At Blockdaemon, we don’t just passively host protocols. We make sure we have skin-in-the-game with every blockchain we host. Terra is no exception. In early 2021, we wanted to actively contribute to Terra's community. By running a dedicated validator node, we had already aided decentralization. However, we wanted to go further than simply fulfilling our validator duties. ‍

We wanted to lay the bricks on which developers could build and scale. It’s why, in early 2021, we submitted our governance proposal to help develop Terra’s infrastructure. With the community’s blessing, we wanted to build important tools for Terra. Tools that would add real, tangible value to developers. With that in mind, we set ourselves the following goals:

• Build non-validating node RPC endpoints. These endpoints would then be available to the builder ecosystem.
• Integrate Terra into Blockdaemon’s Ubiquity product. This is a single API to access blockchain data across a suite of protocols.

To assist our effort, the Terra community contributed 7k LUNA tokens (worth $50k at the time of grant).In 2021, we announced that all of our infrastructure deliverables were successfully completed.

‍What’s more, on successful completion we returned 100% of the LUNA tokens granted to us by the community. We hope that by returning these funds, we want to demonstrate our long-term commitment. We look forward to seeing how other projects can benefit from these funds to add-value in the ecosystem. In this post, we’ll look at what we helped achieve and why we returned the tokens, specifically:

1. The successful relaunch of Blockdaemon’s validator
2. The creation of RPC Endpoints for transactions & balances
3. The completion of Terra/Ubiquity integration

The Successful Relaunch of Blockdaemon’s Validator (Delivered May 2021)

Nodes act as the backbone for a blockchain, and reliable blockchain infrastructure is essential to the health of decentralized networks. In May 2021 we successfully relaunched our validator node.By running a validator node, Blockdaemon helps secure the network. We are entrusted to reliably and consistently produce blocks on the blockchain. This is underpinned and guaranteed by our team of protocol experts and enterprise-level infrastructure. If you’re interested, you can find our dedicated validator on Terra Finder.

The Creation of RPC Endpoints for Transactions & Balances (Delivered Nov. 2021)

At the time of our grant proposal, there were limited options for retrieving Terra data. There were few professionally run public RPC endpoints for retrieving node and validator performance and health data. In essence, a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is the most direct form of an API. It allows devs to communicate to a blockchain node to remotely execute code. It is very similar to a function call, but between two different systems.We wanted to provide additional public Terra RPC endpoints. These would only reduce barriers to entry, but also to increase decentralization, network stability, and visibility.

‍In November 2021, we successfully delivered Terra RPC endpoints for transactions and balances.

These Terra RPC endpoints are now available for the entire community to enjoy: https://blockdaemon-terra-lcd.api.bdnodes.net:1317.LCD endpoints only! Swagger UI 6. Our RPC endpoints have shown strong performance to-date.

The Completion of Terra/Ubiquity Integration (Delivered Jan 2022)

Ubiquity is a general API platform for interfacing with some of the world’s most popular blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ubiquity offers a high-performance, high-availability API, granting infinite scalability and zero downtime. In January 2022, Blockdaemon’s engineering team successfully integrated Terra into Ubiquity. It is now available in the Blockdaemon app.Ubiquity provides a highly-available read-only REST API for Terra blockchain transactions.

It extends the capability of the existing REST API with additional query types. It also maps existing resources to a common multi-chain model that wallets and exchanges can interface with.Our second milestone was enabling streaming endpoints within the Ubiquity feature set for Terra.

You can read more about our WebSockets API here. Queries include transaction stream and transaction steam per account.  With this achievement, Ubiquity grants API access for developers to interact with the Terra blockchain.

Why We Built Infrastructure for Terra and Donated our 7k+ Luna  back to the community

Terra is paving the way for stable cryptocurrencies, as a world-class platform for stable, secure digital assets. We are proud to run a validator node on Terra’s network, fulfilling our role as a guardian of Terra’s security and stability. As a valued member of the community we feel it’s important to have skin-in-the-game. That’s why we’re happy to contribute and help out where we can.Our proven track record of performance across multiple Proof-of-Stake platforms makes us uniquely positioned to add value to the network. Furthermore, we are proud to unveil our native access to Terra’s on-chain information.

This provides a sound gateway to verifiable, on-chain block data. We took a little longer than discussed to deliver so we knew that giving back all of the tokens received at their current price to the community pool was truly that extra step so that more projects can utilize funds to continue to progress the overall ecosystem!We are committed to the success of Terra community and wanted to deliver on these milestones because we know the importance of the projects that need the above deliverables.

‍All of these deliverables add to the public health and continued success of the Terra blockchain.

Do you want to create your own Terra node? Contact us today, we’ll make it easy.Let’s continue to grow Terra together!