Just wanted to chat about RPC, because it’s really important in blockchain and distributed systems.

RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call. Simply put, it allows one program to request a service from another computer without having to worry about the network details. It sounds basic, but it’s actually a cornerstone of modern distributed applications.

This concept has been around for a long time, too. In 1981, Bruce Jay Nelson began formalizing the idea. Later, Microsoft’s DCOM and Sun’s Sun RPC were implementations of this approach. In recent years, Google’s gRPC has been a major step forward. Its HTTP/2-based design improves communication efficiency significantly, and it also supports streaming and cross-language use.

When it comes to application scenarios, RPC is everywhere. In the finance industry, it’s used to process transactions across databases; in telecommunications, it’s used to manage network devices; and in healthcare systems, it’s used for remote diagnosis. Cloud computing companies like Google and Microsoft rely on RPC to coordinate the many services running across global data centers.

The most interesting part is how RPC is used in blockchain. Variants like JSON-RPC have become a standard for communication between blockchain nodes, and DApp developers basically have to deal with it. With RPC, you can query on-chain data, execute smart contracts, and get market information in real time—so it’s crucial for trading decisions.

The trend I’ve been seeing in recent years is that RPC technology is becoming increasingly embedded in microservices architectures and blockchain ecosystems. Whether it’s traditional cloud computing or Web3 applications, efficient RPC implementations have become key to whether a system can scale. If you want to understand how modern distributed systems work, you really can’t get around learning the fundamentals of RPC.