What are RPC's and how do companies make money with them?

It is just a URL allowing you to connect to a server...

RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call and is simply how you connect with and talk to the blockchain.

This is a node and it is important to understand that there are many different node types. You will hear VALIDATOR and RPC but then you will also hear the term FULL NODE.

An RPC node is a full node and a validator node is a full node. They are both full nodes that have different configuration so they end up doing different things in the end but they are built the same in the beginning.

The RPC is a full node configured to be an RPC node and a validator is a full node configured to be a validator.

So, the validator validates and we will talk more about them in another post. The RPC communicates. This is what allows developers to connect to the chain to build dApps. They can connect with what is known as an endpoint and an endpoint is simply a URL. The address to a server, that is it.

Think about connecting to Google to search something online. You have a URL to connect to that Google server and get information. An endpoint URL for an RPC is no different. It is just the address to the server (node) that has the latest blockchain data.

Connecting to a blockchain endpoint allows developers to write transactions to the network. This also allows them to query data from the chain. This data can then be indexed (organized) so that they can do cool stuff with it that provides value to the community. Think about an app showing the current block height of ETH. It had to get that data from somewhere and it does this by pulling data from the chain through an RPC node.

So how do companies make money with RPC’s?