The Ledger of Building and Using Data Infrastructure
Many teams initially think that building their own nodes and indexes might be cheaper and safer. But when you lay out all the costs, you’ll find that it’s not that simple.
First are the hardware and bandwidth expenses, and then there’s the time for full synchronization. Synchronizing a new chain’s complete blocks can take several days or even weeks. By the time you finish syncing, rollbacks and upgrades can bring new troubles. Not to mention cross-chain integration; you have to maintain the data structures of multiple chains yourself, and ensure query latency, caching strategies, monitoring and alerts... If any part of this chain breaks, the online functionality could fail.
Chainbase’s model is to have a professional team handle the underlying stability, providing developers with available, standardized, and accelerated data. This way, teams can use it as needed, scaling up as required, without worrying about 7×24 node operations. You can even think of Chainbase as a cloud data layer, with clear costs and an experience similar to a cloud database.
It’s not to say that building your own has no value, but rather that you need to weigh the opportunity costs. Are you going to spend your R&D resources on product and business innovation, or on maintaining a data system on a chain that could fail at any moment? This choice actually determines the team's competitiveness in the coming years.
