Author: Paul McAviney

Onboarding the next wave of users to Web3 is a massive undertaking that many projects in the ecosystem are building for. One project with a unique approach to this is Celo, a layer-one blockchain network. Celo gives a superior new-user experience by being a mobile-first layer-1 blockchain that is easy to use with just a mobile phone. Your phone number acts as your address rather than a complex string, and the network allows users the option to pay gas fees with other tokens than the native currency.

However, the user experience is just one side of the onboarding coin. Developer experience is the other. After all, a new network is just as good as the RPCs that let you use it. Only some developers have the resources to run a node.

When developing Web3 projects, it helps to have a local blockchain devnet for testing. Ganache is one of the most popular tools for this in the Ethereum ecosystem and part of Truffle. Ganache allows you to set up a local blockchain with different settings to thoroughly test your smart contracts before deployment.

Seeing a local blockchain’s output in the terminal helps you to understand how your project will behave in a live environment. The ability to set the output to variables to manipulate some front-end code is even more useful. Some users may not know that you can do this by running Ganache in your browser.

Since its inception in 2014, Ethereum has established itself as the de facto leader of blockchain platforms capable of supporting Turing-complete smart contracts.

Ethereum has been instrumental in bringing about a revolution that we now know as Web3. The largest decentralized exchange, NFT marketplace, and yield farming protocol all reside on Ethereum. The chain is responsible for handling billions of dollars worth of value, and it has opened up avenues for creators and investors that were previously unfathomable.

I’ve only been in Web3 for about a year now, but I can honestly say that NFTs are the most exciting aspect of it for me. I’m not talking about Apes or Punks, however. PFP (profile picture) projects and art, although a cool and simple proof of concept for the technology, won’t create a better world.

Instead, I’m excited about the actual utility of NFTs. Allowing gamers to own their assets, delivering fair royalty commissions to musicians and artists, and making concert tickets impossible to scalp while providing a sweet digital memento are some of the use cases I find interesting.

Archive nodes are particular nodes on the Ethereum Network that store historical blockchain data. Because they offer this historical information, they are helpful when you need to audit past transaction history or gather data. Services like Etherscan and Dune Analytics use archive nodes, but anyone can run one themselves.

In this article, we will review the different types of Ethereum nodes, dive deeper into archive nodes, and introduce the new archive node capabilities of Infura. We’ll then walk through a real-world project to show how to connect the Infura API and web3.js to a pre-built react frontend. Once complete, the user will be able to query an Archive Node for some statistics for a given Ethereum wallet address.