Ethereum is turning ten years old, marking a decade of smart contracts and programmable money. It gave us lots of nice things, such as ICOs (making a comeback), DeFi primitives, and cypherpunk values (also making a comeback). 

Throughout its history, it continued adding blocks without fail, throughout downturns and hard forks. Made possible by everyone involved. 

SQD is built on top of Ethereum, and powers plenty of EVM products – so we figured, it’s a good time to reminisce a little on the future of Ethereum, and the role we play in that. 

We entered the EVM indexing landscape as an incumbent four years ago and have grown to become a known choice 

Yet, the ethereum ecosystem isn’t just another business opportunity to us. It’s also deeply aligned with our values and beliefs in the power of decentralization and permissionlessness as drivers of innovation and empowerment. 

Why Ethereum? 

Few know this, but the SQD token was first minted on Ethereum mainnet. It was an ERC-20 token that was deployed as a smart contract before being bridged to Arbitrum One using the official bridge. 

Within the SQD architecture, the blockchain component serves as a reliable, censorship-resistant, and verifiable layer, enabling reward distribution and managing access to the network. 

SQD powering key Ethereum projects

We’re not just using Ethereum ourselves to manage our token; SQD has also become the data backbone for billion-dollar apps. 

Everyone needs onchain data. As Ethereum’s L2 ecosystem expanded, more and more dApps were built multi-chain from the start, placing a burden on builders who needed data. SQD aggregates more than 200 chains, including L2 data, making us an attractive choice. 

Many SQD users come to us because we’re the only place that offers the data they need. Be that full traces on Polygon, or a mix of L2s + native VMs that they can’t access elsewhere. 

This, in addition to scale, cost efficiency, and flexibility, explains how we became a crucial part of the EVM landscape's infrastructure. To name just a few, SQD is the data backend of: 

• Interface (everyone’s favorite app to stalk what their frens do onchain) 
• Railgun (a privacy protocol endorsed by Vitalik.eth himself) 
• PancakeSwap (the place to go for a cute entry to all the DeFi activities) 

We love to see these builders innovate and utilize the data without being locked into predefined schemas. 

That’s why we were very excited to see Fuel bring a new VM to Ethereum and naturally integrated their chain’s data to our network. 

For those not interested in building their own indexer from scratch, we have numerous examples of indexers that retrieve useful data, such as an indexer that retrieves Uniswap V4 data across multiple chains. 

These can be deployed by anyone as they see fit to analyze what’s happening on Ethereum and its many EVM chains. 

Aaaand one more thing.. Let’s get a bit nerdy. 

EIP-4444

In Japan, 4 is really not a great number. Never give four gifts to a person; instead, opt for three or five. That’s because the word for four has the same pronunciation as death, even though the signs are entirely different (四 vs. 死.) 

Why this tangent? Because EIP-4444 is four digits, and four fours give it big threatening energy. 

But not only for those of us who speak Japanese, it also spells death for anyone trying to retrieve the full Ethereum state history from an execution client. 

POV: you try to download the entire Ethereum blockchain history with low-speed German wifi. 

In a nutshell, EIP-4444 is the recognition that blockchain state (the entirety of what has happened on the chain until that point) is just growing too big for clients to store. 

When the proposal was put forward, the historical blocks already occupied 400 GB of disk space (imagine how much anime you could store instead), meaning clients needed at least 1TB to function. To fix this, the proposal suggested simply removing historic data older than one year. Soon, validators too have to live in the perpetual present. 

Sounds sensible until you realize that it’s the same clients that dapps go to via RPC interface to access historic data. Just because it’s not necessary to validate current blocks doesn’t mean there are no use cases for historic data. 

While Ethereum-native solutions have been proposed, the 96 follower count on X suggests that the Portal Network hasn’t quite gained popularity. 

Fortunately, you don’t have to deal with a Torrent library for the full Ethereum history, nor the Portal Network X account that has been inactive since last year. SQD has stored the entirety of Ethereum from day 0. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can access it through our network. 

Ethereum’s ten-year history is already stored, and we’re ready and looking forward to continuing to serve builders at the edge with all the EVM data they need. 

We also remain excited about what Ethereum’s strong dev community will be shipping in the future. 

“I’m looking forward to seeing more experimentation with Verkle trees. I believe they could unlock a mobile-first web3 experience. Light clients are still underexplored, but, in my view, will be the key to realizing the “trust but verify” maxim on the devices we all carry with us. Great time to be building on Ethereum.”

Dan, CPO at SQD 

ICYMI: We’ve also written, discussed, and commented on Ethereum extensively in the past. Check it out:

https://blog.sqd.dev/the-road-ahead-for-ethereum/

https://blog.sqd.dev/a-deep-dive-into-the-world-of-layer-2s/ 

https://blog.sqd.dev/exploring-the-superchain/ 

https://blog.sqd.dev/hype-or-reality-a-look-at-parallel-evms/ 

https://blog.sqd.dev/proto-danksharding-is-coming-heres-what-people-think/