Executive Summary
Over the past four years, Gnosis has emerged as an industry leader in Ethereum-based open finance, trusted by enterprises, developers, and crypto users alike. From their open framework for conditional tokens to their permissionless DEX and multisig wallet, they have built interoperable market mechanisms and protocols that allow users to securely create, trade, and hold crypto assets. Hoping to provide a seamless end-user experience and ensure that their infrastructure is maximally decentralized and resilient, the Gnosis team transitioned from fully self-hosting their nodes to a hybrid solution with Infura’s API service. Their hybrid approach gives Gnosis the flexibility to verify their transactions and run their own nodes for complex queries, while also reducing the cost of infrastructure and increasing network stability.
Challenges
Gnosis was one of the earliest players in the Ethereum ecosystem. Before Infura came to market in 2016, Gnosis was running their own node infrastructure to power their applications. Performance, security, availability, and reliability are all aspects that can make or break the end-user experience. To preserve the best experience, Gnosis had to ensure their infrastructure was secure, always online, and robust enough to handle surges in traffic. Maintaining their own solution turned out to be time-consuming and frustrating. To ensure their applications were always on and performing properly, Gnosis sought out an Ethereum node service provider that could offer connectivity at scale.
Solution: Increasing Network Resilience with Hybrid Infrastructure
Gnosis uses Infura in many ways. The Gnosis Safe Multisig wallet uses Infura to connect users to Ethereum. The Gnosis mobile app also uses Infura to display users' token balances and sync with Travis CI, a continuous integration service for quickly testing code. The Gnosis team ultimately adopted a hybrid infrastructure, running their own nodes alongside Infura to increase network stability and uptime. This model gives Gnosis the flexibility to confirm and verify transactions themselves and helps diversify their infrastructure. Their hybrid approach is a smart solution for dapp teams who want to reduce operational costs and remain confident that their infrastructure is decentralized and highly resilient.