The Cloudflare Ethereum Gateway
Last year, during its annual “crypto week”, our portfolio company Cloudflare shipped an IPFS gateway. I wrote about that then.
This year, they have shipped an Ethereum gateway.
It is great to see a very large Internet infrastrcuture provider build and ship crypto gateways.
If you are a small developer looking to create decentralized applications, having a web-scale provider offering IPFS and Ethereum gateways is really helpful.
I expect to see Cloudflare continue to extend the number of crypto protocols they support with their gateways.
And that will be part of what needs to happen to get to a world of truly decentalized applications.
If you are interested in developing on the Ethereum protocol and want to understand how the Cloudflare gateway works, this blog post explains it well.
Comments (Archived):
It’s great to see more “blockchain as a service” capabilities being rolled out, hiding the intricate technicalities of blockchain set-ups.Interesting that the example given is one of an ICO issuing ERC-20 tokens.
Was listening to something about Gauntlet the other day, kinda like Device Physics (from the Asic modeling world) for Cryptoeconomic model testing.So hard to do, such a great service idea.An example potentially of blockchain as a service type of thing.
My point exactly. Most companies using CF do not want to take that route. What would have been effective is showing how you can use smart contracts to replace or enhance an existing business function. This is still picks and shovels. I haven’t found any gold. (yet)
True it is still geeky, but less geeky than building a node from scratch.
I’m sure Fred, you’re familiar with the investment life cycle. Everybody’s always looking for the ‘next big thing’ and you’ve been beating the drum about crypto.Maybe it’s time I take a hint.
This looks really cool. But I read the entire post and still went: “Okay, now what do I do?” I started to get excited about my “Smart Contract” and then got quickly thrown into programming code.Not a knock on CloudFlare by ANY means, but on the general use-cases presented in crypto. I personally believe that is why there have not been any killer apps. Perhaps with FB behind everything this will change.I have used Cloudflare for years and totally love this company – both as a client and security pro.
I’m sure Fred won’t mind, please sell me on CloudFlare!!!!(1) They are a CDN — content distribution network? That means that, e.g., JPG files my Web site will display can come directly from Cloudflare without using bandwidth of my server farm or, for the ads, that of the ad networks???? That’s their main business?(2) They can defend against DDOS — attacks on my Web site via distributed denial of service? That’s their other main business??(3) If I have geographically distributed, maybe redundant, server farms, they can somehow from just one URL the users see redirect to an appropriate server farm?(4) Anything else?
Well, I use them for (1) and (2) (and 3 is part of the features of 1). I am not sure of their business plan, but it seems to be to layer more higher-value cyber security services on their existing CDN. (Thus I don’t understand the crypto play, but I am probably missing the big picture)What impressed me most is their “Easy On” approach. It literally took me 5 minutes. At one point they were getting like 20,000 customers a day or some crazy number.
All Facebook is doing is drawing the attention of government and society. No one who is ethical and reasons well trusts Facebook, and so Facebook shining a light on this will simply further expose what crypto-“currencies” are. What Facebook is trying to launch, even as a “stablecoin” is apparently closer to a fiat currency – except trying to avoid democratically voted in governments who use monetary policy to manage economy and put pressure on bad actors, etc. If someone is going to argue that we don’t need centralized authority and security services and the ability to prevent known bad actors from using money then they’re a sociopath or worse.This is the problems with bubbles and bias, sources and what people are allowing themselves to be exposed to – to integrating into their thinking. Ties in well with Fred’s post today about Jerry’s book on developing self-awareness. The ego mind is powerful as is indoctrination and can block you from the full reality – aka truth.Unfortunately sometimes only devastating, very traumatic events is what will shake someone to the core to break whatever illusions they have been captured by. That may mean someone they deeply trust “breaking it to them” – however the receiver of that will either crack open a bit to let the light/truth in, or they will fortify their walls – their ego mind guard coping mechanism and shut out that person. This behaviour mostly starts with emotional suppression/repression during childhood, leaving unhealed open wounds – emotional wounds are as real as physical ones we can see, and scabbing can occur to stop bleeding out – but doesn’t resolve the underlying issues that prevent energy from flowing fluidly as it wants – allowing the neural network of the brain to freely evolve how it wants – to its full capacity vs. having road blocks from the ego mind that redirects certain development from occurring or certain systems from integrating into logic: the logic learned from empathy, compassion, emotion, and so on.The only value I see to these ‘experiment’ of crypto-“currencies” is a wake up reminder to people of the greed and bad actors that exist out there (and the waste and inefficiency that comes from it), and that it will develop a lot of skilled people who are fluent in blockchain – where there is value – whether they will be incentivized enough by regular salary or only the pull of the extraordinary and unreasonable level of wealth that they could direct to themselves via these global, decentralized Ponzi-Pyramid schemes is another question.