Building a decentralized future is about more than tokenomics or cryptography, institutional adoption or even regulation. For Ethereum and the entire blockchain ecosystem to grow, it falls on the community to build the infrastructure components that keep the network running. Across the Ethereum network, there is a need for utilities that lower the barrier of entry and simplify access to Ethereum data. Among the most essential of these are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) products. Leading the way is Infura, which offers developers a suite of tools to connect their apps to the Ethereum network and other decentralized platforms.

Many of the blockchain space’s most remarkable projects — Metamask, CryptoKitties, UJO, Radar Relay, Cipher Browser, uPort — utilize Infura’s APIs to connect their applications to the Ethereum network. In doing so, Infura provides the fundamental infrastructure required to handle both the short-term spikes that can often occur during token launches and essential, longer-term scaling solutions. An average of 6.5 billion JSON-RPC requests per day on the Ethereum network are channeled through Infura infrastructure, making the project an essential pillar of the ecosystem.

“Our mission is to facilitate access to Ethereum and the opportunities it provides,” says Infura Lead Systems Engineer Nicola Cocchiaro. “We’ve always believed that only through widespread adoption can the enormous potential of Ethereum be fully realized. One of the ways that we aim to help achieve that goal is by providing infrastructure as a service. Over the the last two years, this has put us in a privileged position to witness the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem firsthand, and the growth has been explosive both for it and us.”

Some numbers on the rise of Infura: “We now have more than 15,000 registered developers, we’re serving over 6 billion API requests per day and transferring roughly 1.6 petabytes of data per month,” says Cocchiaro. “In 2017 alone, we relayed transactions that moved more than 7 million ether, with almost 9 million more so far in 2018. And most of this growth happened over the second half of 2017.”