GRPC Use Cases

Why gRPC Shines?

While raw speed is often the headline in Solana data streaming, Carbium gRPC represents a fundamental shift in how applications consume blockchain data. It focuses on the intersection of Low Latency (22ms), High Fidelity, and Architectural Efficiency.

Unlike standard HTTP APIs where you request data in text-heavy JSON format, gRPC uses Protocol Buffers, a highly efficient binary format. This makes data smaller to transmit and much faster for your computer to process (parse). More importantly, gRPC supports streaming, maintaining a persistent connection that eliminates handshake overhead.

Carbium gRPC vs. Standard RPC

• Standard RPC (HTTP): Works on a "Pull" model. Your application must constantly poll the server ("Is there a new block yet?"). This introduces latency gaps and is inefficient for real-time monitoring. It is best suited for static lookups, like checking a specific wallet balance.

• Carbium gRPC: Works on a "Push" model. You establish a connection once, and Carbium pushes data to you the millisecond it is available.

By serving optimized Full Blocks via this Layer 2 pipeline, we enable specific high-value use cases that require atomic data integrity rather than fragmented "shreds." Below are the primary architectural patterns where Carbium excels.

1. The Institutional Indexer

For teams building historical archives, block explorers, or compliance databases, data consistency is paramount. Relying on raw shreds often results in "gaps" or partial states that corrupt database writes.

• The Problem: Traditional shred streams require the client to implement complex reassembly logic. If a shred is missed due to UDP packet loss, the entire block is corrupted locally.

• The Carbium Solution: Carbium performs the reassembly and validation on our Layer 2 servers. You receive a guaranteed, atomic block.

• Benefit: Zero-logic ingestion. You can pipe Carbium gRPC messages directly into Postgres, ClickHouse, or BigQuery without middleware to check for missing shreds.

2. "Slot-Aware" Arbitrage & Trading

Sophisticated trading bots know that the Solana slot duration is roughly 400ms. The race is not just to see the data first, but to see the complete picture before the slot closes.

• The Reality: Seeing a shred at 9ms vs a full block at 22ms offers a negligible advantage if the network slot is open for another 380ms.

• The Carbium Edge: By waiting the extra ~12ms for a Full Block, your strategy receives the complete state changes of the previous slot.

• Application:

  • Backrunning: You can safely execute transactions immediately after a target transaction is confirmed in a block, knowing the state won't shift unexpectedly due to a missing shred.

  • Liquidation Bots: Accurately calculate health factors based on the final state of the oracle in the block, rather than a partial update.

3. MEV Searchers (Sandwiching & JIT)

MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) requires a holistic view of the mempool and confirmed blocks. While mempool streaming is separate, analyzing confirmed blocks is critical for statistical modeling and "Just-In-Time" (JIT) liquidity provisioning.

• Why Full Blocks? To calculate the profitability of a strategy, a searcher effectively needs to simulate the chain state. Simulating against partial shred data is computationally expensive and prone to errors.

• Carbium's Role: We deliver the "Ground Truth." Searchers use Carbium to validate their models against finalized blocks with extremely low latency, ensuring their local simulation environment remains synced with mainnet.

4. Real-Time Dashboards & Analytics

Consumer-facing applications (Wallets, Portfolio Trackers, NFT Marketplaces) prioritize User Experience (UX) over nanosecond latency.

• The UX Risk: Displaying a transaction that disappears due to a reorg or bad shred reassembly destroys user trust.

• The Stability: Carbium's L2 pipeline filters out noise. When your frontend receives a block event from Carbium, it is formatted, complete, and ready to display.

• Implementation: Connect a backend WebSocket service to Carbium gRPC. Broadcast updates to frontend clients only when a Full Block is received. This creates a "snappy" but stable UI update cycle (~400ms cadence) that feels instant to humans but remains technically robust.

Summary: Carbium vs. Raw Shreds

FAQ

Q: If I am building a sniper bot, is Carbium right for me?

**A: **It depends on your strategy. If you are "spraying and praying" based on the first signal, you might prefer raw shreds (which we will offer soon). If you are building a "smart" sniper that verifies liquidity depth before firing to save gas fees, Carbium Full Blocks are superior.

Q: Can I use Carbium for Geyser plugins?

A: Carbium is the client-side alternative to running your own Geyser plugin. Instead of managing a validator node + Geyser plugin (expensive, high maintenance), you connect to Carbium gRPC to get the exact same data stream.

Q: How much bandwidth does indexing require?

A: Solana produces a massive amount of data. However, because Carbium sends optimized protobuf messages (Full Blocks), the bandwidth overhead is significantly lower than listening to raw shreds, as we strip out the reassembly overhead and duplicate packets often found in UDP shred streams.