Introducing the Infura Dashboard

At Infura, we have been hard at work building out our infrastructure and capabilities to ensure we continue to deliver on our mission of providing the world scalable access to Ethereum and IPFS.

Our Ethereum Mainnet endpoint is currently servicing around 100,000 requests per second. Over the last 6 months, we have had 4 outages totaling 4 minutes for an uptime of 99.99%, with an average latency of 356ms.

In addition to the ever-present demand to continue to scale and optimize our infrastructure, we have been hard at work building solutions that will deliver more flexibility and value to our core users from the development community.

The Infura Dashboard

We recently did a soft-launch of the new Infura Dashboard, which lays the ground work allowing us to deliver additional services going forward. Let me introduce you to the new Infura Dashboard, including what we are calling our V3 authentication keys and AllowListing of contract addresses.

The first thing you’ll notice are Login and Sign Up buttons:

For the last two years, Infura didn’t have the notion of an “account”, our service only depended on a one-time registration which would assign you an access token to use for your decentralized application.

Even if you have previously been assigned an Infura access token, you will need to now Sign Up to generate V3 authentication keys. Existing keys using the current Infura endpoint will be deprecated soon and will stop functioning at some point in the future. We will be sure to announce this date prominently and communicate it with sufficient time to ensure minimal disruption to service. We encourage you to migrate your applications to the new V3 authentication keys and endpoints now!!

First, register for your Infura account. You can use the same email address you have previously used, if you already are a user.

You will need to verify your email address by clicking the link sent to your inbox to activate your account.

(Side note: we are aware that a very small percentage of people registering are not receiving emails, we are doing all we can to ensure our mail isn’t being filtered, and working on alternate methods to activate the account. For now, if you don’t receive the email, please bear with us and submit a support ticket, we will activate your account manually.)

After you verify your email address, your account will be active and you will be guided through a short tutorial.

Infura API keys provide easy access to the Ethereum network, and enable us to supply the data and connections that matter to you. This means you can focus more time on building applications, instead of worrying about the nuances of accessing the blockchain.

Endpoints are the URLs you will use to send Ethereum requests from your decentralized applications. They are your main connection points to the Ethereum blockchain, and replace the need to run a full node yourself. These new endpoints function in your code exactly as the legacy endpoints have functioned before. You will be able to simply replace your legacy endpoint URLs (if you are an existing user of Infura) with your new V3 endpoints.

In the Infura Dashboard, we are introducing the concept of AllowListing specific smart contract addresses that your application will utilize, or that you otherwise are interested in interacting with.

For now, AllowListing a contract address simply allows you to keep a list, however, we will be delivering additional services in the future for your AllowListed contracts. These services could include un-throttled access, analytics, and so on.

Our new V3 API includes a Project ID and Project secret. This information should not be confused with Ethereum account public and private keys. The Infura Project ID and Secret are used to authenticate your access to Infura. You should notice the Project ID does NOT start with 0x, it is NOT an Ethereum Public Key. DO NOT try to send ether to this Project ID!! Using HTTPS/TLS basic auth, your Project ID and Secret will be used in your code for sending requests to the Infura endpoints.

In the past, Infura has only relied on a public key, and has been noted that it could be intercepted and used by others. With Infura V3 authentication, your Project ID doesn’t need to be kept secret. However, your Project secret should never be human readable in your application — be sure to keep it confidential!

Now let’s go to the Dashboard examine further.

From the Dashboard, you will be able to create a new project. One important feature of the Dashboard is the ability to create multiple projects, each with their own ID and Secret. Now, if you are concerned that your ID and secret have been compromised, you can easily create a new project and generate a new pair.

Create a new project!

Your new project will be setup with an Project ID and Project secret, along with convenient links to the endpoint URLs for your application on Mainnet and the three main test networks (Ropsten, Rinkeby and Kovan).

The endpoint URL can directly replace your existing Infura endpoint URL in your code. Note: At launch time, the Project Secret is NOT needed to authenticate your requests to the Infura endpoint URLs. The Project Secret is provided for future use and its usage will be clearly communicated and documented in the future as needed.

Finally, you can enter Ethereum Contract Addresses to AllowList them for your application. As previously mentioned, this functionality exists to deliver future capabilities and at launch doesn’t provide any specific capabilities to your new Infura project.

We hope you enjoy the new Infura Dashboard. As always, we welcome your feedback, comments, suggestions, feature requests, complaints, etc. etc.

Stay tuned as we continue to deliver additional capabilities from the Infura Dashboard to simplify and enrich your Ethereum development experience.