BlockJoy raises $12M to help cut operating costs for businesses running blockchain nodes

BlockJoy, a startup providing white label blockchain nodes as a service, raised a total of $12 million from its seed and Series A rounds, the company exclusi1vely shared with TechCrunch.

The Boston-based startup aims to reduce operating costs by up to 80% for enterprises running staking nodes and APIs as a service, the two co-founders, Sean Carey and Chris Bruce, said to TechCrunch.

“On AWS, it would cost $200 a month per node, but we rethought the web3 infrastructure and we are able to run those same nodes for about $11 a month, shaving about 80% of cost,” Bruce said.

Carey, who’s also the Helium co-founder, and Bruce, a four-time founder, began BlockJoy as a staking service side project. “We started this completely by accident,” Carey said. “We wanted to stake tokens and the systems to do it weren’t sensible […] so Chris and I worked together to create this project and the birth of BlockJoy happened.”

BlockJoy was “never intended to be a company — it was supposed to be for friends and family,” Bruce shared. “But after six months, people were coming in and staking nodes with us, and six months into our launch, we were running 1,200 validators for the Helium Network.”

Investors include Gradient Ventures, Draper Dragon, Dragon Roark, Active Capital, Borderless HNT and Renegade Ventures, among others.

The startup built BlockVisor, its patented blockchain node management software, which lets users run blockchain nodes on any infrastructure in an automated, cost-effective manner through a “point-and-click” user interface, Bruce said.

This means enterprises using BlockJoy’s service can deploy and manage blockchains, nodes, validators and ETLs (extract, transform, load) with “a click of a button,” Carey noted.

The capital will be used to launch BlockVisor, which is now open in beta mode. “It allows anyone to launch a node wherever they want on our infrastructure, their infrastructure or even through the cloud,” Bruce said.

“BlockJoy is a web3 infrastructure company at a fundamental level,” Bruce said. “That means we have a platform that helps node operators like Blockdaemon, Alchemy or any exchange or business that runs nodes for their business.”

The team currently works with a handful of crypto companies, including Binance, Crypto.com and the Helium Foundation, Carey shared. It’s also onboarding new blockchains, including Ethereum 2, Cosmos, Polygon, Solana, Algorand and Avalanche. By the end of its beta launch, BlockJoy aims to support about 25 blockchains, Bruce said.

“We allow them to operate those nodes in a decentralized manner just like they’re running them on the cloud with software specifically designed for blockchain nodes,” Bruce said. It typically takes node operators four to six months to implement new protocols, but BlockJoy can implement them within a matter of days to weeks, he added.

In the long term, BlockJoy hopes to make its technology more accessible so that running a node is easy enough that anyone can do it, Bruce said. “We want to provide infrastructure that’s drop-dead simple but not centralized. We want to see the proliferation of web3, and this is step one.”