Quicknode

December 17, 2020 — 3 min read

Fullnode client diversity is important to the survival of a protocol, community, and the decentralized applications (dApps) which depend on them to operate.

Ethereum 1.0 has Geth, OpenEthereum (fka. Parity), Nethermind, Trinity, Besu, just to name a few. ETH2.0 has many of its own, too! Prysm, Firefly, Lighthouse, and Nimbus for example.

In December 2019 we released support for the BTC blockchain on our API and Dedicated node products, to compliment our popular Geth & OpenEthereum offerings for ETH. bitcoind was our node client of choice.

Over the last 12 months we listened to our users and realized we need to go multi-client for BTC as well, to support the features we wanted our platform to have.

The company evolved as well: moving to more sophisticated architecture, improving node performance, reliability, and uptime. We now manage support for multiple clients, across multiple networks & chains, and deliver consistent availability & speed – at scale (Quicknode processes over 3B requests/month).

Today we announce support for Bcoin, a Bitcoin client written in JavaScript and maintained by dozens of generous and thoughtful volunteers. Bcoin has extended facilities for fee estimation with its mempool methods (estimatefee en estimatepriority).

Users can now select the bcoin client at checkout of any Quicknode API plan:

Another reason we wanted to support bcoin is because of its modular design, which allows for plugins and multi-chain support. This has empowered us to give our customers a much requested feature: the address balance index.

Ethereum's RPC has the ability to look up any address balance built-in, but Bitcoin's RPC does not. Every block explorer you use has spent cycles building its own index of balances for every address. Now this is as simple as clicking a button on the Quicknode UI and sending this request:

curl -H "Content-type:application/json" \
     -d '{"id": 1, "method": "qn_addressBalance", "params": ["1LPE9YTzDBQF5vZNnKcTJejstfsS8Z6icx"]}' \
     https://your-node-name.bcoin.quicknode.pro/long-id-here/

This is a big step forward in our support for Bitcoin; it makes our service that much more useful to people building Bitcoin-based experiences. We also will likely support zeromq connections for bcoin in the future. If you're interested give us a shout! Supporting bcoin also puts us in a great position to support Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC) and handshake protocol (HNS, an alternative DNS).

Special shout out to Matthew Zipkin for his amazing help throughout the setup process!

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