Greetings Ethereans — after many days and many nights, we’re proud to finally unveil a public service for the Ethereum community that’s been underway for some time.
ArchiveNode.io, a public access Ethereum archive node for developers — at no cost!
Inspiration
The inspiration for this project was originally sparked by a tweet from Lefteris, the creator and lead developer of Rotki, an “opensource portfolio tracking, analytics and crypto tax reporting app that respects your privacy”.
… the Hardware requirements [for an archive node] are simply insane. And Rotki does need it. Historical stats are needed for accounting purposes.
This tweet really resonated with me, a great project and developer who would greatly benefit from archive node access but simply can’t due to the insane requirements. I knew that with a community as big and generous as the Ethereum community, we can do better than this.
Taking Action
I thought long and hard about what the possible solutions were for Rotki and other developers in this situation, with very little outcome. They either have to shell out $250/month to Infura which is quite the bill for small time developers, or pay the upfront costs of well over $1,000 to host and operate an archive node out of their home. So, I reached out to the Ethereum Foundation and applied for a grant.
The foundation was happy to climb aboard to see where we could take this, and finally we were off to the races. From start to finish, it took nearly two months to get our node fully sync’d. Along the way, Dan from PieDAO had reached out to us to express support for our projects vision, and had very generously offered to fund another archive node. With two nodes, we have better redundancy and can support more developers, success!
Future Outlook
While the foundation’s grant was extremely generous and helped us get the project off the ground, grants don’t last forever. Currently we’re looking at about a 10 month runway before funds are depleted, which is quite a long time — but not long enough. As much as I hate to admit this due to my “decentralize everything” spirit, we are operating our first node off of AWS and the second node off of a bare metal server hosted on OVH.
While this is convenient, it is the opposite of cost effective. In the future, we hope to create a Gitcoin Grant to support a longer runway (physical hardware essentially opens us up to infinite runway), assuming we have the necessary demand. Until then, we’re going to gauge the demand from here and re-evaluate in a few months.
Get Involved
If you’re an Ethereum developer who has a use of archive access, you can get in touch today by visiting ArchiveNode.io and applying for access. We chose to use an application form to gain access to prevent any malicious activity, which also allows us to support more developers by screening them first.
If you aren’t sure if you’re eligible for access, it’s pretty easy to determine:
- Are you developing something on or for Ethereum, that doesn’t harm the ecosystem?
- Did you recently raise a ton of money through an ICO?
If you answered yes to the first question and no to the second question, congratulations! You’re probably eligible!
(There is no cost for a developer to use our archive node(s), we just ask you to respect it.)
Thank You!
- Chase Wright (MysticRyuujin)— Without Chase, this project would not exist. He’s the networking guru the project needed to ensure things succeeded smoothly, and deserves more credit than I’m able to give. Thank you Chase for your efforts and continued efforts going forward!
- Dan from PieDAO — Redundancy and node failures were a big worry for us, but thanks to Dan we now have reliable redundancy in the event of an outage and continued support from him. Thank you Dan!
- Thomasz from Nethermind — We chose to use Nethermind for our archive nodes, and want to thank Thomasz personally for the work he not only put into Nethermind, but also the work he put into ensuring our archive node was running smoothly and helping us get over any hiccups we faced throughout the way.
- Ethereum Foundation (and Ken) — While all of the people above are responsible for this projects existence, we quite literally would not have gotten past day 1 if it wasn’t for the grant from Ethereum Foundation. Thank you for your support!
