CardanoScale: SPO-Powered RPC Gateway for Cardano

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CardanoScale: SPO-Powered RPC Gateway for Cardano

Hello everyone :waving_hand: I’m Justina, DevRel Engineer at Lava Foundation. Wanted to share some details about the project we are building for Cardano Ecosystem. What we’d like to get is your input and feedback - it would help us shape this initiative and truly align with the Cardano community needs.

The Problem

Cardano lacks a standardised, SPO-aligned RPC gateway. Teams building on Cardano must either negotiate bespoke deals with individual SPOs, run their own nodes, or depend on a single centralised provider. Pricing is driven more by marketing than measurable quality of service, and there’s no easy way for builders to get multi-provider redundancy without wiring it up themselves.

Meanwhile, SPOs already run 24/7 infrastructure capable of serving RPC - but there’s no structured path for them to monetise that capacity beyond block production.

What We’re Building

CardanoScale is an SPO-powered RPC gateway: one subscription, one endpoint, multiple SPO-run providers behind it. CardanoScale is part of the Project Catalyst Fund 15 under Cardano Use Cases: Prototype & Launch.

CardanoScale: SPO Flywheel
CardanoScale: SPO Flywheel1920×1072 342 KB

How it works:

  • SPOs use their existing infrastructure to permissionlessly join CardanoScale to serve the incoming traffic.
  • Traffic is routed across multiple SPO-operated RPC nodes based on measured QoS (uptime, latency, sync freshness, correctness). If one provider degrades, traffic automatically shifts to healthy ones - no single point of failure.
  • SPOs earn rewards linked to their service quality, not their marketing ability.
  • Builders use CardanoScale to access reliable enterprise-grade RPC. They integrate once and get redundancy, failover and performance monitoring out of the box.

This is built on Lava Network’s open routing protocol, which already handles production RPC/API traffic for projects including Hypernative, Mintscan, SweatEconomy and institutional clients like Fireblocks - over 160 billion requests served across 30+ chains.

CardanoScale is being developed in partnership with Wizard, a Cardano-native team building a global orderbook and DEX indexer. They bring deep experience with one of the most data-intensive workloads on Cardano, making them both a demanding user and a strong infrastructure partner.

Why SPOs

CardanoScale is designed around SPOs as the primary providers - not as an afterthought.

SPOs already operate the infrastructure needed: full Cardano nodes running 24/7, high uptime, technical expertise. What’s been missing is a way to channel paid RPC demand to them in a structured, quality-driven way.

With CardanoScale:

  • Quality is rewarded - An SPO delivering excellent service receives more traffic and more rewards.
  • Entry is permissionless - No approval committee.
  • The economics are straightforward - 55% of our Catalyst F15 budget (101,750 ADA) is allocated directly to SPO rewards, paid based on performance.

This isn’t about replacing existing infrastructure like Blockfrost, Koios or Maestro. It’s a complementary layer that creates a structured marketplace where SPO-run capacity meets builder demand, with quality of service as the common currency.

Where We Are Now

We want to be transparent about what exists today and what’s ahead:

What’s live: Lava’s routing protocol is in production across 30+ chains, serving real traffic at scale.

What’s in progress: The Cardano-specific RPC specification needs to be created and approved through Lava’s governance process. This is a necessary step before SPOs can begin serving Cardano RPC through the protocol.

What’s ahead: Once Cardano specification is approved onchain, SPO onboarding will kick off for Cardano Testnet and Cardano Mainnet.

How SPOs Can Get Involved

If you run a Cardano stake pool and want to explore becoming a CardanoScale provider:

  1. Express interest - We’re building a cohort of SPOs to participate in the early phase. To join, fill out this interest form.
  2. Join the conversation - We’re active on Discord and happy to answer technical questions. Check out the SPO channel on Wizard Discord server.

Questions for the Community

We’d genuinely appreciate feedback from this community:

  1. For SPOs: What would make this worth your time? What concerns would you want addressed before participating?
  2. For builders: How do you currently handle RPC? What would a multi-provider, SPO-backed gateway need to offer for you to consider it?
  3. For everyone: Are there Cardano-specific technical considerations we should be thinking about as we design the RPC specification?

We’ll be following this thread and responding to questions. Looking forward to the discussion.

Links:

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I couldn’t understand the importance of this

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Hey @endeavor, thank you for your comment and I’m happy to clarify. The main goal of CardanoScale is to strengthen and decentralize the RPC infrastructure on Cardano. Today dapps that want to build on Cardano have to either run their own node (significant technical overhead) or get deals with SPOs (single point of failure and marketing-led pricing). From the SPO angle - they often struggle to find a sustainable revenue model which affects their operational prospects and as a result affects the decentralization of Cardano.

So CardanoScale aims to address these issues from a few different angles.

For developers:

  • Easy starting point - get the endpoints and your are good to start building
  • Public RPC access layer - the funds from the proposal will be used to incentivize SPOs to provide high-quality public RPC enabling teams of various sizes and maturity.
  • Easy to scale - more mature teams can easily scale as demand increases. They can step up from public RPC to subscription services without leaving the SPO ecosystem.
  • No RPC downtime - Lava protocol routes traffic to a network of available SPOs behind one simple endpoint. If one SPO goes down (or provides sub-par service) the routing mechanism automatically reroutes to another most optimal node.

For SPOs:

  • Transparent and sustainable rewards based on usage and quality of service (latency, sync freshenss, availability)
  • No significant hardware overhead to join CardanoScale - they can use their existing infrastructure to join CardanoScale permissionlessly.

For Cardano ecosystem this means reliable and enterprise-grade decentralized RPC service and contributions to Cardano decentralization while keeping the value inside of the Cardano ecosystem.

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Hyy Justina, just figured out this is the first time you have made a post. That’s nice. What you are doing with cardanoscale is amazing, keep it up

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@justina will your enterprise be publishing an API standard about how your RPC calls are made on the Cardano network? If so, it would likely attract more funding support on Catalyst and possibility even beyond it.

Publishing a CIP for this, and maybe even your infrastructure model on Cardano, could be a great step forward if you can convince your “Lava governance” to commit to open source on the Cardano platform. I believe the result would be more likely to become a standard part of Cardano infrastructure if so.

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