SQD co-founder Dima Zhelezov on rethinking a Satoshi-era design from first principles.
In Episode 1 of the Data Moat Interviews, SQD co-founder Dima Zhelezov tackles one of the foundational questions in Web3 infrastructure: what actually makes SQD Portal different from every other blockchain data solution on the market?
His answer doesn’t go where you might expect. It doesn’t lead with throughput numbers or feature parity. It leads with a deeper observation about the entire industry: no one has seriously rethought the way blockchain nodes serve data since Satoshi published the original Bitcoin design.
That is the core thesis behind SQD Portal - and the reason it sits in a category of its own.
The Problem: RPC Is a Satoshi-Era Design
The RPC interface is how almost every blockchain application accesses onchain data today. Wallets, indexers, analytics platforms, dApps - virtually all of them depend on RPC under the hood.
But the RPC interface was never designed for them. It traces back to Bitcoin’s original implementation, and then to the first Ethereum node. As Dima points out, these nodes were conceived primarily as consensus machines - peers participating in the network, exposing a minimal interface so other peers could verify state.
The interface they offer to developers is, by design, an afterthought. With RPC:
- You cannot look back in history efficiently.
- You cannot filter.
- You cannot aggregate.
- You cannot run the kinds of queries real applications actually need.
That single constraint has shaped what is possible in Web3 development for over a decade.
Why Centralised Data Lakes Don’t Solve It
A wave of companies have tried to paper over RPC’s limitations by building centralised data lakes and analytics layers on top - snapshots, indexed warehouses, hosted query interfaces.
But as Dima notes, almost all of them still rely on RPC under the hood. They are surface-level fixes for a foundational design flaw. You can wrap a slow, limited interface in something prettier - but you cannot make it fast, flexible, or trustless that way.
That is the gap SQD Portal was built to close.
The Solution: A Blockchain-Native Data Interface
SQD Portal does two things together that no other solution offers.
First, it provides instant access to terabytes of historical blockchain data. The kind of deep historical lookups that are effectively impossible at scale through RPC are first-class operations in Portal.
Second, it exposes that data through a blockchain-native query interface built for how developers actually work. Filtering, aggregations, complex multi-chain queries - Portal is designed from the ground up for these workloads.
In Dima’s words, Portal provides a very simple blockchain-native interface to extend and empower developers with a more flexible way to query data. It is not a wrapper around RPC. It is a rethink of the entire data layer.
Run It Locally or at Network Scale
One of the architectural choices that sets Portal apart is its deployment flexibility. You can spin a Portal up locally and work against a local environment for development - the same interface, no friction. Or you can connect to the SQD network and get instant access to data across 200+ blockchains, including Solana.
No custom indexers. No subgraph rebuilds every time a query changes. No DevOps overhead managing fleets of RPC providers. Just an interface that does what blockchain data access was always supposed to do.
The Data Moat
This is what makes SQD’s position defensible.
The Graph, Alchemy, Goldsky, every centralised data lake, they are all solving the symptom. SQD is solving the underlying design flaw.
It is hard to catch up to a competitor that has reasoned from first principles about a problem the rest of the industry has accepted as a given. That is the data moat - and it is why Dima believes Portal is the new standard for processing blockchain data.
Watch the Full Interview
Watch Episode 1 of the Data Moat Interviews on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUE-F2rhWT4
The Data Moat Interviews is a series of conversations with the SQD founding team and product leadership, breaking down the architecture, decisions, and competitive edge behind SQD’s infrastructure.
Full Transcript
Q: In your opinion, what are the biggest reasons why Portal is the new standard for processing data?
Dima Zhelezov: I believe that essentially, no one took a serious attempt to redesign and rethink the way that the blockchain nodes serve the data. There are multiple companies who try to build a centralised data lake, or present some analytics on top of this data, but deep down, everything still relies on what is called an RPC interface. And this RPC interface goes back to Satoshi and then to the first implementation of the Ethereum node. By design, these nodes were more of a consensus machine, like a database, and this interface itself is very limiting. So you cannot look back in history efficiently, you cannot do filtering, you cannot do aggregations. And that limits how the blockchain data can be accessed.
With the Portal, not only do we provide an implementation and instant access to the terabytes of the historical data, we essentially provide a very simple blockchain-native interface to extend and empower the developers with a lot more flexible way to query it. And the Portal is something that you can spin up locally, for example, work with a local environment, or you can connect it to the SQD network and then get instant access to all the data across 200+ blockchains, including Solana.
Try SQD Portal
- Learn more: sqd.dev/portal
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