Key Takeaways
- Ankr links idle computing power with blockchains in need of node hosting.
- The ANKR token is used to settle transactions between providers and end-users.
- They’re capable of providing this computing power for much cheaper than competitors AWS or Google Cloud.
Ankr is bringing cloud computing to the blockchain. By doing so, they’ll be competing with giants such as AWS, but their unique decentralized approach allows them to carve a significant niche in this lucrative market.
Disrupting a Trillion Dollar Industry
The advent of cloud computing has been one of the defining factors of the internet’s accelerated growth in the last decade. It has also paved the way for Amazon’s rise to become one of the world’s most valuable companies.
Providing a decentralized approach to AWS, Google’s Cloud, or Microsoft’s Azure will undoubtedly be a complex challenge, but Ankr offers several advantages. Distributing computing power and storage across the world through a cloud computing model is more secure, reliable, and resistant to censorship.
Ankr’s objective is to link idle computing resources with individuals or companies who need them. Ankr’s platform works by linking data centers with idle servers or companies not using all of their computing resources and then linking them with end-users. Transactions between providers and users are settled on the Ankr blockchain, using their native ANKR token.
Much like other crypto projects challenging the status quo, one of Ankr’s key advantages lies in cutting out intermediaries and gatekeepers from the equation. By creating a decentralized network allowing optimized use of global computing resources with a strong focus on privacy, the company is creating a particularly attractive proposition for businesses that deal with sensitive data.
The crypto industry itself is also interested in these services for running different blockchain nodes for a low price. For a blockchain to be secured, its data needs to be distributed among trusted nodes that can independently verify transactions.
Ankr is already working with more than 40 blockchain protocols such as Polkadot, Avalanche, Cosmos, Matic, and Tron to provide them with the decentralized computing power they need to make sure these blockchains run securely.
In the last few weeks, the price of ANKR has seen a sharp rise thanks to more partnerships and higher protocol usage.
A majority of the necessary nodes to create sufficient security are often hosted on AWS or Google Cloud, creating two major issues.
First, the cost of hosting on these services can be prohibitively high, especially for nascent blockchains whose traffic and fees are not enough to reimburse those expenses.
Second, this creates a single point of failure, which might seriously compromise the network’s security if any of these centralized services were to go down. In November of 2020, ConsenSys-backed Infura, one of Ethereum’s infrastructure providers, went down and created issues for the entire Ethereum network, including exchanges like Binance.
Decentralization, further than security issues, is also a core value of blockchain projects. Blockchains that forego a sufficient degree of decentralization often suffer from distrust, even though they can sometimes provide lower fees. Counting on your users to host nodes can also be tricky as doing so is often quite expensive and requires technical knowledge.
According to Ankr, even one of the most popular and decentralized blockchain Ethereum has 60% of its nodes hosted on the top 10 public clouds.
Ankr, as a blockchain-native project, is uniquely positioned to provide the necessary secure, decentralized hosting that blockchains need to thrive. By doing this through a decentralized network, the company has also strongly reduced the high prices often synonymous with cloud computing.
Disclaimer: The author held BTC, ETH, and several cryptocurrencies at the time of writing.
