As a token near the top 100, Ankr is growing fast and is helping to support many mainstream projects, including Binance, Polygon, and over 50 others. But even as such a strong ally in the community, most people have never even heard of them. That’s because they do most of their work behind the scenes. Ankr is a decentralized Web3 infrastructure protocol. Instead of choosing a blockchain to become a node provider for, those who wish to create a node can add theirs to Ankr’s growing network. From there, blockchains can pull from that node pool to help sustain their own networks. In a system like this, even if everyone was to use Ankr, it would still function as a tool for decentralization. That’s the benefit of an anonymous, permissionless protocol.
Today, I sat down for an interview with Josh Neuroth, Head of Product at Ankr. Josh was previously the Sr. Director of Product & Marketing at Cyxtera Technologies and VP of Product at Inflect. His passions and experience motivate his goals to build a better, more open web. We talked about Ankr’s role in the community and how they are working to stay on top. We also spoke about their services, the advantages of their product, and how to deconstruct the more technical aspects of their platform. Finally, we touched on Ankr’s achievements and what they plan to do next.
- What role will Ankr play in an open and distributed Web3 internet?
Ankr provides decentralized Web3 infrastructure with an array of blockchain nodes globally distributed across many different Proof-of-Stake networks. This infrastructure helps drive the growth of the crypto economy while powering a full suite of multi-chain tools for Web3 users.
- How competitive is Ankr in the decentralized finance space?
Ankr is very competitive in DeFi as a provider of liquid staking. Liquid staking is a way to earn a base level of rewards before taking your liquidity to DeFi platforms for other earning strategies like yield farming. In this way, Ankr is again providing more opportunities to work together with other protocols in Web3.
- What solutions does Ankr offer for enterprises?
Ankr provides blockchain enterprises with easy ways to integrate node infrastructure to power their projects, staking solutions for their users, and tools like blockchain analytics to keep them informed.
- What are the advantages of Ankr APIs?
Ankr’s APIs and RPCs help developers streamline their building on decentralized applications or other blockchain projects. Our advanced APIs provide a way to query data on many different blockchains simultaneously, saving developers a lot of time and money. Additionally, our infrastructure is decentralized, unlike our top competitors, meaning it is much more aligned to the ethos of Web3 while providing benefits like censorship resistance.
- What are RPCs, and how does Ankr excel in this area for a distributed internet?
RPCs (Remote Procedure Calls) are a type of application programming interface that allow developers and dApps to read and write data on blockchains remotely without needing to set up their own nodes. Ankr provides a global infrastructure of nodes that are reachable using this RPC layer, meaning more reliable and faster connections.
- What milestones has Ankr achieved since its inception?
Ankr is now decentralizing our node infrastructure completely, disrupting our own previous centralized provider model. We have come a long way with the total value of assets locked in staking and we are serving more requests to blockchains every day (currently about 10 billion requests daily) as the fastest-growing provider of decentralized infrastructure.
- What’s next on the Ankr roadmap?
We will soon launch a way for anyone to stake their ANKR token assets to independent full nodes on the Ankr platform, enabling them to earn a higher APY on top of any appreciation in the token’s price. This is a highly anticipated and first-of-its-kind product that our community has been wanting for some time.
