Internet Security Provider Cloudflare Announces an Ethereum Gateway

Internet security provider Cloudflare is introducing the Ethereum Gateway to its Distributed Web Gateway toolbox enabling users to interact with the Ethereum network without installing any software.

Instead of downloading and cryptographically verifying hundreds of gigabytes of data - an impossible task for low-power devices and those with low technical barriers to entry - the gateway enables any device with web access to interact with the Ethereum network.

The gateway gives people the ability to put new contracts on Ethereum with having to run a node, because Cloudflare will take a signed transaction and push it to the network thereby allowing miners to cryprographicaly add it.

Despite the value Cloudflare brings to gateway clients, the service is completely free.

Nick Sullivan, Cloudflare's Head of Cryptography, explains that the program "Leverages the existing Cloudflare network, which already provides a number of free services."

In a sense, Sullivan suggested Cloudflare is doing it for developers and ecosystem at large.

"By providing a gateway to the Ethereum network we can help users make the jump from general web-user to cryptocurrency native, eventually making using the distributed web a fundamental part of the Internet," Jonathan Hoyland wrote in a blog post.

Though Cloudflare sees itself as only one access point among "The constellation of gateways that already exist," meaning that despite the added speed of its backchannel, it will not become a centralized authority on the chain.

Currently, newbie visitors to the gateway's website can interact with an example app, but the ambitious should access the RPC API, where it's possible to do virtually anything available on the Ethereum network itself, from examining contracts, to transferring funds.

Despite ambitions to break down the barriers to distributed computing, Sullivan said the majority of Cloudflare users are hobbyists.