Hi. I’m Konstantin, and today I’m psyched to announce the official launch of Blockdaemon, a nodes-as-a-service deployment solution for developers keen to launch product rather than concepts.
Want to hear more about how Blockdaemon can help you with your Blockchain journey? Contact us today to chat more about our blockchain solutions, or read on to get a closer look at what’s new.
It was a long time in the making — the culmination of years of learning, hard work, networking, little wins, and little failures too. And I really want to tell you about it, which, sadly, made this blog post rather long. But if you are used to reading SDK documentations (and our core customers are), this will be a breeze!
2017 has been a flash-bang of blockchain activity, and my year has been no exception. I have been deeply involved in a handful of blockchain enterprise start-ups as well as ICOs, that have given me an invaluable first hand understanding of the extreme and dynamic nature of crypto backed businesses (check out my linkedin if interested in learning more about the projects). The pace of structural risk and rapid evolution is fascinating. The environment has driven incredible innovation around capitalization, regulation, and customer acquisition. On the other hand, there is a distinct absence of innovation around tools to handle the practical implication of operating and managing vast blockchain networks. They are decentralized, they need tons of informational CPU power.
We decided it is time to bridge this disconnect. We know it’s not easy to launch, manage, and maintain these networks. We know the innovation cycle can easily be hampered by poorly structured blockchain networks, making agile iteration on cloud hosted blockchain platforms expensive, slow, and often useless.
Blockchain networks are struggling to parlay traditional infrastructure norms and expectations into the blockchain infrastructure and economy — cheap data, ease of deployment, centralized server infrastructures, mysql, APIs etc. These core technologies are what affords all those talented engineers the time to freely ideate and iterate. You know, those mind-altering ideas that move us forward — the ones that drive innovation. However, it’s not so easy with blockchains.
Your product, like all enterprise software, needs the marketability and scalability that transforms a product into a real business. Now try telling your Dev Ops lead you are thinking about deploying complex data sets onto a hybrid blockchain with dozens of nodes managed by different entities and specific cloud like requirements around infrastructure flexibility. Show him the requirements, and I will show you an engineer with serious heart palpitations.
Then one day it all came together. My co-founder and CTO, Arun, and I were working through what it would take to deploy a few nodes for one of the blockchain companies I advise. As we slogged through it, he was perplexed by the absence of any simple deployment solutions for blockchains.
We had three options: engage in a multi-month effort putting together a POC workflow using a quasi-platform provider that provided only hard-coded blockchains and select networks, go to a completely vertical provider like IBM or Microsoft, or use one of the over-funded and under-built solutions developed 24 months ago by a niche blockchain start-up with an upsell strategy.
Dude, where’s my middleware?
And just like that, Blockdaemon was born. Well, it was conceived, anyway. We started Blockdaemon four months ago with one goal: to become a blockchain middleware provider, offering simple pre-configuration across as many chains and networks as possible, with a simple dashboard and access management tools. One-click-deployments.
We wanted to build the shovel shop in the midst of a gold rush so to say. We learned that the people we trust most, the engineers, were the ones who really need tools to unlock blockchain’s enterprise potential. So we moved quickly from an enterprise tool to a developer tool.
Like the original daemon, we run in the background connecting it all, freeing up developers to do what they do best: innovate and iterate. With that in mind, we started working on building in-network portability, which allows our future customers some leeway, mitigating the inevitable — that they’ll pick the wrong blockchain protocol for their application, and need to switch to one that better fits their needs.
Supporting ICOs is an important strategic avenue for us. Blockdaemon’s first customer has just announced their token project, MADnetwork — check it out. It’s pretty neat. And it will be run on our nodes. In fact, we hope to power a good amount of the foundations created over the last 6 months by token sales, because they all need product.
Our public slack, blog posts like this, and many other activities coming down the pike (for a sneak peak go to do-they-have-a-product) are our way of creating a hub for a community, somewhere developers can come for answers and support for specific questions around the deployment and management of nodes. It is a place for you to tell us about your experiences, and let us help you deploy your solutions.
Congrats on making it to the end of this post, in about the time it would take you to create a blockchain network on blockdaemon. So now stop wasting any more time and get building!
Konstantin & The Blockdaemons
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