a16z Launches Trustless Access to Ethereum Blockchain Offering 2-Second Synchronization
U.S. venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is rolling out Helios, a Rust-based Ethereum light client the company developed with the aim to provide fully trustless access to the Ethereum blockchain.
The announcement was made by a16z crypto, the company’s venture capital fund that invests in crypto- and web3-focused startups.
“One of the main reasons we use blockchains is trustlessness. This property promises to allow us self-sovereign access to our wealth and data. For the most part, blockchains like Ethereum have delivered on this promise — our assets are truly ours,” the crypto fund said.
“However, there are concessions we’ve made for the sake of convenience. One such area is in our use of centralized RPC (remote procedure call) servers.”
Users typically access the Ethereum blockchain via centralized providers such as Alchemy, and these businesses run high-performance nodes on cloud servers to enable others with easy access to chain data, according to a16z crypto.
“When a wallet queries its token balances or checks whether a pending transaction has been included in a block, it almost always does so through one of these centralized providers. The trouble with the existing system is that users need to trust the providers, and there is no way to verify the correctness of their queries,” the fund said, adding that its solution was designed to solve this problem.
The Silicon Valley firm says that Helios, whose use of Ethereum’s light client protocol was made possible by the blockchain’s switch ro proof of stake, converts data from an untrusted RPC provider into an RPC that is verifiably safe and local.
“Helios works together with centralized RPCs to make it possible to verify their authenticity without running a
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