Day Two Cloud 132: What Web3 Means For Infrastructure Engineers

Web3 is the term for an emerging technology movement that aims to create a more decentralized Internet and put more ownership in the hands of individual users and consumers. As of early 2022, Web3 is most closely associated with faddish-seeming movements such as cryptocurrencies and NFTs, but it’s worth understanding the technological underpinnings of Web3, particularly blockchain. We also discuss business models driving Web3. Our guest to guide us through Web3 is Josh Neuroth, Head of Product at Ankr. We discuss: * Web3 terminology, including dApps, blockchain, and nodes * Web3 as cultural and technological phenomena * Blockchain/distributed ledger fundamentals * Smart contracts * Enterprise use cases for blockchain * Blockchain software stacks * Operations and management challenges of running highly distributed systems * More Takeaways: Web3 can feel daunting. Get started with a wallet. Metamask in the Chrome web store. Buy $20 worth of crypto on Coinbase and put it in your wallet. Start connecting to dApps. Get a cheap web server and launch a node. Start playing around with it. Or if you don’t want to build a node, query Ankr’s public (rate-limited) RPC API to connect to the blockchain. Show Links: How Infrastructure Providers Can Enable Web3 – The New Stack @0xJosh.eth – Josh Neuroth on Twitter Josh Neuroth on LinkedIn Transcript: [00:00:04.250] – Ned Welcome to Day Two Cloud. Today’s it’s going to be an interesting conversation. It might be a hot button topic. We’re talking about web3, but not just web3 in the abstract sense. We’re going to get down to what it actually means to the Infrastructure Engineer. And we have a special guest, Josh Neuroth. He’s a head of product at Ankr, who is a service provider for hosting nodes that run blockchain. So he might know a thing or two about a thing or two, right, Ethan? [00:00:30.340] – Ethan He knows more than a thing or two about a thing or two. He knows a lot he knows a lot about the culture, the environment, use cases, system requirements, and so on, along with all the terminology that if you’ve been reading about web3 and your head’s swimming because all the jargon is just kind of drowning you, Josh can clarify all of that for you. [00:00:47.800] – Ned Yeah, and I like jargon, but my goodness, there’s a lot of jargon. So if web3 is piquing in your interest, enjoy this episode with Josh Neuroth, head of product at ankr. [00:00:58.290] – Ned Well, Josh Neuroth, welcome to Day Two Cloud. Before we get into the topic at hand, why don’t you introduce yourself to the fine audience out there? [00:01:07.980] – Josh Thank you. Yeah. My name is Josh Neuroth. I lead the product team over at ankr, which is a web3 infrastructure company. And I’ve spent most of my career in product management last seven or eight years kind of geeking out in infrastructure, working at Infrastructure as a service companies and building solutions for some of the world’s leading networks and companies. [00:01:31.210] – Ned Okay. Well, that dovetails nicely into the conversation we want to have because we wanted to talk about the infrastructure side of web3 and understand from an engineering standpoint what’s required to run web3 components. So let’s get started with some fundamentals. Ethan and I are mostly web3 Newbies. We don’t know that much. We’ve done a little bit of reading,