At Infura, we believe testnet ETH should be free and easily accessible.

As an Ethereum developer, you know how important it is to test your dapps before deploying them to the mainnet. However, testing can be challenging when you need to acquire Sepolia testnet ETH to fund your smart contracts and there’s nowhere to turn.

Aligned with Infura’s mission of making building in web3 easy and accessible to everyone, we're releasing Infura’s new Ethereum testnet faucet that drips 0.5 ETH daily requests.


Why we created the Infura testnet faucet


At Infura, we believe testnet ETH should be free and easily accessible. Recent shortages of testnet ETH have caused significant problems for developers, who have had to purchase GoETH on the open market.

The monetization of GoETH led to speculators driving the price to $1.61 per token, and one user even purchased a Cryptopunk using funds from GoETH transactions.

Because testnet ETH should be free and easily accessible, the Ethereum Foundation is shutting down Goerli testnet and requesting that developers migrate to the Sepolia Testnet.

Infura's new testnet faucet is here to help the ecosystem by providing a reliable, high-volume drip of Sepolia ETH. Facilitating web3 development QA procedures on a test network is critical to the future of blockchain implementation at the protocol level. Access to a stable, high-volume faucet will make web3 development easier for developers.

With this faucet, you can request free testnet ether with just a few clicks. Want to see for yourself?

Here’s how.


How to use the Infura testnet faucet


To use the Infura testnet faucet, follow these simple steps:

First, to go: https://www.infura.io/faucet/sepolia.  

Then enter your Ethereum address into the open field. (More detailed steps to do this are here: How to get your Sepolia Wallet address on MetaMask)

Next, click the login button to access your Infura account.

Click "Receive ETH" and wait for the transaction to be processed. You can follow the Etherscan link for transaction verification.

Check your MetaMask wallet to confirm you’ve received your testnet ETH. You can do this on the Sepolia network. (Reminder: Secure your MetaMask wallet)



It's that easy! You can request testnet ETH as often as you need to, but please be aware of the 0.5 ETH daily limit.


Keep learning with Infura


Congratulations! Now you have the ETH you need to test your dapp, publishing a few smart contracts, and even mint some NFTs. Below are a few helpful resources to keep learning with Infura:

 * Getting Started with Infura
 * The Developer’s Guide to the Web3 Stack
 * Get started with using Infura’s NFT API + SDK
 * Read our Infura NFT API Documentation for more ideas
 * Deploy a Smart Contract on Sepolia Testnet and test it out!


Frequently Asked Questions


Q: Can I receive more testnet ETH?

A: The current limit is 0.5 testnet ETH per day, but this could change later.

We may increase testnet ETH rewards for engaging with Infura in the future. Open emails and follow us on Twitter to get the latest updates on test ETH withdrawal limits!

Q: Will you support upcoming testnets like Holesky?

A: We're working closely with the Ethereum Foundation on launching and providing services to additional testing and development in the Ethereum ecosystem. The upcoming Shanghai / Capella upgrade is in scope with upcoming iterations of the feature.

Q: What other features can we expect in the future?

A:  With the recent acquisition of Hal by ConsenSys, we plan to implement an example monitoring service to notify users when transactions are  fully processed. We already use Hal for internal monitoring of transaction processing for manual retries.

Additional FAQs are answered directly on the faucet site.

We hope the new Infura testnet faucet makes your developer experience easier and more pleasant so you can keep shipping your innovations and building the future of web3.

Infura product updates and feature announcements.

Infura Product & Features

Product & Features

Introducing Infura’s ETH testnet faucet: Get 0.5 ETH daily to test your dapps!

The Developer’s Guide to the Web3 Stack

Infura’s NFT API + SDK are packed with all the tooling you need to mint your innovations with ease.

Have you ever wanted to create something beautiful with a few lines of code? What if with just three lines of code you could build an NFT marketplace? Or mint digital art? With the announcement of Infura's NFT API + SDK general release today, you can! It’s never been easier to mint any-NFT-thing you want.  

Over the past several months, the Infura team has been hard at work to create the best NFT tooling possible. It was only June of last year when we started the private beta with a handful of developers, using a handful of endpoints that connected to Ethereum and Polygon.

“ConsenSys products have powered the NFT experience since the very beginning, with a significant volume of NFT transactions in the ecosystem passing through the MetaMask wallet backed by web3’s strongest infrastructure from Infura. Since the limited beta release of our NFT API and SDKs in June 2022, our team has made significant strides in making the NFT toolkit the best tooling builders need to bring their NFT innovation to the world,” said Rob Dawson, Chief Technology Officer, ConsenSys Software.

Today, the Infura NFT API comes with 14 endpoints so developers have access to all the metadata they need for building. The NFT API also includes read and write capabilities from eight blockchain networks, in four languages, with integrated IPFS access.

“With the general availability of the Infura NFT API, we are focused on helping even more developers capture the huge demand of the NFT market and accelerate their building journey with instant access to cross-chain data, pre-built templates, and the ability to mint NFT collections to 8 networks in one integrated product,” Rob added.

Today we want to thank you the 500 participants who took part in our beta programs and gave us such valuable feedback that has allowed us to build the NFT API + SDK we believe will empower creators.

Let’s learn more.


The Infura NFT API + SDK offers superior security with ConsenSys Diligence


While other RPC-providers might have similar endpoint offerings, Infura’s NFT API + SDK is a clear choice for creators and developers who value the safety of their smart contracts.

The Infura NFT SDK comes with three ERC-721 and ERC-1155  templates that cover more than 85% of all NFT use cases. Each template has been pre-audited by leading blockchain security platform, ConsenSys Diligence. This means these templates are not only easily customized with metadata to create and mint NFTs in minutes, but also provide top security.

Being pre-audited means Infura’s NFT templates have been run through Diligence’s smart contract security software, Diligence Fuzzing.

The fuzzing tool battle tests contracts by attacking them with millions of scenarios over and over again until the contract is deemed error-free. The blockchain is immutable and immutable means forever. Why risk your IP using anything else?


The Infura NFT API + SDK offers multi-chain options and compatibility


Infura is an industry leader when it comes to multi-chain compatibility with RPC endpoints to 14 networks. When it comes to the NFT API, 14 endpoints with read/write capability are supported across 8 networks.

This includes early access to the new zkEVM launched by ConsenSys that’s scheduled to be available to the general public in April. Its zero knowledge-rollup technology will reduce blocktimes, latency, and gas fees–significant for NFT dapps.


The Infura NFT API + SDK offers accelerated development with the ConsenSys product suite


Developers using the Infura NFT API can take advantage of accelerated development for their NFT innovations with easy integration to the ConsenSys product suite. Add Infura, Diligence, ConsenSys zkEVM, and MetaMask to your tooling to take your NFT project to the next level.

Developers and creators can use the Truffle Suite to build an NFT dapp, spin up a dev environment to test for free, then check the Truffle dashboard for results and predict gas fees.

Next, download the MetaMask Unity SDK to use the wallet as a login authenticator and automatically connect users and their wallets to your NFT dapp or blockchain game.


Hear what devs using the Infura NFT API + SDK are saying


"Infura’s NFT API removed all the legwork to provide NFT capabilities for our web3 gaming platform. We no longer have to analyze every smart contract on-chain to determine whether they are NFTs or store NFT data and metadata. Using the Infura NFT API means we don't need to worry about scaling our database to account for increased traffic of our wallet application. Infura does it all for us." - Jay Chung, Global Business Development at Intella X / Neowiz

“Infura’s NFT API and SDK helped us very quickly build a dashboard and advanced filtering system for our users by leveraging the high-level API. We did not need to parse a long list of blockchain transactions ourselves to display meaningful information. And compared to some concurrent providers, we’ve never had any issues with the API stability and the rate limiting. Plus, the first tier of pricing helped us grow in our first months without being too expensive.” - Louis Pinsard, Co-Founder & CTO at Dialog


The Infura NFT API + SDK is only getting better


While we believe the Infura NFT API + SDK are built to empower NFT creators today we’re certainly not finished making it the best tooling on the market. Here’s what to expect from the product roadmap:  

 * Six more Diligence-secured NFT smart contracts
   
 * Expansion of the read function, making it even easier for developers to extract, manipulate, and report on metadata.
   
 * Low code and no code offerings for those non-technical creators to ensure every kind of builder can participate in the NFT creator economy.


Get started today


Check out the below demo for step-by-step instructions to get started using the Infura NFT API + SDK today.



The Infura NFT API + SDK is now available for all Infura users. Don’t have any Infura account to use the NFT tooling?

No problem. You can create an account in just three steps for free on infura.io/register.

Happy minting!

Empowering creators with the Infura NFT API + SDK

Ethereum Network Updates, Upgrades, Hard Forks

Infura - Ethereum Network Updates

Network

How To Choose The Right Blockchain For Your Next Dapp

Infura product tips and Web3 tutorials for developers building decentralized applications.

Infura Developer Tutorials

Tutorials

Getting Started With Infura

So, why would you need a hybrid infrastructure model alongside Infura?

Let’s think about how your database is set up. You probably have your own database, which is great. What happens if that database goes down? Would your app continue to run seamlessly, delivering the experience you want your customers to get? Or, would your database shutdown cause outages and crashes in your app?

If the dataset you’re hosting is a public dataset, you have a new paradigm for making your infrastructure much more resilient and reliable by integrating Infura into your overall strategy. Infura implements a reverse proxy pattern internally and can be a highly reliable and performant node in your infrastructure stack, allowing you the ability to have a portion (or all) of your traffic routed to Infura.

You can choose to keep your database as your primary database with Infura as a backup, or vice versa. In this way, Infura will act as an always-on backup for your database, providing a level of flexibility previously not available with a single database running.

You also have the opportunity to use Infura as a stats comparison tool to make sure your performance is up to par. Alternatively, you may need to handle more load (request traffic) than your infrastructure can currently handle. You can route the overflow to an Infura project ID to handle spikes in traffic so your service stays up and running.

There are many opportunities for you to use Infura alongside your own in-house node infrastructure to improve your user experience. Let’s dive a little deeper on how we accomplish this.


What does it mean when Infura implements a reverse proxy pattern?

Let’s review what a normal proxy is first, and then we’ll flip it and reverse it, a la Missy Elliott, to talk about the reverse proxy. A proxy server (or web proxy or forward proxy) is a server located in front of a group of client machines (computers). When those computers make requests, the proxy server intercepts those requests and communicates with the target web servers on behalf of those clients. Basically, a proxy is a fancy word for a request/response middleman.

If you’re a visual learner, here’s a diagram from Cloudflare that shows just where that forward proxy sits:


What is a reverse proxy?

A reverse proxy is a server that typically sits on the edge of your infrastructure. It is responsible for receiving requests from web clients and subsequently routing them to one or more backend web servers.

Here’s another great diagram from Cloudflare to show how the reverse proxy fits in to the whole flow:




One of the main reasons to use a reverse proxy server is load balancing, ensuring the flow of traffic between clients and servers remains smooth. This is one of the main advantages of using both your own node and Infura. In addition, it allows you to cache content and provides web acceleration for improved performance. Lastly, reverse proxies allow for more efficient, secure SSL encryption and protection from DDoS attacks and related security issues.

As we previously mentioned, Infura can be used as a reverse proxy to assist with ensuring the flow of traffic for your clients and servers stays as smooth as possible, making for a more enjoyable user experience.


Some examples of a reverse proxy in action

Let’s first look at how we can set up a very simple reverse proxy using Caddy.

We will use our localhost and a backend HTTP service running on 127.0.0.1:9000 to make sure we’re getting our reverse proxy working correctly.

First, download Caddy. Once that’s downloaded, check out their Getting Started guide here. Or, follow along to learn how to set up a simple reverse proxy!


At this point, you may be running your own node, but since it takes too long to sync one for this article, we can substitute with a simple NodeJS stub to check that our reverse proxy is working correctly. I simply named mine main.js.


const http = require('http');

const hostname = '127.0.0.1';
const port = 9000;

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
   res.statusCode = 200;
   res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain');
   res.end('Reverse proxy success!\n');
});

server.listen(port, hostname, () => {
   console.log(`Server running at http://${hostname}:${port}/`);
});



This sets up a backend HTTP service running on 127.0.0.1:9000 mentioned earlier and will display a “Reverse proxy success!” message if our proxy is working correctly. To start this, run `node main.js` in a different terminal window and leave that connection open!

Next, we will want to create a Caddyfile (literally create a new text file in whatever directory you’re working in and name it Caddyfile). Once you have that set up, we will set up our simple reverse proxy itself inside the Caddyfile with just two lines:

localhost 

reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:9000



In this instance, reverse_proxy is where we want to get our information from (the original site), and localhost is where we are redirecting to using our reverse proxy.

Now, from the same directory as your Caddyfile in a new terminal window from your `node main.js`, run:  

caddy run



This will start the caddy server and will allow your reverse proxy to work! Now, you’ll notice when you run this that you don’t see the “Reverse proxy success!” message popping up.

That’s because this just started the server. You now need to make a request to “https://localhost” and you’ll see the message. To do this, open another terminal window (that makes three now, for those of us keeping track), and simply run:

curl https://localhost



Running this command will give you the “Reverse proxy success!” message we were looking for, and now you know you’ve successfully set up a simple reverse proxy.


Enter Infura!

Now that we’ve gotten a basic reverse proxy up and running, let’s try one using an Infura endpoint. We will keep our overall setup of using a Caddyfile the same, but we won’t need the backend HTTP service running in the background, as that will be switched to an Infura endpoint.

We’re going to change up how our Caddyfile looks:

localhost 

reverse_proxy https://rinkeby.infura.io {
   header_up Host {/v3/<YOUR_PROJECT_ID>}
}



You will notice that we’ve added in a “header_up Host” inside the reverse_proxy section. This allows us to include our Project ID to both the Rinkeby endpoint and the localhost endpoint we are proxying to.

To test this out, we will need to send a request, so I used web3_clientVersion as an example:

curl https://localhost/v3/<YOUR_PROJECT_ID> \
-X POST \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"web3_clientVersion","params": [],"id":1}'



When we run this, we get the following output:

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":"Geth/v1.10.8-omnibus-aef5bfb3/linux-amd64/go1.16.7"}



Cool! But how do I know my reverse proxy is working? Well, if you switch out `localhost` in our curl command to `rinkeby.infura.io`, you get the same output, which shows that our reverse proxy is running properly.


How do you use Infura as a backup for your own node?

We’re going to set things up initially the same as we did in the previous example but with two upstreams, one to our localhost and the other to the Infura node.

Next, we’re going to set up load balancing. Now, what’s load balancing? Load balancing acts like a traffic cop sitting in front of your application servers, routing client requests across all the servers that can fulfill those requests quickly and efficiently.

So how do we set that up?

Since we’re using Caddy, we can refer to their docs for the basics of how to use more than one upstream. When we look at lb_policy, there are many ways to determine which upstream Caddy will use first. Caddy will default to using the first listed upstream and will move down the list if the servers stop responding. In our example, we want to have localhost:9000 from our main.js file be the first upstream, meaning we want our reverse proxy to send the data through our localhost first, so we will identify that by putting it first in our list of upstreams (we will leave our Infura Rinkeby endpoint in as the second upstream):

localhost

reverse_proxy localhost:9000 https://rinkeby.infura.io {
   header_up Host {/v3/66172ed429624788ac264604755ba42c}
}



Since we are using the localhost:9000 port, we want to get that server back up and running. In another terminal window, start the Node server with node main.js.

To make sure everything is set up correctly, let’s run our request through by running the same request from earlier but with the :9000 port included, expecting to get the “Reverse proxy success!” message:

curl http://localhost:3000/v3/<YOUR_PROJECT_ID> \
-X POST \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"web3_clientVersion","params": [],"id":1}'



and we get the following output:

Reverse proxy success!



Excellent! Now, how do we incorporate the Infura endpoint to be a fallback?

You’ll notice we left the Infura endpoint in our Caddyfile where it originally stood and we asked our proxy to load balance using the first upstream (our localhost), which was how we got that “Reverse proxy success!” message.

Now that we confirmed that we set everything up correctly on our end, we’re going to kill the localhost server, mimicking what would happen if your private node went down. Once we do that, our requests should automatically start routing to the Infura node and we should get something similar to the below output:

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":"Geth/v1.10.8-omnibus-aef5bfb3/linux-amd64/go1.16.7"}* Closing connection 0



But wait! We don’t get that! Instead, we get an error message.

This is because Caddy only allows us to use either two HTTP or two HTTPS endpoints - in our case, localhost is HTTP and our Infura endpoint is HTTPS.

Luckily, there is a tool we can use to make this work with localhost that will create a TLS certificate and sign it with a CA trusted locally by your device and browser. That tool is called mkcert, and it’s incredibly easy to install by following these steps.

Keep in mind if you’re doing this with your own private HTTPS node, you likely will not need this additional step.

If you are following our tutorial step-by-step (using localhost), be sure to follow all the steps, including updating your main.js file to the below to include the HTTPS requirement and the options constant.

const https = require('https');
const fs = require('fs')
const options = {
   key: fs.readFileSync('<PATH_TO_CERTIFICATE-KEY_FILE>.pem'),
   cert: fs.readFileSync('<PATH_TO_CERTIFICATE_FILE>.pem')
};

const hostname = '127.0.0.1';
const port = 9000;

const server = https.createServer(options, function(req, res) {
   res.statusCode = 200;
   res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain');
   setTimeout(() => {res.end('Reverse proxy success!\n');}, 1000)
});

server.listen(port, hostname, () => {
   console.log(`Server running at https://${hostname}:${port}/`);
});



When you run the mkcert localhost command from the tutorial, the certificate key file and certificate file used in the code above will be created.

Now that we have our localhost running with HTTPS, we can continue! Since we are running everything with HTTPS, we need to update our Caddyfile to reflect those changes.

localhost:3000 

reverse_proxy https://localhost:9000 https://rinkeby.infura.io {
   header_up Host {/v3/66172ed429624788ac264604755ba42c}
}



Now that we have all our files in order, let’s make sure our Node.js server is running and send that request again.

curl http://localhost:3000/v3/<YOUR_PROJECT_ID> \
-X POST \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"web3_clientVersion","params": [],"id":1}'



What do we get?

Reverse proxy success!



Perfect! That’s exactly what we want to get, as we have asked our reverse proxy to go to https://localhost:9000 first.

Now, what happens if we kill the Node server and send our request again? Remember last time we did this, we got an error message. This time we should be getting the result from our Infura Rinkeby node:

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"result":"Geth/v1.10.8-omnibus-aef5bfb3/linux-amd64/go1.16.7"}



Success!

Our reverse proxy is, in essence, ignoring the localhost node, as it’s not functioning, and is defaulting to the Infura Rinkeby node!

Super easy, right? Now you know how to use Infura as a backup node to keep your services up and running smoothly!


Where can I learn more about reverse proxies?

Take a look at our client story from MakerDAO. They currently use Infura for a multitude of reasons, including using us as a backup node solution to ensure all developers can use the MakerDAO toolkit!

Another great example is the Polygon PoS network. We initially began working with Polygon to share some traffic load for their network, allowing users to access the Polygon networks via Infura endpoints and effectively ensuring their network remains fast and functional, regardless of traffic spikes they may see. We have since increased our partnership so we are now handling 100% of their network traffic.

Check out this blog post highlighting multiple companies across all verticals using a hybrid infrastructure model of their own nodes plus Infura. Get some ideas on how we can help you accomplish your needs, from verifying transactions to providing backup database services!

If you would like to run an Infura node in addition to your own, sign up for a free trial today.

How to Run Your Own Node AND an Infura Node

When enterprise developers build dapps on Ethereum, they often have to consider the entire tech stack and development process. The list of considerations range from application features such as Web2 interfaces to deployment, which is usually on a permissioned network hosted by a preferred cloud provider. Since most full-stack software engineers build off of SDKs and API calls, it’s important to establish the value of the application with consideration of the deployment network.



Get the best of both Web2 and Web3 worlds

Many enterprise blockchain business cases build on the principles of traditional Web2 development. Web2 focuses on operating with a fluid user experience with attention to detail on scalable and responsive code on multiple devices. A valuable decentralized application (dapp) in Web3 redesigns the economics and industry roles while building on complementary existing systems -- instead of fully replacing those systems with analogous Web3 features.

Say you would like to reinvent a syndicated loans issuance platform such as IPREO. This effort would require significant IT resources to spin up a minimum viable product from the ground up if you’re recreating features like tranche issuance calculations or calendar date exceptions. Instead, consider a path to lesser resistance: blockchain modules that connect these digital assets to new liquidity networks. The functionality is a re-issuance of an existing financial instrument to ABC network with a listing on XYZ automatic market maker rather than the full end-to-end dashboard.

To connect to pockets of liquidity, an enterprise developer must deploy with the same smart contract language that is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and look to bridge the assets to networks with the desired investor and issuer markets.


Why build on public Ethereum?

Until now, publishing enterprise dapps on Ethereum requires significant system integration, executive buy-in and high set-up costs. Recently, we have seen more public blockchains working with enterprises to cover non-functional technical needs in order to meet minimum requirements of security audits and performance. However, the relatively tribal nature of the blockchain developer subculture means that mainstream enterprises are still conservative when it comes to building on Ethereum.

If you are an enterprise developer, consider the following advantages of building on public Ethereum vs. permissioned networks:

1. Faster setup and lower total cost of ownership

2. Immutability and longevity of the data stored with thousands of independent nodes

3. Composability and low barrier of entry to decentralized finance (DeFi)




1. Faster set-up and lower total cost of ownership

This is a standard private blockchain journey for a consortium:

After you develop your dapp, a lot of time is focused on node deployment adhering to enterprise software standards. On the business side, you are also trying to build a consortium to agree on the benefits and adoption before the tech is tested.

The consortium model usually chooses a separate tech vendor that does not have single ownership from one consortium member to prevent conflicts of interest. The tech vendor determining deployment and long-term support likely runs the Ethereum nodes on behalf of participants. This will get the product to market faster and focus on the business benefits.

The last step involves time and licenses for adding more nodes and mutualizing infrastructure costs across participants. Compared with private networks that remove tokens from their operation, public networks require ownership of native tokens to fund transactions. This gas cost pays for the infrastructure -- third parties running full nodes and running operations for mining/validating. In my time building enterprise projects, we have never seen this happen.

The public journey is much more straightforward. After you develop your dapp, the deployment is a choice between public networks with updated configurations on your Truffle setup. The added complexity is the gas costs for funding and running your transactions on this network.

To simplify connectivity to EVM-compatible networks, you can use Infura’s Ethereum API to connect your app instantly with a single line of code. Simplify your transaction management with Infura Transactions (ITX) using prepaid accounts without holding ETH on your balance sheets. ITX is a transaction relayer that manages your transactions to prevent dropped or stuck transactions.

You will also likely want to work with a team such as Diligence that can audit your contracts and monitor them when they’re live.

Public Ethereum has an overall lower total cost of ownership when you compare the operational cost of running a system on mainnet rather than focusing on the ownership and maintenance of the network itself.

A consortium may have more control in the private chain and face less security and treasury reviews at first. However, your infrastructure overhead and negotiations on consortium network matters tend to outweigh the convenience and added features of connecting to mainnet.


2. Immutability and Longevity

The Ethereum mainnet is secured by the interaction of thousands of independent nodes run by individuals and miners throughout the world. Private chains typically have a small number of nodes controlled by one or a few organizations. Those nodes can be tightly controlled, but only a few need to be compromised in order to rewrite the chain or commit fraudulent transactions.

At ConsenSys, we’ve recommended public networks to enterprise developers for their resilience of replicated data as you are able to recover more quickly with a larger network of more than 15,000 independent nodes. The more peers you have, the easier it is to find a seed and fully recover your recorded transactions. In consensus decisions, the more blockchain validators there are to verify transactions, the more difficult it is to coordinate a majority decision that may lead to an attack.

In a permissioned network, the security is governed by the node with the least security. Your network is only as secure as the weakest link. Any added nodes to the network may also increase the surface area of attack. Most institutions will recommend a base software security test in order to join as a full node owner. The node owner will have to pass standard penetration testing to prevent any hacking on the node in case it is a bad actor to the entire network.


3. Composability and Low Barrier to Entry on DeFi


The Ethereum network powers a vibrant ecosystem of third party applications and technology including DeFi and NFTs. A highly composable and interoperable system allows you to connect to DeFi to build financial products that enable and combine multiple apps to match specific user needs. The Ethereum mainnet offers enterprise developers the ability to gain access to market liquidity and provide innovative ways for users to participate in the exchange, trading or growth of that liquidity.

When we say composable, it’s much more than just an open banking API. It’s a set of open source live protocol contracts that can be called and extended. We’ve seen pure forks of open source code like with Uniswap to get sushiswap. The market has seen countless copies of DeFi models such as Compound and Aave, and it doesn’t look like things are slowing down anytime soon.

There’s more and more real value happening in DeFi leading us to believe that cryptocurrencies are not a fad. It is here to stay.

Watch Clemens’ presentation “Pitching Public Ethereum to Enterprises” at EdCon 2021.

Interested in building on Ethereum? Contact us to get support on starting your enterprise project.

3 things enterprise developers should consider when deploying on Ethereum

Are you excited by blockchain but don’t have a great deal of experience coding? It can be easy to fall down a rabbit hole of technical tutorials that make assumptions regarding your initial development knowledge. A particularly important topic to grasp is basic security within your code.

As you begin to build out your very own dApp, you will have to include information such as an Infura API key, along with a mnemonic.

If you are new to coding, this is the equivalent of giving a stranger your social security number and keys to your home. Once this information is public, there is no definitive way to ensure it hasn’t been captured by a person or web crawler, which could result in malicious behavior.

So, how can we address this?

Thankfully, we can use dotenv along with git to protect our sensitive information within our project when / if we push to github.

Dotenv is a zero-dependency module that loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env, storing configuration in the environment separate from the code. It is often a convention for environment variables to be stored in a .env file or other mechanisms based on the server you are using.

Note: This article will focus on building out a project using Truffle and Infura.

In our project, we will need to run the following command:

npm i dotenv


Once the process in our terminal has been completed, we will want to make sure we have the dependency successfully installed. Head over to your package.json file and check to ensure that dotenv has been added under dependencies.

Next, at the root of our project, let’s create a .env file:

Here is where you will add all of the sensitive information that should not be shared.

We will make sure we can access our .env information in our truffle.config file. At the top of the truffle.config file, add the following:

require("dotenv").config


This will tell your project to load anything that is in the .env into an environment variable, granting you access to it.

Now, instead of having to put our Infura api key or mnemonic in an exposed file, we can import that information from our .env file.

When it comes to gaining access to our project key we are going to use, sign up to Infura and create a project. In your dashboard, you should see something similar to this:

The following code is an example between the usage of .env and exposed information within truffle.config:

const HDWalletProvider = require('@truffle/hdwallet-provider');

const infuraURL = 'https://rinkeby.infura.io/v3/<project id here>'

const mnemonic = "Your mnemonic here"


rinkeby: {

provider: () => new HDWalletProvider (mnemonic, infuraURL),

network_id: 4,

gas: 5500000,

confirmations: 2,

timeoutBlocks: 200,

skipDryRun: true

},


Imagine if you pushed this up to github. Anyone would have the ability to open your truffle.config file could take advantage of your exposed mnemonic and project id from Infura.

Let’s take a look at that same code and implement better security practices.

Notice how we are calling upon the information without having to directly add to our file.

One important detail, as of now even with an .env file: if you push this project to github, it will show the .env file, which would defeat the purpose!

Take a look for yourself.

This is where .gitignore comes into play. We will need to create a .gitignore file, so we can push this project up to github.

Without getting into git, a quick summary could be git is version control software that keeps track of all of your files and the versions of them. What .gitignore does is it tells git not to keep track of this file along with everything it contains.

If you want to dive deeper into git along with other foundational material, have a look at our Basic Training, a free course that helps ensure you have the fundamental tools when developing.

At our root (similar to the level our .env file lives), we will create a .gitignore. Inside of that file, we will add .env along with any other files you would rather not be pushed to github.

We can now push our project up to github and notice that our .env file is no longer exposed. Our sensitive information is now much more secure.

If you are experimenting with this, make sure you add your .env file to your .gitignore before pushing.

If you are running into issues, remember gitignore ignores only untracked files. If your files were committed in the past, they are now tracked by git. To ignore them, you first need to delete said files, git rm them, commit and then ignore.

Otherwise, you can delete the .env file and run

Git rm .env --cached


Here is a helpful link discussing the removal of sensitive data from a repo if it was previously committed and discusses how to clean the git history. Savvy attackers don't just look at the most recent repository info, they'll look at the history of it as well.

Note: If you come across it in documentation, a question you might have is
“What is env. example”

An env. example file, on the contrary to this tutorial, is actually included in the repository, it is used as an example file for you to know what KEY=VALUE pairs you need for your project. Most often, it is used to copy the .env file and then change the values.

Example of execution:
Enter to the project root directory using your terminal.

Check if .env the file exists or not.

If the file does not exist then create a file named .env.

Now execute the command

cp .env.local .env.


So the .env.sample file has all the ENV declarations defined but without their values. It helps other developers establish/set up the project without having to reverse-engineer the codebase.

So after git clone, you usually execute the command `cp .env.sample .env` and fill in the values with the Infura credentials as we saw in the example above.

Note: When you create a new repo using github, if you scroll down you should see the option to include a .gitignore file so you don’t have to create one yourself in the future.

Hopefully, you found this article on basic security practices helpful as you begin to develop your very own projects. Feel free to join our Discord if you want to continue the conversation, share projects, ideas, and join the community!

Start here with a free Infura account >

How to Use .env to Enhance Basic Security Within Your DApp

Optimistic Ethereum is a rollup scaling solution that allows users to submit transactions on the Ethereum network and get them executed faster for a much lower gas cost. From the perspectives of users and developers, this is a "parallel universe" called Layer 2, or L2, where users typically have the same addresses as they do on the Ethereum blockchain (also called Layer 1 or L1). There are gateways that allow messages and assets to be transferred between the universes.

The Optimism network API largely uses the same JSON-RPC specification as Ethereum and Infura supports all the necessary API methods for building a fully functional application on the Optimistic Ethereum network.


Why are transactions cheaper on Optimism?

On L1 Ethereum, thousands of nodes run your transaction to verify that the proposed block that includes it is valid. This process is expensive and has to be paid for. Unlike on L1 Ethereum, Optimistic roll ups provide faster and cheaper transactions because it allows users to perform most of their tasks off-chain in a "layer 2" protocol. On Optimistic Ethereum, the smart contract has only two tasks: deposits/withdrawals and verifying proofs of transactions on chain. This makes the process more efficient and a lot cheaper.


Why is this safe?

The great thing about decentralization is you can trust that transactions are executed correctly because there are thousands of computers executing them. Honest miners would reject such a transaction. With rollups, you don't have that level of redundancy.

The answer, in the case of optimistic rollups, is incentives. Every node in the network has to put up a stake before it can propose a new block with the execution results of a transaction. Every other node can check up on those results, and if it thinks they are incorrect, dispute them. The dispute is resolved on L1, so it is as trustworthy as anything else in Ethereum. Whichever node lies, either proposer or disputer, loses its stake and most of it goes to the other node involved.

Of course, the whole point is to avoid running transactions in L1. This system achieves that by making it pointless to cheat. Any proposer who attempts to cheat is going to be caught by the other nodes, lose its stake, and not get the invalid transaction result accepted as valid. A disputer can force a single transaction to go into L1 arbitration as a denial of service attack, but the stake is high enough that it wouldn't be worth doing.


How does Infura work with Optimism?

Infura exposes endpoints for Optimistic Ethereum (the production network) and Optimistic Kovan (the test network). You use them the same way you use any other network, by selecting them from the menu and using the specified endpoint.

There are a few small differences between building on Layer 1 Ethereum and Optimism:

1. You must use the JSON-RPC API as we do not support Websockets yet.
2. Search filters are not yet supported


How to Get Started on Optimism...



The main difference between Optimism and regular L1 Ethereum (other than the cost) is the access point URL.

| Network          | RPC URL |


… If you are using the Truffle development environment

Infura users can add the free Truffle Optimism add-on directly on their Infura dashboard. The Truffle Optimism box also contains the configuration definitions required to use Infura. Currently, you will need to manually add the gas costs of transactions when you use Truffle to run deployments or tests on Optimistic Kovan or the main Optimistic Ethereum network.


… If you are using Hardhat

To use Optimistic Ethereum or Kovan, edit hardhat.config.js's modules.export.networks to add these definitions:

"optimistic-kovan": {
    url: 'https://optimism-kovan.infura.io/v3/<Infura Project ID>',
    accounts: { mnemonic: <your account mnemonic goes here> },
    gasPrice: 15000000,
    ovm: true // This sets the network as using the ovm and ensure
                      // contract will be compiled against that.
},
"optimistic-ethereum": {
  url: 'https://optimism-mainnet.infura.io/v3/<Infura Project ID>',
  accounts: { mnemonic: <your account mnemonic goes here> },
  gasPrice: 15000000,
  ovm: true // This sets the network as using the ovm and ensure
                    // contract will be compiled against that.
}



Then you simply run:

npx hardhat --network optimistic-<kovan or ethereum> <command>



… If you are using Remix

When you use the Remix Optimism plugin to develop for Optimism, network connections are created through the wallet. If you use MetaMask, you can select the network Custom RPC and fill in the details:

What is Optimistic Ethereum?

Infura now supports additional networks including Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon.

All three projects are essentially new blockchain networks. They offer low transaction fees and faster confirmation times compared to Ethereum. Crucially, they extend the utility of Ethereum as users can transact using their assets that fundamentally reside on Ethereum.

This scaling approach is called off-chain protocols and we have put together a short post to help explain how they help to scale (and extend the utility) of Ethereum.


Why not just transact on Ethereum? What is the scalability bottleneck?

Ethereum supports around 15 transactions per second and as seen in Figure 1 the network fees tend to skyrocket when users exceed the network’s throughput ceiling. In some ways, the throughput limitation is self-imposed by the community in the pursuit of decentralization.

The goal for decentralization is to maximise the percentage of the world’s population who can verify the blockchain’s integrity (and transactions) in real-time. This goal is essential to minimise the trust in block producers as the community can self-enforce the set of consensus rules that govern the validity of blocks. Depending on the target percentage of the world’s population, there is a limit to the computational, storage and bandwidth available to the network for processing transactions.

Our challenge as a community is to figure out how to increase the network’s throughput while adhering to the imposed resource constraints.


Why should we care about off-chain protocols like sidechains or rollups?

Most approaches to scale the network focus on:

 * Distributing verification. The verification task is distributed amongst nodes on the network as opposed to requiring all nodes to replicate the same work (Ethereum today).
 * Better utilize the network's available resources. The network's resources should be continuously utilised and not allowed to sit idle. For example, short block intervals to better utilize bandwidth.  

Scaling solutions still remain a few years away from adoption as they require major changes to the underlying Ethereum protocol.

An alternative and popular scaling approach, off-chain protocols, is a solution that is immediately available. It scales the network in a following way:

Off-chain protocols: Transaction processing is moved away from Ethereum to another network while still transacting with the same assets that reside on Ethereum.

We consider this a scaling solution as other blockchain networks are not limited by the same resource constraints as Ethereum. They can experiment with various scaling protocols (or simply test the limits of go-ethereum) while extending the utility of Ethereum.


Where are my assets held when transferred to another network?

A bridge contract is responsible for holding the user’s assets on one blockchain (Ethereum) and notifying the other network to mint an equal quantity of coins for the user. Once minted, the user can transact on the other network and eventually withdraw their funds back to the original blockchain (Ethereum) via the bridge contract.

Not all bridge contracts are equal. We must consider the bridge contract's process for deciding when to release funds back to the user. Ideally, the funds should only be released if the bridge contract is convinced the other network is not compromised. This is called the underlying trust assumption that ultimately protects the user’s funds. It can often cause controversy when discussing whether an off-chain protocol is truly scaling Ethereum.

On one hand, some users only consider a new blockchain network a scalability solution if the other network can retain the same (or very close to) security of Ethereum.  Protocols that can achieve this level of security are often called rollups. Whereas, other users will be satisfied with stronger trust assumptions as long as the funds locked into the other network are secure enough (sidechains).

Rollups, that retain the same security as the main-chain, will require more resources from Ethereum. For example, every transaction on the rollup network generates a state update that is published to the bridge contract. Whereas a side-chain does not necessarily require significant resources from Ethereum as validation of transactions is performed by a set of external parties. This trade-off on security/resources will be felt financially by the users and as a result there is no free-lunch.

Regardless, we believe that different bridge contracts will emerge and implement different degrees of trust. In the end, all blockchain networks which support transacting assets that reside on Ethereum will increase the utility of Ethereum. It is just important that users are aware of the trust assumptions and risks before deciding to lock funds into a bridge contract.


What is a sidechain?

The term sidechain originates from a paper by Blockstream. It was an interoperability solution to enable two blockchains to verify information about each other’s progress via light-weight proofs. The intention was to allow bitcoins to be locked in Bitcoin and to be released in the other network (and vice versa) without trusting any intermediary with the funds.

Over the years, the term sidechain has taken on a life of its own. It is often used to imply that an independent blockchain network has a relationship with another blockchain network. In practice, this is implemented with a bridge contract that allows assets to be moved from the main-chain (Ethereum) to another blockchain network.

There are three type of bridge contracts that are used for side-chains:

 * Single organisational. A single party has custody of the funds locked in the bridge contract.
 * Multi organisational. A fixed set of independent parties (K of N) has custody of funds that are locked.
 * Crypto-economic. A dynamic set of parties, determined by their weight in assets, have custody of the funds.

For example, WBTC is a single organisational bridge as the BTC is held by BitGo. The Liquid Network and RSK blockchain implement a multi-organisational bridge as an appointed set of parties will authorise assets to be moved across from one blockchain to another (i.e., implemented as a multi-sig). Polygon is a crypto-economic bridge as it relies on (⅔)+1 of stake to appoint validators who post periodic checkpoints about the network’s state to the bridge contract (and this checkpoint can be used to automate user withdrawals).

Crucially, the bridge contract for a sidechain does not verify the integrity of the other network and instead it relies on a set of parties to attest to its validity. It is assumed that at least a threshold of parties should have a financial incentive to remain honest and protect the user’s funds.

While the cost of a sidechain transaction consumes no additional Ethereum resources, the trade off is that the network will not retain the security of Ethereum and ultimately, trustlessness.


What is a rollup?

The term rollup originates from barry whitehat’s zkrollup and it emerged from the research on Plasma.

A rollup is still an independent blockchain network, but the transacted assets that reside on Ethereum are protected by the bridge contract. It must be continuously convinced the rollup network is not compromised and the funds are not at risk. In the worst-case, the bridge will bypass the other network and allow users to unwind and eventually withdraw their funds.

A rollup can retain the same (or very close to) the security of Ethereum and this is accomplished by solving the following problems:

 * Data availability. The bridge contract must be convinced that all data is publicly available. This allows anyone to independently compute the rollup’s stateful database.
 * State transition integrity. The bridge contract must be convinced that all state transitions (transactions) are valid.
 * Censorship-resistance. The bridge contract will self-enforce transaction inclusion to ensure a user can eventually withdraw their funds if the network is compromised (or no longer making progress).

As a quick summary on potential solutions. The data availability problem is solved by just posting all data to the Ethereum network and this is where the name rollup originates (to roll up the data). The state transition integrity problem is solved using a fraud proof (Optimistic rollup) or a validity proof (zero knowledge rollups) system. The censorship-resistance problem is a little trickier, and often not discussed, but it requires the bridge contract to self-force the inclusion and eventual execution of user-generated transactions.

There is an on-going financial cost for rollup. The network must continuously provide evidence to the bridge contract that all finalised transactions are valid and the network is not compromised. This consumes resources from Ethereum and impacts the scalability that is attainable by rollups. However in the immediate term, it can significantly reduce the cost of a transaction. For example, in Arbitrum, a swap costs 1,600 gas compared to 120,000 gas on Ethereum.


What is the difference between a sidechain and a rollup?

Sidechains, such as Polygon and rollups, such as Optimism and Arbitrum are just independent blockchain networks. They have their own set of block producers and smart contract environments. The core difference between a sidechain and a rollup is found in the bridge contract that locks funds from Ethereum onto the other network. Precisely, it is the trust assumption that protects the funds held by the bridge contract.

 * Sidechain. The bridge contract may receive information about the other network, but it does not validate its correctness. A set of parties who govern the bridge are responsible for checking the other network is not compromised and attesting this fact to the bridge contract.
 * Rollup. A set of parties (sequencers) are responsible for providing evidence about the state of the other network to the bridge contract. It is up to the bridge contract to validate the evidence’s correctness and to independently verify the other network is not compromised.

It is a subtle difference, but it boils down to whether the bridge contract can self-enforce the validity of transactions on the other network or if it must rely upon a trusted set of parties to attest that it is valid.

Of course, there is no free lunch. Rollup networks can retain the security of Ethereum, but it also consumes more resources of Ethereum. This increases the financial cost to transact on a rollup network compared to a side-chain.  As a user or developer, you will need to consider the security offered by the other network and the potential financial cost that it entails.

Choose a solution that best suits your use case.


How can I get started with rollups and sidechains?

You can check out our blog announcements for the networks we support which includes Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon.

All networks adhere to the same JSON RPC standard as the Ethereum network and they support EMV-compatible smart contracts. You can activate the networks in your Infura account, update the provider URL and start interacting with the networks immediately.

Arbitrum and Optimism are still in beta and in the progress of preparing for their mainnet launch. You may need to contact the teams if you want to deploy a smart contract to their mainnet. Polygon is already launched and you can start deploying contracts immediately.

We hope you found this article about rollups and side-chains informative. At Infura, we have supported Ethereum for over 5 years and we are excited to now support new projects that extend the utility (and scalability) of Ethereum.

Off-chain protocols: Sidechains and Rollups

JSON RPC, methods, calls, requests - what does it all mean?! When you start building a dapp on the Ethereum blockchain, you’re introduced to a host of new concepts, request methods and naming conventions to employ - it can be overwhelming. The Infura team are experts in web3 infrastructure. We build open source tools and materials to help more developers interact with Ethereum and IPFS. In this tutorial, we leverage the collective experience of our team to bring you an in-depth guide to reading and writing requests to the Ethereum blockchain, using Infura.


Key Terms and Concepts

Before jumping into the meat of this tutorial, let’s clarify some key terminology. Below is a list of important terms and their corresponding definitions that you need to get familiar with.


Request

A developer interacts with Infura by sending a request through JSON RPC either over HTTP or WebSocket; as a single request or as a batched array. Requests follow this format:

{"id":1234, "method": "eth_foo", "params":[...] }

Because you should be posting this to an endpoint that has your v3 key in it, we can always associate these requests with a key or a project.


Method

The method is essentially what function we are asking an Ethereum node to execute. This will either request data from the node, execute an EVM function and return a response, or transmit data to the Ethereum network (send a transaction). Currently there are 65 methods which are supported by the popular Ethereum clients (Geth, Parity, Besu, Nethermind):

The most commonly used methods are highlighted in bold and comprise the vast majority of Infura’s traffic:

These methods can be grouped into the following categories:

i) Block Data Related

 * eth_getBlockByHash: retrieves a block's details by its hash (a string representing the 32-byte hash of a block);
 * eth_getBlockByNumber: retrieves a block's details by its number (an integer block number, or the string "latest", "earliest" or "pending");
 * eth_blockNumber: retrieves the current block number.

These methods retrieve static data about a particular block in the blockchain. This data is contained in the blockchain headers and could include information like block number or transactions mined, for example.

ii) Per User (address) Data

 * eth_getTransactionCount: retrieves the nonce of an address (i.e: how many transactions have already been mined, per user, for that address). This is needed because when you go to send a new transaction, there’s a field called ‘the nonce’ which is intended to prevent you from accidentally rebroadcasting transactions and sending them out in an order that you didn’t intend.

This method retrieves the simple state data for addresses. It doesn’t matter whether that address is a user or a smart contract. Any address can have an ETH balance.

iii) Reading Existing Smart Contract Data

The concept of smart contracts, and interacting with them, is what makes Ethereum different from other blockchains. A smart contract is two things:

 1. It’s a bit of code, usually written in Solidity, that compiles down into byte code - which is understood by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM);
 2. It’s a means of storage. Think of it as halfway between ‘disc storage’ and ‘ram.’

Below are the most common methods for interacting with smart contracts:

 * eth_call: retrieves a constant EVM method on a Smart Contract and is the primary way to retrieve already mined data from the blockchain about a particular smart contract;
 * eth_getLogs: retrieves events published by smart contract transactions. Smart contracts can emit logs that are really user defined, so when you’re creating this smart contract you can decide the format of these log events. These dapps can then see when your smart contract has emitted these events, and respond accordingly;
 * eth_getStorageAt: retrieves raw state storage for a smart contract;
 * eth_getCode: retrieves the compiled EVM code for a smart contract. There is no copy of a smart contract’s source code on the blockchain itself. So, for example, when you search an address on Etherscan and the verified code of that smart contract is returned, that all happens off chain.


Using eth_call

ERC20 is one standard for how developers can create a token. Almost all wallet software understands this standard, so if you want to create a token and make it easier for people to interact with it, ERC20 is a good place to start.
Eth_call is the most commonly used method for interacting with smart contracts, particularly ERC20 contracts. A typical eth_call request looks like this:

At first glance, it’s not clear what any of this information represents. Let’s break it down:

The "id":1 field is an identifier string which is set by the requester, and helps make sure the client and server are communicating in the same context.

The "jsonrpc":"2.0" field specifies the version of the protocol and must be exactly “2.0”, which the protocol expects.

The from field is the data requester, which could be any wallet address or smart contract. This field is optional.

The to field is always a smart contract. There are two ways to find out what that smart contract is:

 1. You can make a request on the blockchain using eth _getCode, but that would give you the compiled code. Unless you have tools to reverse-engineer the EVM byteCode, you’re not going to immediately know what that means.
 2. You can type the smart contract address into Etherscan.
    Searching Etherscan is the most common way to find out what type of smart contract you’re dealing with. Let’s take the smart contract address 0x6B175474E89094C44Da98b954EedeAC495271d0F and type it in to see what happens:

Etherscan tells us that this smart contract is for the ‘Dai Stablecoin (DAI)’. At this point, we also have the opportunity to inspect the original Solidity code for this contract and confirm that it’s verified:

Great! Now we know that this address represents an ERC20 contract.


Deep-Dive into ERC20

Created in 2015, ERC20 is a relatively simple token standard and the most common contract type on Ethereum. Within this standard, an ERC20 token has to implement the following functions:

 * function totalSupply() public constant returns (uint);
 * function balanceOf(address tokenOwner) public constant returns (uint balance);
 * function allowance(address tokenOwner, address spender) public constant returns (uint remaining);
 * function transfer(address to, uint tokens) public returns (bool success);
 * function approve(address spender, uint tokens) public returns (bool success);
 * function transferFrom(address from, address to, token uint) public returns (bool success).

At certain times, an ERC20 token also has to emit the following events:

 * event Transfer(address indexed from, address indexed to, uint tokens);
 * event Approval(address indexed tokenOwner, addressed indexed spender, uint tokens).

You can view the standard on GitHub for more detail about how these functions work and when to emit these events. For now, let’s try to request the balance for some of the DAI tokens.

We know that our address is 0xDfBaf3E4c7496DAd574a1B842bC85B402BDC298D.

We also know that the DAI contract address is 0x6B175474E89094C44Da98b954EedeAC495271d0F.

To query our balance using eth_call, we use the balanceOf function of the token contract. The JSON-RPC format expects eth_call to have a specific data field format that requires normalizing the contract function balanceOf to a short Function Selector. To do this, we take out the names and the type of inputs it takes, and take that as a string. We then run it through Ethereum’s sha3 keccak hash:

web3_sha3(“balanceOf(address)”)[0..4]-> 0x70a08231

The first four bytes of this hash comprise it’s 4-byte signature. We then take this 4-byte signature, pad it with zeros, add our address as an input and send the eth_call:

This is a hexadecimal number, padded to a 32-byte length with zeroes. If we want to, we can convert this output to a decimal number by using a hex-to-decimal converter. This would return the result 3.890227426645114e+24, which is scientific notation for 3.890227426645114 * 10^24. This is the contract’s balance of Dai in wei, a standard unit of 10^18.

So finally, divide 3.890227426645114 * 10^24 by 10^18, and ta-da! Now we know the balance of the wallet address 0xDfBaf3E4c7496DAd574a1B842bC85B402BDC298D in this contract is 3,890,227.426645114 Dai.


Sending Transactions

Eth_calls are commonly used to read data from a smart contract. But what if you want to write data to a smart contract?

Let’s say we wanted to call the transfer function. Again, we would need to normalize the function first. We take the string transfer(address to, uint tokens) and hash it to get the 4-byte signature. Again, we take that 4-byte signature, pad it with zeros, insert the address and the amount of tokens, and package this information into a data string. We then sign the transaction and send it using eth_sendRawTransaction.

At this point, nodes start broadcasting our transaction out to the rest of the network. Eventually a miner will get a copy of it, go through all their proof-of-work stuff, get lucky and find a hash that matches the proof-of-work and broadcast a block that contains our transaction. Every node that receives this block reads the transactions within it, re-executes them, and holds our ERC20 token transaction in the EVM to update.  

Gas is sent along with any other values, and is spent running the EVM code. The miner gets the block reward, plus all the gas spent in transactions. If you’d like to learn more about how Ethereum mining works, these EthHub docs are a great start.


Mined Transactions

When a transaction is mined, two important things happen: the on-chain Ethereum state is changed via contract interactions, and Event Logs are published for public viewing. Once the Event Logs are published, we can execute JSON-RPC requests for eth_getLogs to investigate what changed, relative to the events that we care about, and react to them.

For example: an event ticketing service that wants to issue off-chain tickets based on crypto payments, could use eth_getLogs to find payments to their address, and react to these events by processing some logic in their backend servers to issue tickets to users.


Using eth_getLogs

In the above sample request, we use the parameters "from block" and "to block" to specify the hexadecimal block number that we are interested in retrieving logs from. Note that if this information is omitted, the method will return information from "block 0" to "block latest" by default (the entire chain history) and that’s not ideal. Infura has a cap on requests of 10,000 events per query. Best practice is to request a single block, as we’ve done in this example, and do that for each mined block.

What this request is saying to the blockchain is “hey, I want event logs relating to address 0x6B175474E89094C44Da98b954EedeAC495271d0F emitted in block 0x91F37C (hexadecimal for block 9565052) that matches topics 0xddf252ad1be2c89b69c2b068fc378daa952ba7f163c4a11628f55a4df523b3ef, 0x000000000000000000000000ee25e1ba53c225d250861c8e5a9a3e0fe19c790e and  0x000000000000000000000000dfbaf3e4c7496dad574a1b842bc85b402bdc298d.

The response returned for this request is an array of events. In the example we’re using, only one event for one address matched the specified topics.

Topics

Topics are events emitted by smart contracts. If we take a look at the original DAI ERC20 Solidity contract again 0x6B175474E89094C44Da98b954EedeAC495271d0F, we can see two event signatures that could be associated with it:

 * 94    event Transfer(address indexed from, address indexed to, uint tokens);
 * 95    event Approval(address indexed tokenOwner, address indexed spender, uint tokens).

How do we find out which topic (event) it actually was? You guessed it: we have to create the Function Selector of the Event and take the hash of it. Let’s try the event on line 94:

web3.sha3('Approval(address,address,uint256)')

The resulting hash is 0x8c5be1e5ebec7d5bd14f71427d1e84f3dd0314c0f7b2291e5b200ac8c7c3b925. This doesn’t match the hash provided in the initial request response. Now let’s try the event on line 95 of the contract:

web3.sha3('Transfer(address,address,uint256)')

Bingo! The resulting hash is 0xddf252ad1be2c89b69c2b068fc378daa952ba7f163c4a11628f55a4df523b3ef, which matches the hash provided in the initial request response. Now we know that 0xddf25 is the Transfer event.


More Event logs

You might be wondering what the data provided in the request response means:

In this context, data refers to all the ‘non-indexed stuff’ that’s captured in the events. In our example, for the Transfer topic, data represents the number of tokens that were transferred. That is, that 0x41f900d25d6693623a6 or 19471.6949921 Dai tokens were transferred from ee25e1ba53c225d250861c8e5a9a3e0fe19c790e to dfbaf3e4c7496dad574a1b842bc85b402bdc298d.

This completes our investigation 🎉

View our developer documentation to explore different ways to interact with Infura to read and write Ethereum data. New to Infura? Sign up and get started for free!

Ethereum RPCs, Methods and Calls

On February 20th, hundreds of attendees, speakers, enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs gathered in NYC for NFT.NYC, the leading Non‑Fungible Token (NFT) event, to discuss the latest trends and opportunities in the emerging NFT ecosystem. During the event, Infura partnered with Horizon Games to bring a SkyWeaver Gaming Tournament to life.

Built on Ethereum using Infura’s API, SkyWeaver pioneers a new dimension of Play2Earn gaming by providing a platform for digital trading card gaming. Players can play casually or compete on the worldwide leaderboard to win cards that become their property. Once won, the cards can then be used in battles, collected to construct a legendary deck, or traded and sold in the marketplace.

During the SkyWeaver Tournament, 16 players battled for a share of the 1,000 DAI prize pool (provided by Maker) and up to 100 Silver SkyWeaver cards. Tournament sign ups and DAI payouts were facilitated using a tournament platform that allows anyone to organize tournaments from start to finish with easy participant onboarding and smart contract-powered payments. The platform currently showcases Ethereum-powered payments and prize pool management that is fast and inexpensive.

Taking home the 500 DAI first place prize was 🥇MaxHS, a veteran SkyWeaver player and former Hearthstone pro. He edged out 🥈TerrenceM, another well known NYC local digital card game player, who walked away with 300 DAI. 🥉Cybourgeoisie and 🥉Feihu tied for 3rd and both took home 100 DAI.

Significant engineering demands are required to battle-test these new systems as adoption scales. Infura’s ability to reliably manage scale ultimately led Horizon to choose Infura as their Infrastructure partner for SkyWeaver.

“The Infura team had proven their ability to handle this scale. We want to express our gratitude to the Infura team and are proud to partner with Infura as our Ethereum node provider as SkyWeaver moves into production ops.”

- Peter Kieltyka, CEO and Chief Architect of Horizon Games

. . .


NFT.NYC left us with a lot to be excited for. Inspired by all the excitement shared by our tournament attendees, I sat down with Chris Gonsalves, Gaming Partnerships Lead at ConsenSys and Michael Wuehler, Co-Founder of Infura, to get their thoughts on what 2020 holds for crypto games and what they believe to be the most promising NFT use cases.


Why are NFTs gaining popularity in games?

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique and non-interchangeable digital asset which can be used to represent all manner of virtual and real-world goods. NFTs are gaining popularity because they enhance in-game economies by creating verifiable digital scarcity and allow players to own (and sell) the assets they collect. Game items represented by NFTs allow for independent tracking of ownership history, provenance, and other metadata. In trading card games like SkyWeaver, this creates a trustable ownership model that follows the same principles as Magic: The Gathering with its physical assets. You can’t fake owning a physical asset (for the most part, sans counterfeiting) but faking digital ownership is incredibly easy without some kind of immutable tracking mechanism.

In addition to enhanced ownership, blockchain-based games are unlocking more ways for players to earn and monetize their assets. New concepts emerging such as Play2Earn will enable skilled players to earn supplemental income from their time spent playing and create new incentive loops to deepen player engagement.


In what spheres can NFTs be used besides games?

Gaming is a great use case for NFTs, but there are other emerging uses starting to take shape. NFTs are a type of token that can be used to represent both digital and physical assets that are verifiably unique. Digital certifications that represent that someone has accomplished a certain action such as voting, attending an event, or completing a specific task is another use case that goes beyond video games. NFTs can be used to track everything from a rare piece of art to the sushi that ends up on your plate at a restaurant. Traceability with the foods we eat and products we use is becoming a big area of interest. A rare cut of Wagyu beef could be tracked using an NFT to record ownership, producer, age, and each hop it made along the supply chain before hitting your plate.

These concepts can even expand to collectables such as a rare jersey or limited edition FunkoPops. A Lebron James jersey off the shelf is certainly not valued the same as one previously worn by the superstar himself. Auctioning off authentic pieces of sports memorabilia backed by blockchain assets allows for rarity verification, chain of ownership, and trackable metadata that will bring more trust and extensible features to the market of collectibles.


What do you think 2020 holds for NFT crypto gaming?

More game industry veterans are founding and joining studios which are developing games with built in blockchain features. With more talent, this will mean the quality of the games will continue to get better and more capital will flow to studios that have teams with decades of game experience. With the launch of games like SkyWeaver, all new players will experience owning their first digital asset. These players may not know at first they’re trading an NFT or spending a stable token, but over time as they start earning these in-game currencies and seeing the benefits of more open economies, they will be incentivized to dig deeper and explore more games and applications built using blockchain technologies.

Want your game considered for future Tournaments? If it’s built on Ethereum using Infura’s API, you’re eligible! Submit a link to your game in this thread for consideration.

Interested in competing in future Tournaments? Register your interest here with a ‘+1’ and your email to stay up-to-date.



Infura Blog | Community News and Announcements

Infura Community News and Announcements

Community

SkyWeaver Gaming Tournament Powered by Infura

On February 14-16, 2,000+ attendees gathered for the third annual ETHDenver hackathon for three days of hacking, knowledge sharing, and community building.    
Whether you spent the weekend heads down building new dapps and competing for sponsor prizes, or jumping between educational panels, workshops, and social events, ETHDenver was one of the most productive and fun opportunities for a Web3 developer to learn, engage, and contribute to this growing ecosystem.

Infura had engineers and product folks answering your questions at the ConsenSys help desk and invited teams to compete for a $1000 prize for the best hack utilizing the Infura API. To win the prize, hackers had to create a useful and unique decentralized application using either the Infura Ethereum API or IPFS API. Many other ConsenSys teams were represented, with great hacks produced around custom MetaMask Snaps and MythX smart contract safety analysis.


Infura Hackathon Winners and Honourable Mentions

Many hackathon projects found using the Infura API to be the easiest integration in their hack, with most deciding to use Infura as a Provider in various web3 libraries including ethers.js, web3.js, and web3.py. Even mobile development using the Dart language was represented, with Infura plugging directly into a library called web3dart. We were impressed with the breadth of submissions and purposes of the dapps, and we thank and congratulate the hackers!


Infura Bounty Winners

1x.ag

A project by the 1inch.exchange team, this project created an easy way to get leverage on ERC20 tokens by using elements of the following protocols: Compound, Fulcrum, Aave and MakerDAO CDPs. By combining a new type of near-instantaneous loan called a flash loan, together with ChainLink oracles for on-chain price verification, token owners could trade at a higher leverage ratio. While most hacks release on testnets, this hack utilized Infura’s Ethereum API to release on mainnet, which was super impressive. Congratulations to the team for producing a really useful combination of DeFi protocol building blocks! 🎉


LedgerLocker

This project was in two parts: an underlying smart contract, and a practical application. The team created a contract that accepted Dai, and converted it to ‘savings Dai’ called ‘DSR’ to gain interest, which accrued while a user was interacting with the service. After the service was completed, the Dai was returned and the interest gained could be paid anyway the project designers wished. The practical application was an Airbnb-like site that accepted user deposits while renting, with an Arduino-powered lock that was connected to the smart contract 👏


Honorable Mentions

TallyLock

TallyLock aimed to reduce the risk of election fraud by providing a simple and affordable way to notarize and lock election tally sheets on a public blockchain, right when they occur, in 3 simple steps. They used the Java library web3j with an Infura API key to connect to testnets. Based in Honduras, the TallyLock team believe that by putting election results on Ethereum, their notarization process would be cheaper, compared to the current method, and less susceptible to interference.

CountOnMe

Count on Me was designed specifically to connect patients to donors by blood type, using geolocation. Built with Dart and Flutter, the app was built to work for both Android and iOS platforms, with the feature of being able to connect using web3dart through Infura.

DieKittyDie

Tired of old CryptoKitties in your account? This team created a game that enabled users to send their Kitties into battle against bosses. If your Kitty won the battle, you received a treasure chest of Dai. This team used Infura with Truffle for deploying their contracts to Rinkeby.
Over 100 hacks were submitted in total at EthDenver this year. Some strong themes emerged, with many teams building projects around Defi and Dai, Crypto Gaming, improved Crypto UX, and planning ahead for Eth 2.0. You can read a full account of all the winning projects on Medium. Shout-out to Consensys’s own team for hacking together Metacredits!


Future Events and More Infura Developer Resources

We’re working on building out more tools, tutorials, guides, and documentation to help you build faster. For the next developer event, if you’d like to get a headstart on learning how to create a frontend for a web3 project, please check out and star our new developer-resources section on our github here. Please create issues for guides you’d like to see, and expect many more soon! Future topics include using the features of Ethereum web3 libraries such as ethers.js, for all the major languages.


Heading to EthCC?

Infura and Consensys will be at EthCC in Paris in two weeks, where Infura will unveil an exciting new open source tool we’ve been building. If you’re heading to this event, make sure to carve out some time to catch this presentation!

What You Missed at EthDenver

Infura is proud to be one of the core products in the newly formed ConsenSys software business among our talented colleagues PegaSys, MetaMask, and Codefi.

We’ve always been laser-focused on providing the best Ethereum-based blockchain tools and infrastructure to empower developers to build amazing Web3 software. Over the last four years, Infura has become critical infrastructure for a diverse population of Web3 businesses. Today, the strength, reliability and speed of our platform is unmatched and we serve thousands of developers every day.

We remain committed as ever to our mission and we see a future where Infura, PegaSys, MetaMask and Codefi bring the best developer tools to market through the ConsenSys software business. While these tools will have their origins in Web3, they’ll become the standard for all developers and applications of any kind.

This is just the beginning.

As always, we're here to help. If you have any questions, product feedback or feature ideas, join the Infura Community to connect with our team. You can learn more about Infura at Infura.io or register for free to start building on Ethereum and IPFS.  

News

Bringing the Best Blockchain Infrastructure and Developer Tools to Market

Gitcoin is a place for freelance developers to work on Open Source projects in return for blockchain-based digital currencies. The platform regularly hosts virtual hackathons to bring developers from around the world together to work on themed blockchain ‘hacks’ and engage with some of the biggest companies in the industry.

In January, Gitcoin ran a two-week virtual hackathon dubbed Take Back the Web. The aim was to inspire developers to identify problems with the internet as we know it, and solve them by building blockchain-based solutions. At the end of the hackathon, every contributor had made something cool and the winners were awarded a bounty!

Hackers had 23 bounties to choose from across 9 Web3 companies. 448 hackers from around the world participated and worked in teams to submit 162 projects over the two weeks. Infura put up two bounties totalling $1000 in Eth. These bounties were created for developers with varying levels of experience - so it didn’t matter if you were new to blockchain development or were a seasoned Web3 pro, every developer had a shot at winning an Infura bounty.


The Infura IPFS Development Prize

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespace connecting all computing devices. If this sounds foreign to you, don’t worry! The purpose of these projects is to make it easier for more developers to understand and build on decentralized protocols, so you should definitely read on and check out the projects below.

Infura offers an API that emulates working with a local IPFS node. To win this bounty, hackers had to use our API to create a dapp with a frontend that could be hosted on IPFS. The project had to be executed well, demonstrate high code quality and make the most novel use of our IPFS API.

And The Winner is…

@jmsofarelli! 🎉When you store (‘pin’) content on IPFS, that content becomes publicly viewable by anyone who knows the hash of that content. But some applications may need to regulate access to certain types of IPFS content in order to function. @jmsofarelli was awarded the IPFS Development Prize by enabling creators to pin their content to IPFS, sign and verify using uPort ID and register each item’s hash on the Ethereum network. By using Ethereum contracts to register these hashes and regulate access to them, this project helps solve the viewability problem.

Special Mentions

While there can only be one winner, we wanted to give a shout out to two great submissions that were also superb uses of the Infura IPFS API:  

 * 📣IPFS-FRBR by @cervoneluca is a  package to handle versioning on IPFS by means of FRBR categorization and Ethereum ERC721 contracts. It offers a solution for the always troublesome problem of software versioning, and combines IPFS storage with Ethereum ERC-721 NFT identifiers.
 * 📣WalletConnect is an interoperability standard for interaction with Ethereum wallets. @Abhimanyu121 created a WalletConnect integration for event management by combining smart contracts for event management with IPFS as the storage destination for a wallet’s tickets. This solution enables developers to store static assets in IPFS, which can always be accessed by a hash, removing the risk of having to rely on a central server.


Infura Ethereum API Optimization Prize

Each Ethereum network call costs money and can be vulnerable to network clogging. This prize challenged advanced developers to create tools for optimizing Ethereum API calls: either by reducing the number of eth_calls that a dapp makes, or by reducing the cost. Projects had to showcase improvements in dapp efficiency and hackers were encouraged to be as creative as possible.

And The Winner is…

@Destiner! 🎉The Ethereum network can become congested with transactions, making the network slower and more expensive to use. Applications can help alleviate congestion and increase their own performance by optimizing the way they request data from the network. One way to do this is through better smart contract design and adopting Solidity best practices. Another way is to batch static read calls together. We awarded this prize to @Destiner for their ethcall Javascript library. This library can be imported to allow batching transactions, thereby helping more developers optimize their API usage and improve the efficiency of their dapps.

Thank you to everyone who participated! Please check out the linked Github repositories and give ‘em a star. You can register for more Infura bounties at https://gitcoin.co/infura or subscribe to our newsletter to stay-up-to date.


Ready to Build?

If you and your fellow developers are eager to start building and want quick, reliable access to Ethereum and IPFS, check out this guide and get started for free with Infura: https://blog.infura.io/getting-started-with-infura-28e41844cc89/. You can also access excellent resources to help you learn dapp development by checking out Kauri’s recently released guide, or through the ConsenSys developer portal.

See you at the next hackathon! Infura will have folks attending EthDenver, EthLondon and EthCC so be sure to swing by the ConsenSys booth to meet the team and drop your feature requests.

Recent Posts (page 29)

Ethereum RPCs, Methods and Calls

SkyWeaver Gaming Tournament Powered by Infura

What You Missed at EthDenver

Bringing the Best Blockchain Infrastructure and Developer Tools to Market

Taking Back the Web With Infura