Podcast notes – Preethi Kasireddy on key web3 architecture – Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Podcast

Guest: Preethi Kasireddy (Dappcamp founder)
Host: Tom Shaughnessy

Architecture of web3 application
https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-of-a-web-3-0-application

Formerly Coinbase engineer, and a16z partner (enterprise and consumer, less crypto at the time)

Then she built Truestory for 2.5 years, building blockchain social network, skin in game for online comments, too early for it

Then started Dappcamp – trains web2 engineers on web3 tech
Idea spawned from devcamp lecture
3 week intense bootcamp

Smart contracts are backend code – removes idea of centralized webserver – all logic + state on Ethereum
ETH is your new backend

Securely communicate with ETH blockchain via nodes (json-rpc)
Alchemy, Infura are node providers – provide API endpoints – faster to start, more secure, easier to scale
Centralization risk, but benefits > costs

ETH is deterministic state machine
Users must initiate transactions using private keys
web2 version = user + password login, which provides the service with your key(s)

IPFS, Swarm = decentralized storage = separate network for data storage
Store media on IPFS, IPFS provides hash to that file(s), you save that hash on blockchain
Most IPFS users don’t also use Filecoin, and instead pin to their own server / node, but Filecoin incentivizes true decentralized storage
“IPFS can be competitive with AWS in future…but will take a lot of time”

Querying ETH database is surprisingly hard
Etherscan is amazing – scans ETH for every block, every transaction
The Graph is a service that does all this for you
diff apps also build their own (eg, Uniswap API endpoints for Uniswap-related data)
Read-only, not for posting to blockchain

web3 isn’t more complex than web2
just a different paradigm (eg, gas fees, private keys)
technically, apps can pay for users’ gas, to remove / abstract away

ETH methods for scaling
1. Payment channels (Lightning, Raiden)
2. Sidechain (Polygon) – most popular now
3. Rollups (key difference: execution is done offchain, and post data to ETH) – will take off in a few years, lots of work to make cross-rollup communication possible

Composability – all ETH L1 smart contracts can talk to each other

Most excited about innovation in Starkware, Optimism, ZK-land (instead of dapps)

“Ethereum fan girl”
ETH has lost market share in recent years
Avalanche accepts EVM and builds off it – EVM has a lot of staying power