How the gateways work

When you create a gateway, Cloudflare automatically creates and adds specific DNS records to your Cloudflare account.

When the hostname associated with your gateway receives requests, its DNS records route these requests to a Cloudflare Workers script.

​​ Read operations

If the API call to the Worker is a read operation and the requested content is cached, the Workers script will respond with the requested information via HTTP to the client.

If the requested content is not cached, it will first be requested via API call to Cloudflare IPFS or Ethereum nodes, cached at the edge for future requests, and returned via HTTP response to the client.

​​ Write operations

Only available for gateways to EVM-based chains, such as Ethereum and Polygon.

If the API call to the gateway is a write operation, the gateway will make an API call to one of the Cloudflare nodes, and the transaction is placed in the local mempool and propagated to peers.

A transaction ID is returned to the gateway, which is then returned to the client via HTTP response. Validators take transactions from the mempool and place them into a block to execute. The new block to add to the blockchain is validated, consensus is reached, and the block is added to the blockchain and propagated to the rest of the network.