While initially it was just major financial entities — such as PayPal, Square, Microstrategy, amongst many others — dipping their toes into the blockchain scene, now we have players from a host of other realms also making their presence felt across these markets. For example, earlier in 2021, Twitter announced to the world that it was going to allow its users to tip its content creators via the use of several different digital assets (including Bitcoin and Ethereum).
Similarly, earlier this year, it came to light that the social media behemoth was fostering its in-house crypto team by onboarding new talent in an effort to bolster its rapidly expanding creator economy as well as explore a host of novel domains including membership tokens, DAOs, and much more
Twitter adopts NFTs with the help of QuickNode
Staying in line with its crypto-centric vision, Twitter announced recently that it has integrated a non-fungible token (NFT) profile picture feature on its TwitterBlue platform, a subscription version of the microblogging and social networking service — with the entire operation being helmed by QuickNode, a Web3 developer platform that allows users to build & scale blockchain-powered applications (dApps) seamlessly.
QuickNode, in its most basic sense, is a project that enables non crypto, blockchain-focused companies to launch their very own nodes (with a global network of RPC endpoints) across a total of 10+ blockchains — including Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Polygon, etc — with the touch of a button. Providing his thoughts on the above stated development, Alexander Nabutovsky, co-founder of QuickNode, opined:
“While demand for QuickNode’s platform as a provider of blockchain infrastructure continues to take off as more companies look to adopt blockchain as part of their product strategy, we’re excited to partner with platforms such as Twitter to deliver support for features like their recently launched NFT Profile Pictures. Through this new feature, we’ll help provide a means in which people on Twitter can show off the NFTs they own and be a part of its thriving community”
For perspective sake, it is worth noting that the NFT market has grown exponentially over the last twelve odd months, with conservative estimates noting that the combined market cap of the sector easily surged past the $40 billion mark over the course of 2021 alone. Not only that, there are many studies that suggest this burgeoning sector will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 39.6% over the coming decade.
Quicknode is improving Solana, here’s how
There’s no denying that the best performing crypto asset of the year gone by has been Solana, and rightly so. The project can be thought of as a crypto computing ecosystem that seeks to achieve high transaction speeds without sacrificing key aspects such as transparency and decentralization. As a result of its amazing technological proposition, the project was able to record gains in excess of 2,500% over 2021.
That said, while on paper Solana is able to handle over 65,000 transactions per second, its existing end-user infrastructure does not allow dApps to reap such monumental speeds, instead, most users report an average tps rate of 1,000 transactions. In this regard, Quicknode recently revealed via a brand new whitepaper that it had been successful in deploying a purpose-written script (available on Github) so as to reduce Solana’s network latency from 126.67 ms to an amazing 15.36 ms.
Not only that, QuickNode’s endpoint was also able to showcase a substantial block height advantage over its competitors, recording a block time advantage of over 50 minutes, a massive improvement in Solana’s native capabilities, to say the least.
Looking ahead
With Solana being touted as a tangible, long-term alternative to Ethereum, it is of utmost importance that any of its existing operational creases (such those related to its latency problems, transaction throughput, etc) be ironed out quickly — especially as more and more users continue to adopt the platform. Thus, it will be interesting to see how things playout for the project from here on end.
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