Shadow is a data workflow platform company that aims to lower the cost/complexities of developing on Ethereum. And Shadow announced a $9 million seed round of funding led by Paradigm with additional support from angel investors at Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap, and Flashbots.
Logging events directly on Ethereum is known for being complicated and costly, with events accounting for up to 12% of a transaction’s total gas costs. Shadow utilizes private execution environments (shadow forks) to reduce these costs. The company founders Alvin and Emily Hsia are siblings who previously worked in technical roles at Airbnb and believe that their platform can unlock deeper data coverage, cheaper smart contracts, and faster product iteration for builders in crypto. Shadow forks are offchain read-only execution environments that are designed to mirror the state of a public blockchain in real time, and are highly optimized for data access.
“To date, Ethereum users have paid ~$700 million in gas fees just to emit events, spiking as high as $73 million in a single month of high activity (November 2021). This bloats the network and imposes unnecessarily high costs on end users,” said the company in a blog post. “Smart contracts are difficult to change once deployed, which is good for security but bad for data accessibility. Developers can’t possibly predict everyone’s future data needs before they launch, and it’s very challenging to meet new data requirements as they arise. Shadow solves these problems by enabling anyone to log anything they want on any smart contract, whenever they need to, completely gaslessly.”
By dropping in their production-grade shadow fork infrastructure, teams can get more data, save users gas, simplify their data stack, and ship products faster. And they unlock deeper data coverage, cheaper smart contracts, and faster integration cycles for builders and analysts in crypto.
How does Shadow work? Shadow provides users hosted tools and infrastructure to 1.) Spin up a new shadow fork with one click 2.) Add custom event logs and view functions for any contract 3.) Instantly access shadow fork data via standard RPC methods 4.) See a real-time feed of shadow events from new transactions 5.) Quickly backfill and export data for historical transactions
The company also manages the following:
— Nodes for both the shadow fork and public chain
— Keeping state in sync in real life, including re-orgs
— Compiling and deploying contracts on your shadow fork
— Proxy patterns and applying changes to all factory-created contracts
— Shadow fork and public chain RPC endpoints
— Decoded and indexed event data exports
