About Direct
One idea
led to another.
Direct grew out of years spent building blockchain infrastructure - and a decision to rethink how people access it.
01 The team
A history of working together.
The relationships behind Direct go back more than 20 years, across businesses, products and the infrastructure we’ve built together.
02 Earlier work
Before Direct,
there was RPC.
We previously built RPC infrastructure serving up to 10 billion requests a day. That work gave us a close view of the infrastructure applications rely on, and the dependencies that come with it.
Earlier RPC infrastructure
10B req / day
03 Why Direct began
Taking the work
out of RPC.
We explored automatic failover, intelligent prefetching and caching to help developers build more resilient and efficient applications.
We wanted those features to come with the speed of a direct connection. As we worked toward that, the design grew more complex, and we began exploring whether peer-to-peer connections could offer a simpler approach.
04 A broader focus
The idea grew
beyond RPC.
As we developed the peer-to-peer approach, we began looking beyond the connection itself to how independent providers could exchange work with consumers.
The design had applications outside RPC. Our focus turned to building the foundation for a decentralized marketplace, with blockchain RPC and AI inference as its first services.
Two markets, one foundation
Blockchain RPCBlockchain access through independent operators. AI inferenceAI models served by independent providers.