CryptoDaily’s Adryenn Ashley interview with Greg Gopman of Ankr.com

Adreynn Ashley (AA) Today we’re actually going to talk about the middleware piece, that infrastructure piece that actually makes the whole thing work and they’re about to make it work better. Welcome Greg Gopman Chief Marketing Officer and Business Development at Ankr, and thank you for joining us today. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wtwPDWn8G4

Greg Gopman (GG) Thanks for having me excited to tell you and CryptoDaily about Ankr. 

AA – Let’s give everybody a little bit of establishing a bit here, like infrastructure middleware. Can you kind of give an example of where Ankr fits in the entire blockchain experience in terms of the technology?

GG – Most chains right now have moved to proof of stake. And so on the proof of stake infrastructure, most things are running on nodes, developers are connecting to nodes to get their data,  sometimes they’re running their own full nodes, nodes make up the system and there’s nodes and validators out there.

Basically Ankr is the underlying layer between the protocols, like your Avalanches, your Binance, your Phantoms, your, you know, all the things that people are building on today outside of Ethereum and Ethereum 2, and the daps, you’re the developers that are building it, right? So there’s this middle infrastructure layer of these nodes and validators and all these things in between the enhanced APIs; RPCs, you know, all these little things that kind of like developers are using. Ankr is the web3 infrastructure company, building that out, making decentralized versions of that for everybody.  We’ve been around for a little bit of time, we’ve been slowly one of the fastest growing companies in the space and kind of doing our thing. Now we’re kind of picking our heads up and letting people know the story, that Ankr is running around like 10-15% of web3 right now.

AA – CryptoDaily has some very educated viewers, but for those who aren’t so educated, web3 is basically a blockchain based, website versus web 2, which is more like a username and password Facebook login. So the web3 infrastructure, talk to me about how is that actually going to increase security?  How is it going to allow people to, to do more? And I especially want to focus on the DeFi parts Ankr can fix and solve and the liquid protocol. 

GG – There’s a lot to unpack. However, most developers are already using Ankr,  they just don’t know it.  We partner with the protocols, Ankr is the largest infrastructure provider for Polygon, for Binance, and for Phantom.  We’re slowly becoming like the fastest also in Avalanche outside their own core infrastructure. That’s our core and that is called an RPC service.  When developers build,  those RPCs are actually managed and run by Ankr. We run a lot of the load balancers kind of like helping, developers basically get to the fastest node and the fastest cluster around them.  So their end users are loading faster. This game all comes down to uptime speed and then at the end of the day pricing and we’re kind of winning on all three right now, which is great.

That’s Ankr’s bread and butter. So for those in the DeFi game, If you’re trying to get the best rate or move transactions fast and everyone is moving in the same direction, a lot of it will have to do with how close you are to the nodes that are around you. So Ankr having more nodes out there and having a large global decentralized node network for all these dApps and users to connect, it allows the whole DeFi process to happen faster and better. 

AA – Let me see if I got this right. So if I have an application and I want to create my own set of node validators, lets say I would like them to be called wizzy widgets.  Wizzy widget validators. I could basically partner with Ankr, Ankr could set up that entire infrastructure piece for our proof of stake.

That’s on layer two or Polygon or Binance or Solana – no? Yes?  Okay, then I could literally sign people up and sell tokens that they have to have a minimum number to be a validator. 

GG – It’s getting some more complex frameworks for that, but we do offer easy to set up validators services for people and for chains. So somebody can work with them sometimes, you know, which chains like a lot of chains, like where we, we partner with them, we do all the work to set it up for them.  And then people will stake tokens with us. And as they stake tokens with us, we’ll spin up more and more validators for that chain. So depending on what you’re trying to do,it’s an ala carte service, I would say for a lot of things.

AA – I do want to try and make sure that I understand it right. I can go and spin up 5 Solano nodes or 50 polygon nodes with enough money.  It would be a lot of work and you have to hire a developer to do it, and they have to do all the dev ops. 

GG – That’s what I’m saying. And so if you want to do it yourself,  we’re moving our whole infrastructure to be decentralized so that more people can upload their own nodes onto our global node network. And so you would be able to upload it, like you were a developer and you wanted to run their own full node or developer node. You could upload onto the network and then you can get paid as other developers use your note or other users. So that’s the new Ankr,  we’re building into the launching now. I think it launches in around a month from now.  This new version of service will begin around April 15th – we’re shooting for tax day.

AA – Talk to me about this defi liquidity pools and staking, and how you solve that because defi is the hottest thing in the market right now. Well, they got to figure out what, how, and particularly the infrastructure to make it work.  Tell me about what you guys provide, how easy is it and where people can get started and specifically, so within the infrastructure space, people can stake a, which is like, when you have a, like, let’s say you had to have blanche and you had like a big traunch of avalanche dope guns. You wanted to stick that to the validator.

GG – You can earn 10% on your avalanche for statements, the network and providing security to the network in doing on your own rewards, like, like staking rewards. Now the future where this stuff is going is not just in like you being able to stake in on that 10%, but in, in staking that, and getting back a liquid token for that, which you can then use, like you get like this asset back, and then you can use that to like, bring into other defi protocols and do other things with it to increase your yield or, or try to find other ways to like, give it out as a loan or, or take a loan out against it or put into different defi farms.

And so there’s this upcoming new defi 3.0 in liquid staging.  Ankr amongst other things, we built ourselves to be like the leader of this new liquid staking movement.

Right now liquids taking is mostly done in Ethereum. We’re expanding to all the other chains. We’re bringing this new breath of this new 3.0 liquid staking revolution play like all these different chains.  It’s like a whole new asset class to kind of be built out there and for people to start playing with and building new things with.

AA – Oh, that is awesome. And I love that. Okay, I have so many ideas! Everyone watching, if you have had any idea of what you could do with the technology that has not previously been available, it is available now, but we need to get them in contact with you.  How would we do that? 

GG – A lot of people don’t know us yet, even though they’re using us. And so we’re just trying to have more touch points and let the community know that we’re here.  We have other premium services for them and we’re, you know, winning the decentralized infrastructure future.

AA – I’m looking forward to diving in with all these ideas that you’ve spawned in my brain, uh, after the show. But for right now, we have to wrap up. I’d love to give you the opportunity to share with the audience. Any last thoughts that you have?

GG – Ankr is doing a really great job of kind of decentralizing a lot of our infrastructure services and our infrastructure around that. Everyone is using this space.  Going forward we are changing our pricing model.  Before we do that we have a HUGE special for the next couple of weeks – one year of Ankr services for only $700.  This is good only until April 15th.

AA – Thank you,Greg Gopman of Ankr.com for joining us and inspiring us to think about all the things that we could build and with a special pricing deal of only $700 right now at Ankr.com. If you register before April 15th, then you too can have an unlimited supply of technology support and all of the SDKs and everything that you need to build your dreams.

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