Blockdaemon’s complete node stack supports the flow of data and value for millions of users. Our customers include top tier financial institutions, crypto native companies, exchanges, and many more…
What a ride 2018 has been for us. While thinking about what to mention in this end of year post, I realized that I don’t want to talk about the usual hyperbolic start-up CEO stuff. While it is hard to forgo the perspective of ever enthusiastic(/terrified) CEO, I will try to give an account of the year that focuses on the processes and challenges we underwent to get to where we are and give 5 predictions about the market, revenue potential and product.
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The delta that was bridged this year ranges from a seed stage startup with 1 person on payroll (our CTO Arun), 1 contractor (Rick), and 3 enthusiastic customers eager to figure out their future-state mainnet, to a 16 person team handling multiple internal deploys per week, thousands of users and 10 large scale partnerships, ranging from Citizen Reserve, Madhive.com, ICOx blockchain and GCoin to Algorand, Aion, Gochain, Stellar, Springlabs and Zayo. We launched hundreds of Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes (by far the most activated nodes to date).
Our vision remained the same: make the blockchain revolution part of the cloud revolution, by supporting professional infrastructure developers with data-migration tooling offering logs and security brought by blockchain. We do this by auto-scaling nodes of major chains across a large network of cloud providers to ensure latency performance and layer 1 decentralization. We then create new data-connections and dynamic tooling/APIs to seamlessly link existing data-lakes to permissioned blockchain networks anchored in larger public ones. You can see our progress by taking a look at our dynamic decentralization tool.
We are fascinated with data-reservoir and how they get moved, interlinked, protected and queried. I used to describe dynamic APIs with a SWOOSH sound (mimicking the sound when spiderman shoots out strings of his synthetic net) — driving our team crazy— testnets containing multiple different protocol nodes, spun up at speed to connect to a live chain or API at an instant, and then disconnect to verify/secure somewhere else. Nodes will live for seconds, so will certain chains, and data be logged and changed. Translating that into a story and actions that gel with iterative/linear capitalization will be the challenge. This isn’t about enterprise adoption, it is about data-abstraction. Our kineticledger is a first start.
We are now in the endurance phase of the market and our venture — we need to keep on iterating, adding new customers and extend platform services. What counts is keeping the monthly acceleration, which can only be done by repetitive processes yielding creative solutions. It can get stressful with little opportunity for success, and I need to make sure the core team doesn’t get fatigued or worn out by the negativity in the market and the sometimes seemingly slow progress. This is where unique value is created — in the stretch, meticulously measuring speed, results and customer satisfaction. The responsibility to provide a narrative for everyone is on me, and the more the market and expectation changes goes from hot to cold to hot, the more the story matters. We learned a ton about UI and the whole flow of self-onboarding customers has changed to a much more informative and dynamic interface.
Enough about us, let’s dive into 2019 and 5 key trends.
We look forward working with all of you in 2019.
Happy Holidays!
The Blockdaemons