Conduit Indexing: Ultra-Fast Blockchain Data for the Rollup Ecosystem

Last week, we announced Conduit Indexing, the newest tool in the Conduit Developer Suite. Powered by Index Supply, Conduit Indexing gives developers unparalleled speed and flexibility in blockchain data queries, at an ultra cost-effective price.

How is this possible? We’ll show you in this deep dive blog breaking down how Conduit Indexing works and why it’s the best choice for rollup operators and developers.

The problems with indexing today

As blockchain performance improves, indexing remains a bottleneck on developers’ ability to capitalize on that performance. We see this in a number of ways:

• Slow queries. With standard indexing solutions like subgraphs utilizing ETL processes, new queries can take days to run, as the indexer has to download the chain’s blocks from a node provider.
• No flexibility. The ETL process also means developers must re-index the chain any time they want to query new types of data or modify the contracts being scanned. The lack of flexibility slows down developers and delays features that need new data feeds. 
• Too slow for high-performance chains. Indexers often lag behind high-performance chains, making it impossible for developers to get up-to-date data fast.

These indexing problems prevent builders from harnessing the full power of high-performance blockchains to build sophisticated, scalable apps.

How Conduit Indexing solves indexer bottlenecks

Conduit Indexing utilizes a radically different technical architecture that solves the problems of traditional indexers, enabling developers to be more efficient.

• Traditional indexing not required. Unlike with traditional indexers, there's no conventional, block-by-block indexing process. The entire chain is simply ingested and made available for SQL querying in a few hours – no matter how big the chain is.
• Fast results for any query. Developers can run any query they want and get responses in milliseconds. Once the data is ingested, there’s no need to re-index no matter what new queries you want to run. 
• Keeps up with any chain. Because it can ingest data much faster than traditional indexers, Conduit Indexing always stays at the tip of the chain and gives you up to date data – even ultra-fast, high-throughput chains.

For example, see how quickly we can query the ERC-20 token balances for a random wallet on Base.

Conduit Indexing isn’t just improving on existing indexers with faster, more flexible queries. It’s enabling new indexing use cases that simply weren’t possible before. 

One example: Live Queries. Developers often have queries they need to frequently re-run to get up-to-date data. Live Queries enable developers to run those queries just once and leave them to auto-update as new transactions occur. We can see an example in the video below from Index Supply: The developer has set a live query to track the recipient of every USDC payment on payments app Daimo Pay in real-time.

Even with new payments happening constantly, the Live Query remains up to date at all times – it even logs the example payment we make in the demo before Daimo Pay’s UI updates for the user.

Conduit Indexing is a game changer for rollup owners and developers

Conduit Indexing is taking one of the biggest bottlenecks in the onchain tech stack and making it 10x more efficient. That means developers can finally tap into the full performance capabilities of high-throughput rollups, and build apps that aren’t hampered by legacy indexing processes. From the rollup owner’s perspective, that improvement to developer experience makes your chain a better destination for builders. It also enables you to get better, more up-to-date data insights into how users interact with your chain. 

Best of all, Conduit Indexing is doing all of this at industry-leading prices. While most indexers charge thousands or more per month, rollup owners pay $250 per month to index their testnet and $500 per mainnet. Developers pay $250 per month to query data for all 15+ rollups supported by Conduit Indexing, with more on the way. 

If you want to 10x your data capabilities and build better with Conduit Indexing, contact us here.