Getting Ethereum blockchain data today is fairly easy, but it does come at some cost. In our quest for data, we lose many of the key benefits public blockchains confer on us. Foremost, we cede control, trust, and security.
Take Etherscan, for example, a ubiquitous blockchain explorer that none of us can live without. With a simple click, we query all sorts of wonderful information including our very own transaction data; with that same simple click, however, we forgo trustlessness, immutability, and censorship-resistance.
Another example is The Graph, a popular blockchain-based data marketplace, which connects data indexers with data consumers who are able and willing to pay. As consumers of The Graph’s service, every time we query, we pay in the form of a direct fee for event data only. Ultimately, The Graph is an indexing protocol geared to delivering data to Ethereum (d)apps, not end-users.
No doubt, Etherscan and The Graph play an important role in the Ethereum ecosystem. They provide fairly easy access to blockchain data, but they do come with some tradeoffs, and longer-term these tradeoffs will only intensify.
TrueBlocks is a different type of indexing and explorer solution for public blockchains.
TrueBlocks is local-first software which has fully embraced the cultural shift of web3, striving to empower end-users above all others. TrueBlocks is designed to address the potential pitfalls so aptly articulated by the tweet above and below.
TrueBlocks has made zero compromise on any of the properties we purport to value from public chains. It is completely open, fully decentralized, censorship-resistant, permissionless; and it facilitates completely private access to all chain data including transactions, traces, events, logs, etc. that’s provably unmodified.
If we all are to truly benefit equally from the security and immutability of a trustless decentralized ledger, shouldn’t we also expect non-excludable and non-rivaled access to its non-compromised data?
In short, TrueBlocks treats public blockchain data and indexes as public infrastructure, not as private goods.