BlockJoy, a startup that provides white-label blockchain nodes as a service, has raised a total of $12 million in its seed and Series A rounds, the company shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
The Boston-based startup aims to reduce the operating costs of enterprises running staking nodes and APIs as a service by up to 80 percent, co-founders Sean Carey and Chris Bruce told TechCrunch.
“On AWS, it would cost $200 a month per node,” Bruce said, “but we rethought the web3 infrastructure and we’re able to run the same nodes for about $11 a month, about an 80% cost reduction.” Will go,” Bruce said.
Carey, also a Helium co-founder, and Bruce, a four-time founder, started BlockJoy as a staking service side project. “We started it completely by accident,” Carey said. […] So Chris and I teamed up to build this project and BlockJoy was born.
BlockJoy was “never intended to be a company — it was supposed to be for friends and family,” shares Bruce. “But after six months, people were coming in and setting up nodes with us, and six months after we launched, we were running 1,200 validators for the Helium network.”
Investors include Gradient Ventures, Draper Dragon, Dragon Roark, Active Capital, Borderless HNT and Renegade Ventures.
Bruce said the startup created BlockVisor, its patented blockchain node management software, that would let users run blockchain nodes on any infrastructure in an automated, cost-effective manner through a “point-and-click” user interface. Is.
This means that enterprises using BlockJoy’s service can deploy and manage blockchains, nodes, validators and ETLs (extract, transform, load) “with a click of a button”.
The capital will be used to launch BlockVisor, which is now in open beta mode. “It allows anyone to launch a node anywhere they want via our infrastructure, their infrastructure or even the cloud,” Bruce said.
“BlockJoy is a Web 3 infrastructure company at its core,” Bruce said. “It means we have a platform that supports node operators like blockdaemon, alchemy or any exchange or business that runs a node for their business.”
The team currently works with a handful of crypto companies, including Binance, Crypto.com and the Helium Foundation, Carey shared. It is also onboarding new blockchains, including Ethereum 2, Cosmos, Polygon, Solana, Algorand and Avalanche. By the end of its beta launch, BlockJoy aims to support about 25 blockchains, Bruce said.
“We allow them to operate these nodes in a decentralized manner as if they were running them on the cloud with software that is specifically designed for blockchain nodes,” Bruce said. He added that it usually takes four to six months for node operators to implement new protocols, but Blockjoy can implement them within days to weeks.
In the long term, BlockJoy hopes to make its technology more accessible so that running a node is simple enough that anyone can do it, Bruce said. “We want to provide an infrastructure that is drop-dead simple but not centralized. We want to see the spread of Web 3, and this is the first step.
