Nirvana Labs is a company that is focused on improving the performance and scalability of the Avalanche blockchain ecosystem. The company has implemented a number of innovative solutions, including decentralizing its nodes and implementing avalanche subnets, which have helped to reduce latencies and improve performance. In addition, Nirvana Labs has expanded its data center regions and invested in renewable energy sources, making it more environmentally friendly and cost-effective for web3 developers.

One of the key benefits of Nirvana Labs’ technology is that it allows web3 developers to build better products in less time and with less money. The improved performance, lower latencies, and lower pricing provided by Nirvana Labs make it easier for web3 developers to create and deploy their applications on the Avalanche blockchain. In addition, the increased number of data center regions and the use of renewable energy sources make it more reliable and sustainable for web3 developers to build on the Avalanche blockchain.

Furthermore, the decentralized nature of Nirvana Labs’ approach has also helped to improve the overall security of the Avalanche blockchain. By distributing its nodes across multiple data centers and cloud providers, the company has made it more difficult for attackers to target the network. This increased security is important for web3 developers, as it allows them to build their products with confidence, knowing that their data is safe and secure.

Overall, Nirvana Labs is driving the growth and success of the Avalanche blockchain ecosystem with its innovative technology and commitment to decentralization and renewable energy. Web3 developers can now build better products in less time and with less money thanks to the benefits provided by Nirvana Labs.

Focused on Improving Avalanche Node Performance was originally published in Nirvana Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What is MetaMask?

MetaMask is a popular browser and mobile based wallet application used by millions of web3 users to send and receive cryptocurrency and NFTs with a wallet that they hold the keys to.

How Does It Work?

MetaMask is self-custodied, which means that when a user creates a wallet they must copy down the automatically generated “seed phrase”. This seed phrase is the key to getting into your wallet. Once you’ve created a wallet, you can use it with any decentralized exchange, NFT marketplace or protocol dApp.

How Can It Be Better?

All web3 wallet apps need to have access to a blockchain node in order to receive or send transactions and balances from that blockchain unless you’re using a dApp that runs their own nodes and allows users to use them. By default, MetaMask is connected to Infura’s public node network.
This means you’re sharing bandwidth with everyone else using the default metamask provider and you’re limited by the number of transactions you can send at one time. When using the default blockchain provider you may experienced:

• Slow transaction finality
• Dropped transactions
• Inaccurate gas fee estimates

If you’re looking to improve your MetaMask experience and get higher transactions per second, look no further.

Supercharge MetaMask with Nirvana Nodes

Nirvana Labs offers the fastest FREE nodes as well as the lowest pricing if you require a high request volume. Compared to other node providers, you get a lot more for a lot less with Nirvana.

Whats Up with Nirvana Nodes?

How did we manage this? In the past, we encountered the same problems over and over again with existing blockchain node providers, so we spent a year building a global infrastructure as a service with one goal in mind. Lower the barriers to entry into blockchain. This means we needed to make running a blockchain node easy, fast and affordable. Unlike many competitors, we focus on the extreme vertical integration of our services. We cut out all middlemen, including Amazon Web Services. So when competitors are seeing dropped transactions due to AWS outages, we still keep on chugging with our cloud-agnostic and decentralized infrastructure. (Wen Token? Follow us on Twitter to find out 😉)

Lets Upgrade!

Upgrading your MetaMask from the default provider is quite simple. Just open up MetaMask as you normally would and head to Settings > Networks.

Here you will see an option to “Add a Network”, if you don’t have a Nirvana Labs account, you can just use our public RPC URL and still see a vast improvement in transaction speeds and transaction success rate but if you’re looking to increase your max transactions per second, sign up and create a FREE node.

Once you’ve got you’re new lightning fast node, input the following options for Ethereum MainNet:

• Network Name: Ethereum — Nirvana (This can be whatever you want)
• New RPC URL: https://ethereum.nirvanalabs.xyz/public
• Chain ID: 1
• Currency Symbol: ETH
• Block Explorer URL: https://etherscan.io

Once you’ve filled out the form, press save and ensure that “Ethereum — Nirvana is selected as your network. Now you can send and receive transactions as fast as you want without worry. At the time of writing this guide, we offer Ethereum and Avalanche nodes. Polygon coming soon! 🚀

Avalanche Public RPC URL

• Network Name: Avalanche — Nirvana (This can be whatever you want)
• New RPC URL: https://avax.nirvanalabs.xyz/public/ext/bc/C/rpc
• Chain ID: 43114
• Currency Symbol: AVAX
• Block Explorer URL: https://snowtrace.io/

If you have any questions or need some help setting up your MetaMask, join our Discord Server where our team of talented Web3 Support Engineers can assist you 24/7/365!

Speed Up MetaMask Transactions was originally published in Nirvana Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Avalanche Network, has recently launched the ability to create sub-networks (subnets) within the Avalanche network itself. Why is this so useful? Because creating your own high performant blockchain where you can have finer-grain control of the ecosystem is now easier than ever!

What is a Subnet?

A Subnet is a sovereign network which defines its own rules regarding its membership and token economics. It is composed of a dynamic subset of Avalanche validators working together to achieve consensus on the state of one or more blockchains. Each blockchain is validated by exactly one Subnet, and a Subnet can have many blockchains. A validator may be a member of many Subnets.

Create a Subnet

Steps to Deployment

Step 1) Create a validator node

Step 2) Create a subnet

Step 3) Add more nodes to your subnet

Subnet Requirements

In this tutorial we will be covering the basics of creating an Avalanche Subnet but there are a few basic assumptions and key requirements. In order to create a subnet you need two things:

• 2,000 AVAX (for MainNet) or 1 AVAX (for Fuji/TestNet)
• A Dedicated Avalanche Validator Node

Enabling a Validator Node on Nirvana Labs is available to Enterprise users. Contact us to get pricing and setup a node today.

Nirvana Avalanche Enterprise Nodes

What’s so great about Nirvana Labs Avalanche nodes? Well for starters, they're FAST! We use over 33 datacenter regions around the world to bring our nodes closer to more people. Our average response latency time is 28ms. How are we so performant yet cost efficient? Our infrastructure is purpose built, cloud-agnostic and energy renewable. Using a node provider allows you to focus on building your dApp and spend less time troubleshooting node issues.

• Fast and cost efficient
• Energy renewable
• Indexing and archive mode enabled

I Have My Node.. Now What?

The Subnet command suite provides a collection of tools for developing and deploying Subnets.

To get started, use the avalanche subnet create <subnet-name>command wizard to walk through the configuration of your very first Subnet. Then, go ahead and deploy it with the avalanche subnet deploy command. You can use the rest of the commands to manage your subnet configurations.

Subnet EVM

Subnet-EVM is a configurable Ethereum virtual machine designed for Subnets. It supports airdrops, custom fee tokens, configurable gas parameters, and multiple stateful precompiles. To learn more, check out the github project.

You can use this newly created Subnet just like you use C-Chain and EVM tools. Only differences are chainID and RPC URL. For example you can follow this article to Deploy a Smart Contract on Your Subnet-EVM Using Remix and Metamask. Or you can deploy your contracts with hardhat quick start guide by changing url and chainId in the hardhat.config.ts.

For example: to connect Hardhat to the local network that deployed with the Avalanche-CLI, we would create a network setting in hardhat.config.ts that looks similar to this:

testChain: {
      url: "http://127.0.0.1:63196/ext/bc/2GAinA2PAEEEnuy1yTeqgqCbQWUGFTvUaiDSRiZgMrRRoLYs92/rpc",
      chainId: 12345,
      accounts: ["<YOUR-PRIVATE-KEY-HERE>"],
    }

Learn more on how to use Avalanche nodes in the Nirvana Labs Documentation or on the Avalanche Node Documentation

Resources: https://docs.avax.network/subnets/create-a-local-subnet

Create a Blockchain with Avalanche Subnets with Nirvana Labs was originally published in Nirvana Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why Did We Do It?

What defines decentralization? Is a blockchain really decentralized if the majority of nodes in the ecosystem ultimately are controlled by one party? At the time of writing this, 67% of Blockchain nodes run on AWS Cloud. As web3 engineers, we wanted a tool that we and our peers could use to build web3 applications quicker and cheaper.

We looked at the available options in the marketplace and after months of testing them, using them in production and spending tens of thousands of our money and clients’ money on these off-the-shelf solutions we found that many had:

• Pricing models that did not scale. They became too expensive to justify the cost of the service.
• Experienced unexpected total outages and suffered from bandwidth loss during times of high traffic demand
• Used the same data centers as their upstream compute provider so many of the outages happened to all providers at once, thus incorrectly shifting the blame to the Blockchain itself.
• The APIs and SDKs between each service provider differed greatly and integrations between them are none to few. Requiring you to buy multiple services to build one dApp
• SDKs and APIs would receive unstable updates and breaking changes with little to no heads-up to the developers using the products
• The latency, data accuracy and bandwidth were poor to suboptimal throughout all of the existing services especially when querying off-chain or semi-off-chain data.
• Global computational coverage was lacking. All providers only utilize a few data center regions in the US and very few in Europe. This leaves all “The Rest of the World” having to deal with latency issues.

What Do We Offer?

Nodes as a Service

When building a decentralized application (dApp), companies must be able to send and receive blockchain transaction data at a massive scale. The quickest and most accurate way to get this data is through a blockchain node.

Running a node is easy enough for a developer with some Linux experience. Maintaining 100% uptime, globally low response latencies and ensuring node security remains very difficult. In order for lean blockchain startups to grow, they must usually outsource this service versus staffing, deploying and managing a network of nodes themselves.

Of course, blockchain data providers such as Moralis, Infura and Alchemy offer you the option to take this worry off of your hands. But what have you really done there? You have added a new dependency to your decentralized application. Your dApp now entirely depends on this vendor to provide correct and timely data in order to function.

We’ve mitigated this dependency risk by first vertically integrating our entire infrastructure stack and cutting out any middle-men that bottlenecked our performance, latency or overall just created a centralized point of failure in our system. We added multi-regional data redundancy in case of natural disasters or wide-scale outages. The biggest constraint during construction was to maintain a cloud-agnostic solution. We don’t even have an AWS account. We’ve taken the time to configure everything from scratch at the bare metal level and we’ve used some next-level virtualization tech as a cherry-on-top.

The results: Our pricing, performance, uptime and security have set a new standard for what’s possible.

IPFS Storage Clusters

Need to store your NFT metadata somewhere? Okay but wait, you have thousands of users around the world that want to see your NFTs as soon as they drop!? Well, I can say from personal experience, that’s easier said than done when you’re using existing solutions. Web3 storage providers such as Pinata, NFT.storage, and web3.storage all have something in common: they lack a competitive pricing structure to compete with web2 storage providers, especially in relation to bandwidth. (gigabytes per dollar). This is the main reason NFT collections have issues with metadata availability at launch time.

How’d we solve this one? Surely running an IPFS node should do the trick right? Wrong. When considering scalability, the node is just one small part of the entire equation. To start with, there must be a robsut gateway in between the IPFS node and the user to be able to handle multiple users at once. The further the user is from the geographic location from the IPFS node, the higher their response time. Additionaly the node operator must enable and maintain security using a firewall and file scanning service. Now let’s multiply this by 10,000 NFTs and 5,000 NFT viewers (users that want to see your NFT). Each provider is different but every single one will start hitting rate limits and bandwidth limits very quickly.

Try comparing our IPFS storage costs with Pinata or even compare it with AWS block volume cost. It’s immediately apparent that Nirvana Storage allows dApp developers to serve metadata to more users for less money. Since all metadata is replicated across all nodes in our global cluster the moment they are uploaded, a developer can pin a 4k video form California to IPFS and then serve it to users in Japan in UNDER A SECOND.

ChainQuery — Next-Gen NFT API

We combined both our blockchain and storage nodes to create the ultimate NFT Indexer API. Query data about any NFT from any marketplace on any of our supported blockchains. Need to get the metadata for all 10,000 NFTs in the collection? All at once? Do you need a list of all current and historical NFT owners with spot prices? Would it be handy to get a news feed of relevant news articles and blog posts about a specified NFT contract? Do you want to know the rarity of an NFT immediately after mint? All of this is now possible with the ChainQuery NFT API. Everything you need in one API so you don’t have to buy 2 or 3 separate NFT API services to build one dApp. Unlike our competitors, we offer this as an a-la-carte option. If your dApp doesn’t need NFT data then you shouldn’t need to pay for that. Vice Versa, if your dApp only needs NFT data then why buy a node? You can just get the NFT API as a standalone product! No node required!

Looking to the Future

Now that we’ve properly decentralized our blockchain data service, the next step is to decentralize ourselves. Yes, eventually Nirvana Labs will become a protocol. The blockchain and token utility will not be decided until we have established ourselves a noteworthy and reputable name in the Web3 space.

Our process of “Gradualized Decentralization” allows us to build freely and incrementally, solving more intricate and smaller problems on our path to full decentralization. More importantly, we don’t box ourselves into a protocol that we must then build around to fit our constraints.

Help us enlighten blockchain infrastructure so web3 developers can build a better world! Soon enough, your smart fridge will host nodes and hold snacks at the same time. 😉

Nirvana Labs — Enlightening Blockchain Infrastructure was originally published in Nirvana Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nirvana Labs is emerging as a key player in building the decentralized blockchain infrastructure. As an organization, we at Nirvana Labs provide an analytics and deployment platform for traders and builders working with distributed ledgers, allowing them to unlock the full potential of the blockchain. Any developer will be able to utilize our ecosystem as an all-in-one solution to ship their codes faster.

One of the key focal points at Nirvana Labs is to provide the fastest nodes in the world enabling users to send and receive blockchain data at light speed. We are achieving this feat while making sure that our infrastructure is economical, accurate and secure. This approach will diminish the barriers for the entire web3 development community to build and scale their decentralized applications.

Ensuring the security of our nodes has always been our priority at Nirvana Labs. And we as a company understand the significance of the next-generation WAF in achieving this objective. The ability of Signal Sciences to proactively monitor and analyze malicious and anomalous web traffic is critical for us to protect our nodes from potential attacks. Specifically, we utilize these features; Corp Rules, Corp Lists, and Corp Signals, provided by Signal Sciences in our platforms to make sure that our nodes are protected from attackers.

Fastly Next-Gen WAF has enabled us to keep our nodes active with zero downtime having maximum security at the application level. Our decision to embrace NWAF has certainly made it possible for us to become the market leader in providing the best possible nodes for our customers.

Written By: Chamika Sudusinghe — Web3 Data Engineer

Fastly and Nirvana Labs Partnership was originally published in Nirvana Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.