In addition to Bitcoin, mainstream public chains will adopt the PoS mechanism in the future. As a result, there will be a huge blue ocean of APIs and pledge ecology. This is also one of the channels through which Ankr wants to make its own contribution to Web3.0 in the blockchain era.
Written by: Dove
With the turbulent wave brought about by DeFi, the iterative development of the blockchain world is staggeringly fast. Ethereum is well-deserved as the biggest beneficiary, and outside of Ethereum, we have also seen a series of innovative public chains such as Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, Flow, Avalanche, and Solana.
Compared with the early public chain wars, this bull market seems to make people more sure that the cross-chain era is unstoppable. This can also be seen from the coexistence relationship between Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. With Ethereum Gas fees on the chain have gradually increased, BSC has become a favorite of small capital investors, and the expansion of users has further promoted the development of the ecology, thus forming a complementary public chain structure. We may as well guess that in the future Web3.0 era, multi-chain coexistence is irreversible.
Compared with the great imagination and practice of many projects in the Web3.0 era, some projects choose to deepen the infrastructure, take root in the track that is most easily overlooked, and silently make their own contributions to the Web3.0 in the blockchain era. . Ankr is one of them.
“The future will not be the single-chain dominance. It is bound to be the era of multi-chain coexistence.” Ankr co-founder and CEO Chandler Song told Lianwen when talking about the original intention and vision of the establishment. “What Ankr wants to do is to become The default Web3.0 infrastructure under any use case seamlessly connects the incentive mechanism of each network with the upper-level DeFi application, and has been working hard for this goal.”
What is Ankr?
Ankr is a Web3 infrastructure platform designed to lower the barriers for individuals, enterprises and developers to participate in the blockchain ecosystem. The founding team of Ankr are mostly from top universities, CEO Chandler Song and COO Ryan Fang are top students of UC Berkeley. As early as 2018, Ankr received US$15 million in financing from Danhua Capital, Pantera and other institutions.
At the end of 2019, Ankr built a one-click node-as-a-service platform, breaking technical barriers to entry by creating simple node deployment applications, and facilitating developers’ deployment and operation of their own nodes.
With the launch of Ethereum 2.0, Ankr has added a decentralized pledge/stable income protocol StakeFi (formerly known as Stkr), allowing ordinary investors to start staking with a small amount of ETH, and provide it through a synthetic asset aETH instead of the pledged ETH With instant liquidity, investors can also use the synthetic asset aETH to trade or participate in DeFi. In the future, as StakeFi further increases its support for public chains such as BSC, Avalanche, Polkadot, etc., holders of various public chains can also use StakeFi, a decentralized cross-chain pledge protocol, to complete the intercommunication from the bottom node pledge to the upper DeFi.
However, despite its achievements in staking services, Ankr still places API (application interface) services at the core of its business and gradually expands it to Layer 2 solutions. As Chandler said, no matter how the blockchain world changes, no matter what use case it is, infrastructure is always what is needed. Ankr’s vision is to connect all services that rely on the infrastructure of Web3.0, including multi-chain pledge, multi-chain environment development, and cross-chain data interoperability.
API service is the core bearer of Web3.0
Whether it is Web2.0 or Web3.0 that emphasizes protocol interconnection, the importance of API to developers is self-evident, which is the core of the entire Internet.
With the vigorous development of cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies, the mobile Internet and Internet of Things industries have accelerated innovation, and the number of mobile devices has continued to increase. Web applications and mobile applications have been integrated into various fields of production and life. In this process, API plays a pivotal role as an important channel for data transmission and circulation, and undertakes the important task of data interaction and transmission between different complex system environments and organizations.
The data shows that in 2018, the API interface business revenue of listed companies in the United States increased by 67% in the industry. Amazon’s API interface business alone contributed $25.6 billion in revenue, an increase of 47%.
As an important infrastructure of Web3.0, Ankr now provides one-click API solutions for developers from a series of mainstream public chains such as Ethereum, BSC, Polkadot, Kusama, etc. Developers do not need to write complex smart contract code , And convenient API access can be obtained by processing the complicated data, so that the technical development and other construction work can be completed smoothly, easily and at low cost.
In addition, as Ethereum’s Layer 2 solution gradually matures, Ankr has expanded its API services to include Layer 2 solutions such as Polygon (formerly Matic Network) and xDai. This allows more developers to use the API of the Layer 2 project, and subsequently build and extend DeFi products.
The most basic facilities may bear the role of the core carrier. This sentence is confirmed by Ankr.
One-click deployment node provides basic guarantee for integrated ecology
As we all know, the PoS mechanism is a consensus mechanism that requires nodes to provide a certain number of token proofs to obtain the accounting rights of competing blockchains. Its core logic is that the currency holders have control of the network. To put it simply, under the PoS mechanism, you no longer need to rely on mining machines. You can enjoy mining revenue after staking tokens, and the revenue depends on the number of coins held by the node and the holding time.
In terms of node deployment, the vast majority of Ethereum developers still choose Infura as the node service provider, but Infura, which is as strong as the leader, has also experienced downtime, which once caused major platforms such as MetaMask and Coinbase to be unable to operate normally. This is because although Ethereum has achieved decentralization, many service providers still rely heavily on Amazon’s cloud servers, which do not fully meet the requirements of Web 3.0.
Relying on its own cloud computing foundation, Ankr not only lowers the technical threshold, but also improves the decentralization of node distribution. Data center owners can also tokenize their idle resources through the Ankr cloud platform, which also enables Ankr to further provide users with easier-to-call computing power at a lower price, ultimately benefiting users. Therefore, under the same configuration, Ankr’s node construction cost is only about 30% of Amazon Cloud.
In this context, Ankr has become the best choice for developers to deploy major protocol nodes. In April 2020, the first recruitment of “Web3.0 Bootcamp” was completed, 15 project teams from around the world were selected, and Ankr became one of them. In the third quarter of 2020, Ankr launched the Polkadot node, and further integrated the Moonbeam, Clover, Acala, Bifrost, ChainX, Darwinia, Plasm and Kusama of the Polkadot ecology, and integrated their nodes on the Ankr platform, bringing Simpler node deployment. The data shows that so far Ankr has supported a total of more than 100 node deployments for more than 50 projects.
In the interviews between Lianwen and Ankr’s two founders, Chandler and Ryan, they have their own beliefs in the PoS mechanism. The two have repeatedly emphasized that in addition to Bitcoin, the mainstream public chain in the future will adopt the PoS mechanism, and there will be a huge blue ocean of API and node services. This is also Ankr’s desire to make itself for the Web3.0 in the blockchain era. One of the channels of contribution.
StakeFi lowers the threshold for investor participation
With the much-anticipated beacon chain being launched as scheduled, the curtain of a new era of PoS has been opened. On the way to the new world, small investors are facing great dilemmas.
The reason lies in the practice of staking nodes. Each node of ETH 2.0 needs to mortgage 32 ETH to meet the requirements. In addition, there are problems such as technology and Slash risks. The extremely high barriers to entry basically prevent ordinary users from participating in the blockchain. Ecological construction. Ankr breaks the technical barriers to entry by creating a simple node deployment application, allowing non-technical users to deploy and run any node they choose.
As mentioned above, Ankr’s StakeFi provides in-depth customization for ETH2.0 investors. In addition to providing staking services for ordinary currency investors, ETH Staking on the Ankr platform will provide users with the corresponding interest-bearing certificate aETH , And can transfer or trade freely at any time.
Ankr also established Eth/aETH, USDC/aETH, DAI/aETH liquidity mining pools on Uniswap, and solved the liquidity problem of pledged ETH by combining DeFi liquidity mining.
In March 2021, StakeFi also released the Eth2 liquidity pledge agreement for BSC and established the first Infura-like API endpoint service on BSC, making it easier for developers to build on BSC. Subsequently, he became the first validator of BSC by voting, which once again lowered the threshold for investors to participate in ETH pledge.
It is worth noting that Ankr also created a new cross-chain pledge on the original basis. According to the team’s plan, in addition to ETH2.0, StakeFi also plans to support BSC, Avalanche, Fantom, Polkadot, Flow, Near and Solana in the future. Fired the first shot of cross-chain pledge of Staking in the Web3.0 era.
summary
As a veteran project, Ankr’s ecological layout is not uncomplicated. In the first quarter of 2021, Ankr successively announced cooperation with projects such as Curve, Sushi, SnowSwap, Plasm, Cere, Marlin and Covalent, and successfully launched the Coinbase exchange.
As stated by CEO Chandler Song, Ankr has been exploring and innovating, and hopes to make the product into a large ecosystem as complete as possible, in order to create a “default Web3.0 infrastructure for any use case”, and this is exactly what Ankr’s vision has always been.
