How Infura Helps OpenZeppelin Provide a Better User Experience

Executive Summary

OpenZeppelin is a crypto-native software and security company, bringing foundational Web3 tooling, infrastructure, and security to builders and users of the decentralized economy.

OpenZeppelin provides a complete suite of security and reliability products to build, manage, and inspect all aspects of software development and operations for Ethereum projects. This includes OpenZeppelin Contracts, a standard for Web3 security adopted by major projects across the space and the company’s flagship product, OpenZeppelin Defender. The platform is used for developers to securely automate a wide range of smart contract operations to ship faster with less risk.

OpenZeppelin chose Infura as their Etnereum node provider to ensure stable and uninterrupted functionality, while its team focused on providing the best possible user experience.

"It's critical that access to the Ethereum blockchain be as open and transparent as possible, and it's vital to have diversity with respect to node runners. Infura makes it possible for anyone to run Ethereum transactions no matter where they are."

Stephen Webber
Developer Advocate

Challenges

The team at OpenZeppelin runs its own nodes. However, using only those nodes as OpenZeppelin Defender's sole infrastructure solution would have resulted in unreasonable overhead. To offer Defender users the ability to quickly spin up their own dapps, the company needed an infrastructure provider that simplified the process for connecting to Ethereum, deploying contracts, reading data from the network, and sending transactions. Without this support, Defender would not be able to support its robust and feature-rich UX since data availability is a key component for an application’s user experience design.

Solution

With Infura as an infrastructure provider, the OpenZeppelin engineering team is able to count on an uninterrupted service through the suite of high availability APIs. Having Infura on the backend of Defender has allowed for the creation of a frontend UX design that accounts for all the data required to ensure OpenZeppelin customers can seamlessly manage their Ethereum smart contract operations using the platform.