This is an interview with the founder of BlockJoy, Chris Bruce, a Web3 infrastructure platform that uses patent-pending technologies, such as Turnstile and Babel, to make running nodes more efficient and support onboarding new chains in days instead of months, while ensuring security and reliability for large-scale node operators.
Can you walk me through the patent-pending technologies that BlockJoy uses to make running nodes more efficient and to support onboarding new chains in days instead of months?
I’d love to start with why we built a node running platform from the ground up. My co-founder Sean Carey and I had a lot of Helium (HNT) tokens that we wanted to stake, as Helium was transitioning to a Proof-of-Stake model. Helium is a custom L1 chain written in the Erlang programming language which requires more resources than some of the more efficient languages that more typical blockchains are written in like Rust and Go.
Furthermore, the way the consensus operates, validators are penalized for poor networking and CPU performance. We quickly realized that the traditional Web 2.0 stack built with Docker and Kubernetes and designed for running ephemeral web applications wouldn’t be very efficient at running blockchain nodes. We estimated it would cost 2-3x more to run on the legacy cloud instead of closer to bare metal.
So, we designed and built a Web3 infrastructure platform from the ground up to run blockchain nodes on bare metal, saving customers up to 80% of the costs compared to running them on the cloud.
How we do this is by leveraging some of the technology we built to save us money and time during our early days as a Staking Operator. Two of the bigger pieces of technology are called Turnstile and Babel.
Turnstile is capable of monitoring a live blockchain and running nodes to determine if and when a node may need more resources. It then optimistically steals resources from other nodes running on the same physical server. Since many nodes are mostly idle synching, this means that we can “oversubscribe” the number of nodes on a single server.
This allows customers to get incredible efficiency gains out of each server and run a lot more nodes on a single server than you would in the cloud or in a kubernetes cluster.
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We’re really proud of what we did with Babel. Babel is a domain specific language that we created to describe how to communicate and manage blockchain protocols. Using babel allows us to add support for new and changing protocols in days instead of the typical 4-6 months large node operators typically take.
What makes this even more special is that it doesn’t require deep technical expertise to create a specific protocol integration and we can push it out to our live system without the need to recompile or redeploy our BlockVisor service. This means that node operator companies can rapidly bring new protocol support to market worry free.
BlockJoy makes it drop-dead-simple for enterprises or anyone to deploy and manage nodes with the simple click of a button or a simple API call.
Our platform gives users everything they need to successfully manage their nodes without anything they don’t need.
How does BlockJoy ensure the security and reliability of its infrastructure, especially for large-scale node operators who are running nodes for the core of their business?
BlockJoy supports automatic updates and failovers. Regardless of what happens, our platform will keep customer’s nodes up and running with as minimal downtime as possible. Additionally, we use innovative approaches to verifying each individual node’s connectivity even if parts of the internet’s connectivity have issues.
We use industry standard security practices and even work with enterprises to integrate their own security and key management processes if needed. Again, this is why we built an infrastructure exclusively for running Web3 blockchain nodes, since off-the-shelf solutions know nothing about blockchains.
Can you discuss the process of transitioning from a validator-as-a-service model to a platform that allows anyone to easily deploy and manage any blockchain node anywhere in the world with a simple click of a button?
Before we rebranded BlockJoy, we were called StakeJoy. We only intended to run our own validators for some of our friends and families. But at the time, it cost around $200/mo/validator to run a decently performing validator on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
But for us, since we built a custom infrastructure, it cost us only $11/mo/validator. So we quickly grew. Within six months, we were operating over one-third of Helium’s validators and at one point we were evening operating over 50%.
There was a point where we had read why Web3 was doomed to fail because people don’t want to run their own servers and never will. It got us thinking that was right — although we didn’t want to admit it at the time — and we realized that StakeJoy was just another intermediary in what is supposed to be a decentralized network. So we decided to pivot our platform and open it up for anyone to use.
But we wanted to go a step further. We wanted people to be able to deploy and manage their nodes on any infrastructure: theirs, ours, or even a server in their garage.
From there, we launched our beta to get early feedback and make sure what we have built is ready for all. When it becomes Generally Available in the next several weeks, enterprises, investors, foundations, developers, anyone will be able to easily deploy and manage their own nodes within any infrastructure they like, anywhere in the world.
And we will likely launch with support for around fifty different protocols, likely more than any other node provider does today (delegation excluded). Customers will be able to operate staking nodes, relay nodes, RPC nodes, archival nodes, pretty much whatever they are called at the time of launch.
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As BlockJoy aims to be the infrastructure for Web3, how do you see the landscape of Web3 infrastructure evolving in the next few years, and how is BlockJoy planning to stay ahead of the curve?
If people consider Amazon AWS as the infrastructure that powers Web 2.0, then we hope the Web3 community will see BlockJoy as the infrastructure that powers Web3.
Our goal is to be a low level tool for all the companies and developers building fantastic Web3 products and services that need to rely on blockchain nodes to power those apps and services but don’t want to be bogged down with the sky-high cloud costs or management headaches.
We hope that by making it easier to run nodes, Web3 innovations will happen faster.
And more people will see the freedom in having a democratized web where there are no intermediaries and people’s data can be private and secure or even monetized by the owner if they so choose.
Web3 will be redefined and there will be more talk about the decentralization of utilities that internet users depend on, like social media platforms.
Due to that need / want for freedom of being productized from the younger generations, we anticipate that more blockchain networks will be created, and more applications will be built on top of them, leading to a greater demand for infrastructure that can support this growth.
To stay ahead of the curve, we plan to continue developing and improving our infrastructure to support a wider range of networks and use cases. Our long term goals are to continue to add support for more decentralized infrastructure that helps to promote Web3 projects.
By that, we mean decentralized applications where users own their own data and others can help maintain the network without a centralized owner. We also plan to make it even easier for developers to run their own APIs and data science tools.
How does BlockJoy balance the convenience of fully managed blockchain nodes and servers within its data centres with the desire to allow customers to remain in full control of their own compute resources?
Over 60% of all Algorand Relay nodes run on legacy cloud providers. It’s also worth noting that over 66% of Ethereum nodes also run on legacy cloud providers and that 40% of all Solana Validators were running on Hetzner until they banned crypto and kicked all the validators off causing Solan Price to crash by over 50%.
If the epitome of blockchains are that they are decentralized, diversified and resilient, then it’s worth asking why the majority of nodes are running in the cloud, paying 2-3x more and making the networks less decentralized.
By using BlockJoy, customers can run their nodes on any server anywhere in the world they want. They don’t have to use BlockJoy’s datacenters, in fact they can leverage a large global network of data centers offering bare metal servers, with incredible cost savings, no egress fees, no lockin, and BlockJoy will make that a seamless and simple experience.
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