FTA: "But Jonathan," I hear you say, "by providing a gateway aren't you just making Cloudflare a centralizing institution?"
That’s a fair question. Thankfully, Cloudflare won’t be alone in offering these gateways. We’re joining alongside organizations, such as Infura, to expand the constellation of gateways that already exist. We hope that, by providing a fast, reliable service, we can enable people who never previously used smart-contracts to do so, and in so doing bring the benefits they offer to billions of regular Internet users.
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I wouldn't say it defeats the purpose. Unless you expect every user to run their own node you really have no choice but to provide one for them or rely on a trusted service like Infura. It also makes nontrivial transaction/history lookups possible by providing a more performant search layer, the results from which you can cross reference against the actual on-chain data.
Further, client-side libraries like Ethers.js use a quorum w/ multiple centralized services to help guard against censorship/errors/etc. at that level. It's an okay middle ground.
That’s a fair question. Thankfully, Cloudflare won’t be alone in offering these gateways. We’re joining alongside organizations, such as Infura, to expand the constellation of gateways that already exist. We hope that, by providing a fast, reliable service, we can enable people who never previously used smart-contracts to do so, and in so doing bring the benefits they offer to billions of regular Internet users.
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I wouldn't say it defeats the purpose. Unless you expect every user to run their own node you really have no choice but to provide one for them or rely on a trusted service like Infura. It also makes nontrivial transaction/history lookups possible by providing a more performant search layer, the results from which you can cross reference against the actual on-chain data.
Further, client-side libraries like Ethers.js use a quorum w/ multiple centralized services to help guard against censorship/errors/etc. at that level. It's an okay middle ground.