Hey Team
Perhaps this is a bit of a silly question, but I figured why not ask!
I’m trying to wrap my head around how exactly wallet/exchange applications are pulling data from the blockchain.
The main thing I’m confused about is that since the data is being hosted in a distributed manner across the world, what would be the means of fetching data such as the current epoch/slot, or personal wallet details?
I come from the mobile app world where (roughly) our network requests point at a single ‘base url’, with various endpoints according to the tail end of the url which we hand off to our libraries to perform the actual requests.
Am I wrong to think that there must be some sort of central point of access in order to fetch this data? I’ve stumbled across https://hydra.iohk.io/build/5367762/download/1/mainnet-topology.json which… seems like something I was looking for…? but TBH, I have absolutely no idea if that’s relevant or not.
In my head it’d be great to just open up a connection to some IOHK hosted gRPC stream, and pull down data about the blockchain. But I feel like it’s likely not that simple.
My second guess would be that the client needs to act as a node in the network, and get the data that way. However I don’t know if there are any obligations to participate in block verification and all of that.
Any pointers/TLDRs would be very much appreciated! I’d love to get into this space and start writing some code. Thanks in advance