We mentioned this idea of bridging in our initial post, but to better understand what we mean by this, let’s elaborate.
This post should shed some light on how Nodeify fits into the current DeFi and Node-as-a-Service (NaaS) landscape and how we position ourselves as a bridge between blockchain developers and investors.
Nodes through the eyes of a Developer
As a developer building applications within the crypto space, having affordable and easy access to a node endpoint is essential to build, test and deploy any idea that you might want to bring into reality. Few reputable NaaS offerings come to mind, such as Infura, QuickNodes, and Moralis (to name a few).
Of course, these names might not mean much to the average investor. Still, these are the service providers that enable thousands of developers to cheaply and efficiently spin up nodes used to develop, deploy, and iterate on the decentralized applications that we use every day.
To give a bit of an example, when you open Metamask and perform a simple transfer, a connection is made to a load-balanced cluster of Ethereum nodes (full nodes) hosted by Infura to fulfill the request. Without Infura hosting, securing, and automating the creation and maintenance of these dedicated nodes, the Metamask team would need to create and manage their nodes to have a secure, stable, and up-to-date environment to ensure our transactions go through without any issues.
By Metamask choosing a partnership with Infura, they are outsourcing the responsibility of owning, managing, and operating a large fleet of nodes (servers), just in the same way that we outsource the creation of electricity to power our homes.
The same goes for many decentralized applications we use every day; partnerships with trusted Node-as-a-Service platforms are created and financially incentivized from both ends. Unfortunately, however, this two-way level of trust has not made its way over into the DeFi node offering space. We believe this is because many of the teams’ within the current landscape either don’t have the required engineering skills to scale or are more interested in short-term gains.
“Nodes” in the DeFi landscape
Flipping the switch and looking at how the DeFi landscape paints the picture of “nodes,” things start to look very different.
We can break down the current DeFi node projects to be either innovators or imitators. Services such as StrongBlock have been around for over a year, offering nodes to investors and pioneering the “node” DeFi ecosystem as we know it today. Since then, we have seen countless imitations spring into action and continue the narrative that investors need the computational aspect of nodes when, in reality, most only care about the yields.
One of the target areas Nodeify will be focusing on is addressing a fundamental problem we see within the node offering space, which centers around the under-utilization of the nodes that investors create. To counter this, we are introducing a mechanism (Nodeify Connect) that enables investors to register their node into a pool that becomes available to developers wanting to build and innovate through our developer portal. This mechanism ensures investors get the yields they deserve from running a node, while developers can also consume the part they want from the same node (the endpoint).
Another property of the current DeFi node offerings that we plan on reinventing is the concept of ‘One room, many doors.’ Many other “node” offerings deceptively share the same endpoint (URL) across many nodes while giving the illusion that they are offering a dedicated instance. As a first within the node DeFi ecosystem, Nodeify will be offering a selection of shared or dedicated instances across both mainnet and testnet for all of our supported blockchain networks.
Above all else, we believe in earning trust through engineering excellence; we’re not going to be using third-party providers for nodes, sugar coating it and telling you it’s something that it simply isn’t. Instead, we’re creating a platform and community that not only bridges developers and investors through the use of nodes but also educates both parties about the underlying technology.
Nodeify is building between two worlds
When building Nodeify, we took a long look at these two contrasting views on how nodes are utilized and decided to bridge these worlds while picking out the best parts of both. By enabling investors to earn passive rewards while offering up their infrastructure to developers, we believe we can create a sustainable business model that rewards and incentivizes both parties.
Nodeify will be expanding its developer onboarding and education platform directly after launch via our developer portal. As we look to the future, we will be introducing new ways to empower web2 developers to leap into the web3 space; this will be an ongoing effort that will open additional sustainability streams to reward our node operators.
This is just the beginning for Nodeify, and we‘re looking forward to sharing more details on our plans to further reinvent the DeFi node landscape directly after launch.
