🏁How to Connect

Users running on-premise node have two options to connect their node to the BDN:

1. On-premise Gateway

2. Hosted Gateway

Users that want to quickly send transactions to the BDN or stream transactions/blocks to their application have two options:

1. Work with the Gateway-API (On-premise Gateway or Hosted Gateway)

2. Cloud-API

On-premise Gateway

An On-premise Gateway peers with the user's node to quickly propagate both blocks and transaction to the node.

Hosted Gateway

A Hosted Gateway is similar to running an On-premise Gateway, yet users conveniently do not need to locally host and manage the Gateway.

To connect to a Hosted Gateway, please follow the instructions available here.

Cloud-API

The Cloud-API supports sending Ethereum transactions fast and subscribing to Transaction Streaming and Blocks Streaming.

Gateway vs Cloud-API

As explained above, if a user runs their own node and wishes to connect it to the BDN, they will need to connect a Gateway to the node (either an On-premise or Hosted Gateway). As a rule of thumb, if a user decides to connect a Gateway to their node, it is better to use the Gateway-API to send transactions and stream data. If they do not have a Gateway installed, they can decide to use the Cloud-API instead of installing a Gateway. Users that require the best performance may decide to use both the Gateway-API and Cloud-API.