Different approach to get the balance of shielded addresses.

[hkey0]

Hello,
As far as I understand, if we want to get the balance of a shielded address, the front-end starts a shielded-sync like process by getting all blocks from the RPC. It won't work after hard-fork anyway.

Instead of doing that, wouldn't it be better to assume that the connected RPC is fully shielded-sync and try to get the balance? I don't know if this is possible, but it would be nice if it was this way.

Reasons:

• It is not possible to pull the first block after the hardfork. An old RPC must be used until the hardfork block
• Gettings hundreds of thousands of blocks in the front-end is tedious

If you want to test it, my shielded-sync RPC address for shielded expedition:
https://rpc.namascan.com/

Thanks, have a nice day!

[Rigorously]

Caching balances in the RPC is an idea that I pitched in the anoma/namada#2900 (comment), but it was ignored or even dismissed as something that should definitely not be done anoma/namada#2900 (comment).

[mateuszjasiuk]

@hkey0 @Rigorously Thank you for messages. If the protocol guys think caching is not a good idea we can't do much about it. I do not feel competent enough in this area to have strong opinion. What I can tell you is that we are having internal discussions about improving shieled-sync/balance queries. The problem is recognized and we are working on solutions(s). :) I will leave this open for time being, if there is some more info in future I will let you know here.