Blockdaemon joins Heavybit program, adds DevOps leaders to Advisory Board, and Announces New Research Initiative focused on Blockchain Network Cost Modeling
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.
Blockchain technology has captured the imagination of the open source software community and increasingly, the enterprise developer community. Our mission at Blockdaemon is to provide developer tools to help deploy both public and private blockchain infrastructure easily, affordably, and on demand. Our team believes that speed to market comes from building on existing knowledge and infrastructure — we need to know what tools can be re-purposed and what needs to be built to connect existing infrastructure to the blockchain development stack.
As we gear up for Blockdaemon’s next stage of growth, we are excited to announce that we are joining the Heavybit program, designed to help take developer products to market. Heavybit was started by Heroku founder James Lindenbaum and its partnership is made up of DevOps leaders including Jesse Robbins, the creator of Chef and one of the pioneers of the DevOps movement. From the early days of our company, our team at Blockdaemon has looked to Heroku as a model for how to deploy developer tools and found inspiration in their community-centric approach and the way they evolved their UX and pricing philosophy.
James and Jesse will be joining our advisory board and will add tremendous insight and experience to our team, and we look forward to working with them.
James Lindenbaum: “As blockchain-based tools and services continue to grow across myriad industries, there’s a great need for tooling and infrastructure to deploy and manage blockchain nodes. The Blockdaemon team are leaders here, providing a nodes-as-a-service platform enabling developers to deploy any major blockchain on any major cloud in minutes.”
Jesse Robbins: “Today, launching new blockchain projects is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Blockdaemon provides developers with the mission-critical tools to quickly build, manage and scale blockchain applications. I am excited to work with the team.”
In joining the Heavybit program, our team is joining a portfolio of developer-focused companies including Stripe, Treasure Data, and CircleCI. We will benefit greatly from access to an extensive network of companies, resources, and access to thousands of the world’s most forward-thinking developers. We are excited to leverage the Heavybit program to continue extending products and services to the blockchain developer community.
Developer education is a key aspect of the Blockdaemon mission. Heavybit has committed to investing in Blockdaemon to help us fast-track some of our developer centric initiatives. One of them is the launch of a developer program that offers early access to our product, discounts via shared-services network costs, and programs geared towards educating the network centric developer world about the cost of complete blockchain networks and how to attach them to continuous deployment cycles for enterprises.
There is a cost to decentralization, which we are in the early stages of understanding as public blockchain infrastructure is implemented. Public blockchain networks have been the first real test in understanding the cost of building blockchain architecture, and today, the cost of constructing these networks has been based on the cost of compute infrastructure, electricity, and network connectivity with rewards like Bitcoin’s mining model. The Bitcoin network mints 1,800 new coins per day, and at today’s market prices, $6 billion of economic value is generated each year to support Bitcoin’s network infrastructure at scale. Our initial research indicates that a high-availability network comprised of 30 nodes costs millions of dollars to build and maintain, including the costs of compute capacity, storage, and electricity.
To ensure that the networking implementation of our industry’s most promising protocols is technically and economically feasible at any network size, we need to gather critical data and build better models to understand the true cost of building and deploying blockchain networks at scale. Either we offer centralization or network costs that are much, much lower than currently experienced. Like actual blockchains which combine the best of peer to peer with the benefits of systemic centralization, there is a clear need for a network client connecting the world’s data centers efficiently with the blockchain ecosystem. This is a big subject and it requires big thinkers.
Helping our team think through these important questions is Meltem Demirors, who is joining Blockdaemon as an investor and advisor. She helped build the industry’s largest network while at Digital Currency Group, and is now focused on ecosystem architecture at her own firm, Athena Capital. Together, we look forward to engaging with the developer ecosystem and better defining the variables that matter when determining the cost of deploying nodes within a network, and developing the infrastructure and tools to enable to do so at scale. We aim to define the true human, social, and computational costs of deploying networks that achieve the vision of distributed, resilient blockchains that can support global computation and coordination.
Our mission is ambitious, and we are excited to bring on new partners who can help us accelerate growth. We encourage you to visit blockdaemon.com and deploy a node! Use the invite code “heavybit” to join our developer program and a free node to play with, thanks to our friends at Heavybit. We selected some fun pre-configurations, and look forward to your feedback!
We are excited to serve you.
