Introducing RouteMesh​

Suppose you’re Goldman Sachs and you need to read or write data to a public blockchain, chances are you need to use an RPC (Remote Procedure Call) provider that runs nodes for that chain. RouteMesh makes it easier and cheaper to access data across every blockchain. 

Since its stealth inception, RouteMesh has been serving billions of requests per month. Now, we are live. RouteMesh solves for specific pain points that customers experience when selecting a RPC provider while also creating an entirely new marketplace; one where pricing and transaction speed are all public. 

The Customer Perspective

Prior to RouteMesh, in order to access any chain, you need to have multiple providers. This creates a strange labyrinth of stitching providers together that can become hard to manage for the average company reading/writing data from blockchains.

In addition each provider has the following aspects that need to be managed:

• Inconsistent error codes and error handling to make implementing fallbacks challenging.
• Differing pricing models with the notion of “compute units” and non-archive vs archive requests.
• Rate limits that can cause bottlenecks in your application if you receive a large amount of traffic. 
• Subscription costs that force a certain level of usage and need to be consumed optimally to get value for money. Overage prices are much more expensive.
• Varying reliability levels for different chains at different times.
  

Clearly this becomes a real issue that any enterprise-grade crypto company needs to solve for. Many have some form of “internal routing” that they use but the sophistication to solve all of these problems isn’t a small project by any means. Solutions such as eRPC or NodeCore try to solve this by providing a load balancing mechanism, however they fall short in the fact that a lot of work is still required to configure them and they still do not solve many of these issues – especially around pricing.

The Solution

RouteMesh is a “grid” equivalent for RPC access. We ran into all of the issues above when supporting our analytics product (read more here) and that’s built our conviction to focus on solving this problem for the broader industry.

In essence, RouteMesh is an RPC provider that doesn’t run any nodes but has access to the largest inventory of nodes globally. Because our model is permissionless (providers don’t need to sign up explicitly), it means:

1. We support over 1000+ chains out of the gate
2. If a call fails, we can retry until we find a node where it does work
3. Pure usage based pricing, no subscriptions or overage prices.
4. Given we have the combined inventory of all nodes, our rate limits are much higher.

Because we have to know everything about our providers and nodes, it means we can do things like:

• Having standardised pricing in US dollars (no intermediate units)
• Give you access to the fastest nodes versus cheapest nodes (we have different API key types)
• Highest rate limits in the industry (aggregate capacity of all nodes)
• Standard URL schemes making it super easy to integrate (no URL maps required)

Outside of the technical innovation present, we’ve also innovated on the business model by enabling route-based pricing. 

Because we can use a blend of providers, our pricing typically helps customers save anywhere from 40-70% of their RPC costs while offering a more reliable service.

On latency: We have router instances in different regions of the planet and have benchmarks for nodes in that region meaning we can serve requests sometimes as quickly as 7ms! You can view our metrics here. All our metrics are public and we know the metrics of everyone else too.

We are just getting started. Join us in building a new standard for blockchain access.