BlockJoy, a white-label blockchain node-as-a-service startup, has raised a total of $12 million from its seed and Series A rounds, which it has exclusively shared with TechCrunch.
The Boston-based startup aims to reduce operating costs by up to 80% for companies running staking nodes and APIs as a service, said co-founders Sean Carey and Chris Bruce. told TechCrunch.
“On AWS, it costs $200 per node per month, but after rethinking the web3 infrastructure, we can now run the same node for about $11 per month, saving us about 80% of the cost,” says Bruce. say.
Helium co-founder Carey and 4-time founder Bruce started BlockJoy as a side project to their staking service. “We started this completely by accident,” says Carey. “We wanted to stake our tokens, but the system to do so was unwise. […] Chris and I worked together to create this project and BlockJoy was born. ”
BlockJoy “was never meant to be a company. It was meant to be for friends and family,” says Bruce. “But six months later, people were joining and staking nodes, and six months after launch, he was running 1,200 validators for the Helium network.”
Investors include Gradient Ventures, Draper Dragon, Dragon Roark, Active Capital, Borderless HNT, Renegade Ventures and others.
The startup built BlockVisor, a patented blockchain node management software. This will allow users to run blockchain nodes on any infrastructure in an automated and cost-effective manner via a “point-and-click” user interface, Bruce said. increase.
This means businesses using BlockJoy’s services can deploy and manage blockchains, nodes, validators, and ETL (extract, transform, load) at the click of a button.
This funding will be used to launch BlockVisor, which is currently in beta mode. “This allows anyone to launch a node wherever they want, through our infrastructure, our infrastructure, or the cloud,” said Bruce.
“BlockJoy is a fundamental level web3 infrastructure company,” said Bruce. “This means we have a platform to help node operators such as Blockdaemon, Alchemy, or any exchange or business that runs nodes for their business.”
Carey said the team is currently working with several cryptocurrency companies, including Binance, Crypto.com and the Helium Foundation. It also features new blockchains such as Ethereum 2, Cosmos, Polygon, Solana, Algorand and Avalanche. By the end of the beta launch, BlockJoy aims to support around 25 blockchains, Bruce said.
“We use software specifically designed for blockchain nodes to allow us to operate these nodes in a decentralized manner, similar to running those nodes on the cloud,” Bruce said. said. Normally, node operators take four to six months to implement new protocols, but BlockJoy can implement them in days to weeks, he added.
Longer term, BlockJoy wants to make its technology more accessible and make it easy for anyone to run a node, Bruce said. “We want to provide a completely simple yet decentralized infrastructure.