new open source crypto projects

I've been in the crypto space for well over a decade now, so when major brands started showing interest in the technology with the rise of NFTs in 2021-2022, those of us with technical experience in the field were quickly tapped to design and build out enterprise-grade solutions to bridge the gap between the theoretically possible and the practically implementable.

I've been working on a number of projects in this space over the past year, and while some are still ongoing, I am now able to open source some of the finished tertiary technology projects which came to fruition along the way.

So without further ado, let's get to it.

ethlb

For architects and engineers coming from the web2 space, one may think web3 simply continues the drive to decouple and distribute services. And while to an extent this is true, the decentralized nature of crypto networks introduces a whole new set of challenges when it comes to the design of services.

One of the biggest challenges is scaling a solution built on top of a decentralized network. Naïve load balacing will not work as it is unaware of the underlying consensus algorithm and the underlying network architecture which may lead to inaccurate load balancing.

This is where "chain aware" load balancing comes in, where the load balancer technology must be contextually aware of the blockchain network for which it is being used to ensure downstream clients consistently receive accurate and timely data.

In the commercial space, Alchemy has the most mature example of this in their Supernode service, however for companies which are wary of becoming dependent on any one provider, there was not a viable enterprise-grade solution on the market.

ethlb is a MIT-licensed Open Source implementation of the concepts and technology behind Supernode to provide a highly scalable, distributed, and contextually aware load balancer for all EVM-compatible networks and nodes. In addition to load balancing and scaling capabilities, ethlb also enables query caching, rate limiting, and metrics collection for immediate integration in an enterprise environment.

ethlb has been proven to be highly scalable and performant, capable of handling over a million concurrent requests per second and supporting large-scale end-user experiences.

ethindexer

If you are familiar with etherscan / polygonscan, or other services, the ethindexer provides effectively the same functionality in a self-hosted environment.

The ethindexer can integrate with any EVM-compatible RPC API (or through a load balancer such as ethlb) to efficiently index and search multiple blockchains and enable cross-chain search and data aggregation.

ethindexer is a cloud agnostic and container native solution which can scale horizontally to handle short-term data retrieval needs and scaling up and down to meet the needs of a long-term data pipeline.

All data is indexed in a PostgreSQL database and is searchable and aggregated in real-time.

crypto-provenance

Cryptocurrency introduces a new set of challenges when it comes to financial and regulatory compliance, as well as forensic accounting and asset management.

The crypto-provenance service integrates with a blockchain indexer such as ethindexer to perform large-scale data aggregation and analysis of cryptocurrency transactions to develop a relationship graph of the transactions that led to the creation of a particular asset in a wallet.

This utilizes Redis to build a large in-memory data graph which is then exported to a flat file for futher analysis and processing.

txwatch

For a company doing on-chain transactions, the txwatch service enables relevant transactions to be surfaced into a database for financial reporting, auditing, customer support, and other purposes.

txwatch is a service which can be asynchronously called as part of a checkout flow to capture relevant transaction data and monitor the progress of a transaction. Transactions can be reviewed and cleared by business users to ensure compliance with regulatory and internal financial reporting requirements.

These are just a few of the services which I had been working on over the past year and now am able to open source and give back to the community.

I am excited to see the continued innovation in this space, especially as we climb out of the trough of disillusionment and onto the long-tail slope of enlightenment.

last updated 2024-10-03