Introducing Shadow
Announcing our $9M seed round led by Paradigm.
TLDR
- We raised a $9M seed round led by Paradigm
- Shadow provides drop in infrastructure for crypto builders to get more data, save users gas, simplify their data stack, and ship products faster.
- Our platform is now open for public access – get started with a free trial
- Check out our docs, Twitter, and Telegram to learn more
- We’re hiring founding engineers! View our open roles
Overview
Today, we're thrilled to introduce Shadow and announce our $9M seed round led by Paradigm.
Our first product – now open to the public – enables anyone to get custom onchain data with just a few lines of code, reducing engineering time and costs for advanced onchain data indexing and analytics.
What problem are we solving?
At Shadow, our mission is to help people get valuable insights from blockchains.
Blockchains are a fundamentally new type of database, yet it's still far too difficult and expensive to work with onchain data today:
- Event logs are how smart contracts tell the outside world what's happening, but they are gas expensive and there is no guarantee of accuracy or standardization. Events can often be unreliable, missing data, or even intentionally misleading.
- To date, Ethereum users have paid ~$700M in gas fees just to emit events, spiking as high as $73M in a single month of high activity (November 2021). This bloats the network and imposes unnecessarily high costs on end users.
- 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 our production-grade shadow fork infrastructure, teams can get more data, save users gas, simplify their data stack, and ship products faster.
What is a shadow fork?
Shadow forks are offchain read-only execution environments designed to mirror the state of a public blockchain in realtime, and are highly optimized for data access.
They unlock deeper data coverage, cheaper smart contracts, and faster integration cycles for builders and analysts in crypto.
| Public blockchains | Shadow forks |
|---|---|
| Only contract owners can define event logs and view functions. |
Anyone can write a shadow implementation for any contract. |
| Smart contracts are hard to change once deployed. | Shadow contracts can be modified at any time. |
| Contracts have a 24,576 byte size limit. | No contract size limits on shadow forks. |
| End users pay gas fees to emit event logs. | No gas fees on shadow forks. |
See our docs to learn more about shadow forks, contracts, events, and nodes.
What does Shadow do?
Shadow provides you hosted tools and infrastructure to:
- Spin up a new shadow fork with one click
- Add custom event logs and view functions to any contract
- Instantly access shadow fork data via standard RPC methods
- See a realtime feed of shadow events from new transactions
- Quickly backfill and export data for historical transactions
We manage lots of boring things for you, including:
- Nodes for both the shadow fork and public chain
- Keeping state in sync in realtime, 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
What can I use Shadow for?
Faster and richer indexing
Teams can cut engineering time, get rid of adapters, and speed up indexing by writing shadow events from the contracts they care about. Shadow RPCs support standard read endpoints, and are backwards compatible with existing web3 tooling like subgraphs.
Deeper research and analysis
Analysts and researchers can take matters into their own hands when events are missing or inadequate by writing shadow events into any contract. You can write a custom event, quickly backfill its data for past transactions across a block range, and export it to your data tool of choice.
Save gas and contract size
Smart contract developers can save their users up to 12% in gas on every transaction by moving non-critical event logs and view functions to a shadow fork. This decouples data access from core business logic, and has the added benefit of reducing the size of contracts deployed on mainnet, allowing them to fit more functionality for users within the maximum code size limit of 24KB.
Complete observability
Developers and auditors can use Shadow to see inside the entire stack of any contract, and log everything they want privately and gaslessly on a shadow fork. This enables them to understand the deepest inner details of any contract or transaction with fully comprehensive semantic logging.
How do I get started?
After months of testing with top crypto teams, Shadow is now open to the public.
Head to shadow.xyz to create a free trial account, and get custom data in minutes by following our step-by-step Getting Started guide at docs.shadow.xyz.
For more resources:
- Follow us on Twitter for tips and important updates
- Get help and join the conversation on Telegram
- Subscribe to our blog for case studies and more announcements
Want to build the future of crypto data infra?
We're really just getting started. Check out our open roles if our mission resonates – we're hiring talented engineers to join Shadow's founding team.
Thank you to everyone who has helped us get to this milestone – especially Georgios, Caitlin, Storm, and the rest of the Paradigm team.