Building real-time blockchain indexers means wrestling with hard choices: speed vs. simplicity, RPC dependency vs. reliability, and resource costs. This is what I learned. The Problem Nobody Talks About Most Solana developers hit the same wall: the official RPC endpoint is slow, rate-limited, and not designed for analytics. So you build an indexer. But then you realize indexing blockchain data isn't like indexing a traditional database . You're not indexing static data. You're indexing a stream