Ethereum RPC as a Service

Warning

This post is more than a year old. Information may be outdated.

Google Cloud announced Blockchain Node Engine, a hosted RPC node for Ethereum. RPC is the primary way that you query data on the blockchain. AWS offers a similar product, AWS Managed Blockchain. Essentially these are just fully synced Ethereum nodes running Geth, the Go Ethereum client, and de facto implementation of the spec
Not to mention, enterprise RPC providers are one of the more profitable and real web3 businesses. There's Alchemy ($10.2B valuation, Feb **22), ConsenSys ($7B valuation, Mar **22), and Quicknode. The numbers might be inflated from the last cycle, but these companies have actual revenue. Maybe the markets aren't growing as prominent anymore, but it's a key infrastructure piece that isn't going anywhere
However, while I don't think AWS is a dumb pipe, I'm skeptical of their ability to deliver here because the developer experience is currently so terrible (vs. traditional development). Not to mention the reputational risk to their old-school enterprise customers
Of course, maybe the best version of this business looks more like an API business where you are the sole infrastructure provider offering access to your network