D_D Cloud Founder Crypdough on Building RPC Infrastructure in Rust

Crypdough has been in Developer DAO for roughly three to four years, previously serving as CTO at GivePact before founding Futex Labs. He completed the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship in its third cohort and attended the Polkadot Blockchain Academy in Singapore.

"Dirt Cheap" Infrastructure

D_D Cloud is a cloud infrastructure platform providing RPC access to blockchain networks, built on the Pocket Network. Crypdough received a $25,000 grant from the Pocket Network Foundation early in the project's life, and he described that relationship as unusually productive.

"I got a generous $25,000 grant from the Pocket Network Foundation and they have been extremely supportive of me and extremely receptive of any sort of criticism or changes that I wanted to see in their software up or down the stack."

The platform's pitch is deliberately simple. "We're dirt cheap," Crypdough said. "Infrastructure is expensive, you don't want to bleed out your nose in a bear market." The free tier covers 1 million RPC calls per month. From there, the basic plan at 40 USDC per month raises that to 5 million calls, which Crypdough says represents roughly a 20% savings over comparable plans from industry leaders. The premier tier offers 30 million calls, and the ultra tier pushes to 150 million calls at 850 USDC monthly. For clients with high-frequency trading requirements and stricter latency needs, separate enterprise arrangements exist outside the public pricing structure.

For most use cases, the platform targets average latency around 150 milliseconds. HFT clients get custom setups that are separate from the public service.

The WebSocket Select Macro Fix

One of the more telling aspects of D_D Cloud's development process is how Crypdough talks about bugs. When users started reconnecting every few seconds over WebSocket, the logs began showing out-of-order messages. The root cause turned out to be a missed loop around a select macro in the Rust code, where a task dedicated to reading from the user's socket was being dropped instead of staying alive.

"When you start getting into multi-threaded contexts where you have a thread dedicated just to reading from the socket from the user and maintaining another thread maintaining the connection to the node, weird things happen between when you start communicating between threads and channels and you just want to make sure that everything is statically correct."

That fix, like all the others, is publicly visible. Every pull request and commit sits on the Developer DAO GitHub repository, which Crypdough treats as a feature rather than an obligation. Users who want to verify what the service does with their data can read the code. He noted this transparency as something he values in particular: "For the main thing, people can just look at the codebase, see exactly what's going on, that I'm not doing weird things with their data."

Earlier versions of the platform had their own quirks. At one point, API keys were generated as Ethereum private keys. Not used as such, Crypdough clarified, but generated in that format to see if anyone would notice. They have since been replaced with random printable ASCII characters.

Everything From the Terminal

The D_D Cloud CLI tool, invoked as dd-cloud, is an interactive command-line interface for managing API keys, checking usage, and monitoring account balances. During the episode, Crypdough walked through creating a new key, deleting keys, and pulling up his usage stats, all without leaving the terminal.

One specific feature stood out during the demo: when retrieving an API key, the CLI censors most of the key in the terminal output and copies the actual value directly to the clipboard. Another feature integrates with AWS Secrets Manager, so a developer can generate a new API key and have it stored securely without it ever appearing in a .env file. Google Cloud Secret Manager support is also planned.

Currently, users need to register on the website before using the CLI, but a registration command directly within the tool is in development. The goal is that a developer could complete the entire onboarding flow without opening a browser. Crypdough also noted that the CLI persists login sessions, so subsequent commands do not require re-authentication.

The Subscription Contract and Container Runtime

Two features are in active development for D_D Cloud. The first is an on-chain pull-based subscription payment system. Rather than requiring users to manually top up a credit balance, the smart contract system will pull payments on a recurring schedule. Users retain an on-chain cancel option, and the contract includes version-based pricing controls that require the merchant to get explicit user approval before raising prices. The intent is to prevent subscription costs from changing without notice.

The second is a container runtime, targeted for early preview around July. Rather than running only blockchain nodes, the platform will be able to sandbox and isolate arbitrary user software, including databases and functions-as-a-service workloads. An HFT team is currently working with Crypdough as the first case study, stress-testing the early build before any broader rollout.