EEA Member Spotlight with Alexandre Bourget, StreamingFast’s Co-founder and CTO
As an EEA member, StreamingFast will be part of the EEA community of organizations working to advance Ethereum and drive industry adoption. In the Q&A below, the EEA interviewed Alexandre Bourget on the ways StreamingFast helps the ecosystem achieve the potential impact of Ethereum.
Please introduce your company and yourself briefly.
StreamingFast is a radically different infrastructure product for Ethereum and for empowering developers with better queries and streaming semantics than blockchain nodes. The founding team is made up of serial entrepreneurs, with deep expertise in big data, cybersecurity, dev ops and blockchain. Combined, we have built and sold 6 companies, with the last one being sold to Intel. We have a passion for blockchain technology, and our goal is to help developers build performant applications by organizing the world’s decentralized data.
Having built big data solutions at Intel, my team and I understand the data engineering challenges of maintaining large swaths of data like blockchain data, but very few people are working on how to quickly and reliably read from this data. That’s where StreamingFast comes in, with a radically different streaming-first approach. The StreamingFast core value proposition: it’s the simplest, fastest, and most reliable blockchain data stream in the industry, for real-time as well as historical data.
What first brought you to the EEA, and why did you decide to become a member?
Enterprises that are working within the blockchain space will be helping to drive technology for the next decade to come. While core protocols tend to focus on the best write speeds to the underlying blockchain databases, it often creates a lot of compromises when it comes to reading that data. We’ve devoted ourselves to working on those solutions, and we believe that the EEA – as the first stop for those Enterprises seeking out guidance – is the perfect fit to help us share our knowledge, tooling, and expertise to save these companies months of engineering time.
What are you currently working on with regards to Ethereum? How will end-users benefit from your work?
We recently publicly released StreamingFast, a radically different infrastructure product for Ethereum. By empowering developers with better queries and streaming semantics, blockchain nodes can be optimized for a different role than they could ever natively provide. Well-known companies have been utilizing our APIs for some time and the feedback we’ve received so far has been incredibly positive. Many of the development teams we speak with utilized multiple service providers for redundancy, occasional latency issues, and feature completeness. After trying out StreamingFast, some of our users have been able to drop all of their other providers, as we were able to provide a single solution that just simply worked when they needed it. The main value propositions of StreamingFast include:
● Simpler: use 90% less code. Single integration for accessing a low-latency stream of Ethereum data, from block 0 to the tip of the chain. No need for complex retry logic.
● Cheaper: cut down on 99% of your Web3 calls. Avoid out-of-sync calls. Use in-stream updates to ERC-20 balances, Uniswap reserves, or any other contract’s state update.
● More reliable: read linearly, no more polling. Paradigm-shifting use of a cursor for reliable linearity of the stream, guaranteed across disconnections and in fork situations. Something native nodes with WebSockets can only dream about.
● Faster access to real-time blocks: Get data earlier than any other traditional node provider. Our nodes race to push out data, instead of you hitting one load-balanced node out of 1000, most of which are lagging because of propagation delays.
● Complete: full history at your fingertip. Stream data and state changes from genesis. Let go of your archive nodes.
● Data-rich, industry-wide. EVM-call level introspection: full call graph, all state changes, logs, keccak data, gas costs, Ether balance changes, internal transactions, input data & return data plus some decoded events and state changes.
StreamingFast is available for both Ethereum mainnet and private Ethereum deployments.
How will the EEA enhance your organization’s current efforts?
One comment we have received multiple times in the past was “How come we didn’t have StreamingFast when we started building?” We want to meet Enterprises before they start building. We know that we can save them time and money, and make sure Ethereum remains their first choice of protocol. By removing a lot of the added blockchain complexity around things like fork resolution, Enterprises will be able to get to production faster and simplify the experience for their developers. Our relationship with the EEA will provide Enterprises with exposure to the solutions they need, at the time they need them.
What EEA programs are you most excited about?
We are excited to participate in the Interest Groups as well as the Working Groups. We have been involved with blockchain enterprise deployments for multiple years. As such, we are looking forward to sharing use cases, discussing industry requirements and collaborating to develop open, standards based-specifications to accelerate the adoption of Ethereum-based enterprise solutions.
Learn More and Connect with the EEA
The EEA enables organizations to adopt and use Ethereum technology in their daily business operations. We empower the Ethereum ecosystem to develop new business opportunities, drive industry adoption, and learn and collaborate. Our global community of members is made up of leaders, adopters, innovators, developers, and businesses that collaborate to create an open, decentralized web for the benefit of everyone. Join us and contribute to our work!
Learn more about EEA membership, sign up for the latest updates and contact [email protected].