Decentralized applications (DApps), also known as Web3 applications, are often slower than their traditional Web2 counterparts. The primary reason for this lag is that Web3 apps need to interact with data stored across various blockchain sources, which introduces a significant complexity. Unlike Web2 apps, which retrieve data from centralized servers, Web3 apps must deal with vast amounts of decentralized data from sources like RPC nodes, smart contracts, and blockchain infrastructure, which can be hundreds of terabytes in high-throughput chains.
As blockchain technology scales to handle more transactions, this issue is magnified. Maxim Legg, CEO of Pangea, a decentralized data indexing solution, spoke to Cointelegraph about the core issue: the speed bottleneck in Web3. According to Legg, data indexing holds the key to solving this challenge, enabling faster and more efficient Web3 applications.
Data indexing is the process of organizing raw blockchain data in a manner that makes it easier to retrieve when needed. Legg emphasizes that indexing can help solve a fundamental infrastructure problem in Web3, one that doesn’t need to be repeatedly solved by each decentralized application (DApp) developer.
Legg explains, “This is not something you want your developers to be dealing with. This is a real infrastructure problem. It can be solved once. It does not need to be solved individually by every single DApp developer.” By streamlining data indexing, DApps can access the necessary blockchain data more quickly, ultimately improving the user experience and transaction speeds in decentralized environments.
One of the biggest challenges for DApps is dealing with the massive volume of data generated by high-throughput blockchains. Throughput, measured by transactions per second (TPS), directly correlates to the amount of data that needs to be indexed. The higher the TPS of a blockchain, the more data it generates, and consequently, the more complex and resource-intensive the indexing process becomes.
For instance, Ethereum, the world’s second-largest blockchain, has ambitious plans for scalability. In October, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, laid out a roadmap aiming to scale Ethereum’s base layer and layer-2 solutions to handle over 100,000 TPS combined. This would significantly increase Ethereum’s capacity to process transactions, but also exponentially raise the demand for indexing solutions to manage this data.
In line with Ethereum’s ambitions, other blockchain projects are also focused on increasing throughput to handle more transactions. At the DevCon 2024 conference, Ben Sasson, CEO of StarkWare, discussed Starknet’s plan to quadruple its TPS within three months, aiming to rival Solana’s high throughput capabilities.
Another promising layer-2 scaling solution, ZKsync, is targeting 10,000 TPS by 2025 as part of its roadmap. Additionally, ZKsync plans to significantly reduce transaction fees to as low as $0.0001. These efforts to boost throughput are crucial, but they also require advanced data indexing solutions to ensure DApps can interact with the blockchain data at optimal speeds.
Meanwhile, Solana, a high-throughput blockchain known for its non-voting consensus mechanism, currently processes between 800 to 1,050 TPS. Solana’s impressive throughput and monolithic architecture have garnered significant attention from developers, positioning it as the top ecosystem for blockchain development in 2024.
Despite Solana’s relatively lower TPS compared to Ethereum’s potential future scalability, its fast transaction speeds and low fees have made it a strong competitor, attracting developers who seek high performance and scalability without the complexities of multi-layer solutions.
As more blockchain projects aim for higher throughput and scalability, the need for efficient and reliable data indexing solutions becomes even more pressing. DApps must be able to quickly access and process vast amounts of data in real-time, without compromising performance or user experience.
The rise of solutions like Pangea highlights the growing importance of decentralized data indexing in Web3. By enabling more efficient indexing, Web3 developers can focus on building powerful applications without having to reinvent the wheel for each DApp. This progress is critical as blockchain ecosystems continue to grow and evolve.
The next generation of Web3 applications will need to overcome the inherent speed limitations caused by the complexities of decentralized data storage. Data indexing solutions like Pangea offer a promising path to solving these challenges, allowing DApps to become faster, more scalable, and easier to develop. As blockchain throughput continues to increase, the role of effective data indexing will only grow in importance, enabling Web3 to realize its full potential.
With efforts from both Ethereum’s layer-2 solutions and emerging projects like Starknet and ZKsync, the future of decentralized applications looks brighter and more capable of handling the demands of a scalable, high-performance blockchain ecosystem.
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