This is a brain dump of things I've thought about as potential product market fit ideas for Portal Network.
It all started with the idea of "reimagining light clients" with the promise of easy access to Ethereum state and history for "everyday users" without having to run a full node. Obviously, that has all changed with the advent of the Beacon Chain, the proliferation of execution clients, and the hard reality that getting p2p storage for all of Ethereum's state is just hard. And, then there's the question, who's actually asking for this stuff? Is it really that big a deal to just plug your app/wallet/whatever into Infura, Alchemy, Pocket Network, Ankr network, or whatever other RPC service you can think of?
I dunno. But, here's the product market fit we've achieved so far that I can think of.
- Some EL clients are maybe going to start using Portal Network as backend for serving pre-merge history in May 2025 (partial history expiry or some such)
era1 - the historical accumulator that Portal Network pioneered for verifiably proving the validity of blocks in the pre-merge chain is now used to anchor the blocks in the era1 files that are used in geth for storing ancient chain history - so basically we won a smol victory in that geth now uses one of our ideas- HistoricalSummaries are now available in the Lodestar beacon rest API so you can anchor post merge execution blocks to something trustworthy, though I'm pretty sure nobody cares yet (or maybe never will)?
And that's about it. Everything else is still a solution in search of a problem as far as I can tell. Users and apps aren't beating down our doors to start getting p2p access to ancient state or block history as of yet.
So, with that pessimistic essay out of the way, here's a couple of ideas for potential PMF that are mostly untested:
- Make a Portal Network plugin (or ensure all the correct RPC endpoints are implemented) so we can be a drop-in replacement for Infura/Alchemy in a
ponder instance so app developers can start prototyping without having to go through the trouble of getting API keys and all that nonsense.
- Use as the JSON-RPC provider for
tevm using the UltralightProvider (which in theory should work close to directly out of the box with the tevm transport) - Obviously this would only work for whatever data is currently available in the various Portal subnetworks. Block history should general work fine other than possibly the very tip of the chain. State is going to really only have access to ancient chain history (so pre merge). There is some state available at block numbers later than the merge, but it's woefully incomplete at this point because archival state is hard.
These aren't really that interesting, but it's a start. Portal might become the new "third pillar of Ethereum" but it hasn't taken off yet so I'm curious what actually gets us there.
I dunno what else
This is a brain dump of things I've thought about as potential product market fit ideas for Portal Network.
It all started with the idea of "reimagining light clients" with the promise of easy access to Ethereum state and history for "everyday users" without having to run a full node. Obviously, that has all changed with the advent of the Beacon Chain, the proliferation of execution clients, and the hard reality that getting p2p storage for all of Ethereum's state is just hard. And, then there's the question, who's actually asking for this stuff? Is it really that big a deal to just plug your app/wallet/whatever into Infura, Alchemy, Pocket Network, Ankr network, or whatever other RPC service you can think of?
I dunno. But, here's the product market fit we've achieved so far that I can think of.
era1- the historical accumulator that Portal Network pioneered for verifiably proving the validity of blocks in the pre-merge chain is now used to anchor the blocks in theera1files that are used in geth for storing ancient chain history - so basically we won a smol victory in that geth now uses one of our ideasAnd that's about it. Everything else is still a solution in search of a problem as far as I can tell. Users and apps aren't beating down our doors to start getting p2p access to ancient state or block history as of yet.
So, with that pessimistic essay out of the way, here's a couple of ideas for potential PMF that are mostly untested:
ponderinstance so app developers can start prototyping without having to go through the trouble of getting API keys and all that nonsense.tevmusing theUltralightProvider(which in theory should work close to directly out of the box with thetevmtransport) - Obviously this would only work for whatever data is currently available in the various Portal subnetworks. Block history should general work fine other than possibly the very tip of the chain. State is going to really only have access to ancient chain history (so pre merge). There is some state available at block numbers later than the merge, but it's woefully incomplete at this point because archival state is hard.These aren't really that interesting, but it's a start. Portal might become the new "third pillar of Ethereum" but it hasn't taken off yet so I'm curious what actually gets us there.
I dunno what else