Sean and I are proud to officially announce the launch of BlockJoy with nearly $11 million in combined Seed + Series A funding from Gradient Ventures, Draper Dragon, Active Capital, Borderless Capital, Tribe Capital, Bessemer,  Renegade Ventures,  among others, to support the launch of our patented blockchain node management software. At BlockJoy, we are on a mission to make it drop-dead simple for customers to run their own blockchain nodes on bare metal, within any datacenter, unbeholden to the ever increasing costs and lock-ins of legacy Web 2.0 cloud providers.

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How BlockJoy Was Born

For many of you who know us, you know that we love building products that solve problems. For example, I’ve been programming since I was 9 and have been immersed in the tech & entrepreneurial world since childhood. My first business started when I was in sixth grade, building computers for customers.  I have since gone on to help found 5 venture backed startups. Sean also has extensive tech knowledge, with experience co-founding Helium, and working as Director of Engineering infrastructure at Thrasio, not to mention Giphy where he scaled the popular GIF-sharing and creation website from millions of requests a day to billions of requests per day.  We have both been involved in servers and data centers long before the Cloud craze and have built large infrastructures pre and post cloud.

Using our combined 50+ years of experience dating back to the dotcom days, Sean and I initially developed BlockJoy as a side project to stake our own Helium tokens. Our goal was to provide staking tools for our friends and families to help them through the challenges that the average person may face when operating staking nodes. After the launch and growth of our platform, we expanded our services to run nodes for businesses.

We supported Helium through their shift to a proof-of-stake model, building a platform that allowed us to run nodes at a highly cost-effective rate. Within six months of Helium’s launch of Validators, we were running a third of the Helium network, and BlockJoy started experiencing unprecedented growth.

But, the fact that multiple companies and the average person  had an impossible time running their own validator nodes really bothered us. Not to mention that running them on the Cloud was at least 2-3x more expensive than running on bare metal. That’s when Sean and I realized we could be doing more to help. We decided to take our purpose built Web3 infrastructure platform and open it up for any company or person to deploy and manage their own nodes on any infrastructure for any protocol. So, we jumped into our venture headfirst, leaving our jobs behind to pursue BlockJoy full-time.

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How We Help Enterprises 

Web 2.0 infrastructure is not designed for the demands of large distributed blockchains: heavy virtualization is a huge performance hit, kubernetes is complex with its everything-including -the-kitchen-sink design, and enterprises paying a hefty premium for  legacy cloud services.

As the first and only platform that is purpose-built for running blockchain nodes on infrastructure designed for Web3, BlockJoy helps enterprises to deploy and run blockchain nodes on any infrastructure, anywhere in the world, on commodity bare metal servers. By providing enterprises with blockchain specific  infrastructure, we are saving businesses up to 2-3x in operational costs compared to legacy cloud providers. We are also saving enterprises time, enabling them to support new protocols in days instead of months and giving them the flexibility to deploy on bare metal servers anywhere in the world with the ease of a cloud-like experience.

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Where We Stand Today

Within six months of our launch, we've run upwards of 1,200 validators for Helium, with up to 80 percent cost efficiency. We're proud to share that a few of our most notable customers include: Helium, Binance, Crypto.com, Indodax, Seeed Studio, and Gate.io. We are launching our beta today with support for Ethereum and Helium. Finally, we are planning to launch production with nearly 30 supported protocols after we complete our public beta testing in the coming weeks.

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Our Plans for the Future

As BlockJoy continues to grow, we aim to expand support for more infrastructure that helps promote Web3 projects that focus on decentralized applications. We plan to continue adding features that allow companies, foundations, and developers to easily deploy and manage nodes, APIs, and data tools that power their users’ products and services. We intend to support more blockchain protocols than any other company out there. 

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If Amazon and Azure are considered the infrastructure for Web 2.0, then you should consider BlockJoy as the infrastructure for Web3.

We couldn’t have made it here today without the support of our customers, friends, family, investors, and network. Thank you to everyone who has stuck with us during this exciting journey. 

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