How does QuickNode work as a blockchain development platform in simple terms?

It's hard to do anything with blockchain and explain it to a five-year old. So, we're just going to assume you know what a blockchain is and then try to get an ELI5 from there. 

You need to run your own node if you want to read or write information from the blockchain, or you can pay someone else to run your own node. It's very similar to how email works. I don't know any five-year-olds that use email, but if they did, they’d understand that they could run their own SMTP server. But you shouldn't do that for a few reasons. 

One of them is, it's annoying. You have to deal with server upgrades, protocol upgrades, etc. and the same thing applies to blockchains. The London Hard Fork, the Berlin Hard Fork, the merge, etc. are things that you would need a team of experienced DevOps people to manage. If you don't want to do that, you should use a company like QuickNode.

As to what the tech stack looks like, you need to have some particular software that is continuously synchronizing the blockchain as well as some software that provides the data from the blockchain in an RPC format—the format for blockchain communication. For most of them—Bitcoin, Ethereum, and all EVM-based chains, and even Solana—it’s JSON-RPC. It's just a specific kind of API. These clients are written in any number of languages, including Go, JavaScript, Python, etc.

Specific to us, we have a whole proprietary setup that's doing caching, indexing, etc., just the sort of the things that you would expect. Geolocation too, because we're in 14 different data centers. 

On the frontend or the customer-facing side, it's relatively boring—HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.