg, CEO of Pangea, a company specialising in indexing decentralised data. However, the data index presents a challenge for developers due to its size, potentially running to hundreds of terabytes. Currently, many Web3 developers are creating individual indexing solutions. Additionally, the increase in blockchain throughput, or transactions per second (TPS), necessitates more data indexing for DApps. Ambitious TPS growth plans are in place across the blockchain world, such as Ethereum’s projected 100,000 TPS and ZKsync’s 10,000 TPS by 2025.

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You know how decentralized apps (or DApps) can sometimes feel slower than the web apps you’re used to? That’s because they’re gathering blockchain data from lots of different places.

Maxim Legg, the big boss of Pangea – a company that indexes decentralized data – recently spilt the beans to Cointelegraph. He thinks if we index data (that’s like organising it in a neat way so we can call it up whenever we need), we can make DApps speed up.

When we’re talking high-performance chains, the data from stuff like RPC nodes, smart contracts, etc. can be a massive hundreds of terabytes, according to Maxim. He goes onto explain that it’s a genuine headache for developers to deal with:

“Developers shouldn’t have to go through this slog! This is a proper infrastructure issue that can be solved once, instead of by every DApp developer doing it on their own.”

Sadly, a bunch of Web3 devs are having to come up with their own indexing solutions, which Maxim thinks are inefficient and a waste of time to develop.

Have you ever wondered about blockchain data latency? What factors influence it? Check out this cool Pangea graphic to explain more.

Let’s talk throughput now. The souped-up throughput of a blockchain (that’s the transactions per second, or TPS, we’re talking), the more onchain data that needs indexing by a DApp.

Back in October, Ethereum’s co-creator Vitalik Buterin was talking about scaling up both Ethereum and its layer-2 solutions to handle over 100,000 transactions every second! Maxim isn’t the only one with ambitious plans; several folks in the blockchain world are aiming for stellar throughputs.

For instance, StarkWare’s CEO, Ben Sasson, said at the DevCon 2024 conference that the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, Starknet, would 4x its TPS within three months and compete with the Solana network’s throughput.

The ZKsync team also have their sights set on higher throughput. By 2025, they’re planning to boost ZKsync’s throughput to 10,000 TPS and drop transaction fees to a mere $0.0001.

Solana’s coming in with a non-voting throughput currently sitting between 800 and 1,050 TPS. Thanks to its high throughput and solid design, it’s no wonder Solana has got the developers’ attention, landing it the spot for top development ecosystem in 2024.

Want to read more exciting stuff about blockchain transactions? There’s a pretty cool magazine article questioning whether measuring TPS in blockchain is still useful in 2024. It’s a pretty big question!