Problem

Dapps need to read and write blockchain state, consume events, and often work with off-chain content such as IPFS. Current state can be read on-chain or off-chain, but historic state and events are usually consumed off-chain.

Writing data to events is often much cheaper than writing it to state, but that creates a retrieval problem for dapps: the chain emits the data, while users and applications still need a fast, trustworthy way to search and subscribe to it.

Why Plain RPC Is Not Enough

Typical dapps depend on centralized RPC providers. That creates several issues:

Incorrect Or Missing Data

A dapp generally trusts the RPC provider to return complete and correct results. A malicious or faulty provider can omit data or return misleading answers.

Event Query Limits

Substrate RPC does not provide rich event search. Other ecosystems often impose limits such as:

• maximum blocks scanned per query
• earliest scannable block
• maximum execution time
• indexing disabled on free tiers

Slow Queries

Scanning logs repeatedly is slower and more resource-intensive than querying a purpose-built index.

Unavailability And Policy Risk

Centralized providers can be unavailable due to outages, geoblocking, payment requirements, or policy decisions.

Tracking And Privacy Loss

Providers may correlate IP addresses, identities, and query history.

Pressure Toward Centralized Dapp Backends

Because raw RPC is a poor fit for search, teams are incentivized to build their own centralized indexing backend, which weakens the decentralization story.

More Expensive Chain Design

If developers cannot reliably search events, they may push more data into chain state just to make retrieval easier, increasing fees and block-space pressure.

Limited Extensibility

Chains and dapps may need richer indexing beyond events, including full-text, classification, or domain-specific search over linked off-chain data.

Acuity Index exists to solve the event indexing part of this problem with a configurable, chain-aware, high-performance utility.