How the fight to keep news profitable led to Node Guardians

Node Guardians is an ambitious new non-custodial staking provider that wants to go beyond just spinning up nodes. Sami Ben talked to Cryptonites’ Alex Fazel about his beginnings at Journal du Coin and the road that led him to create Node Guardians.

The struggle to keep media profitable opened up the door for Node Guardians

Journal du Coin is one of the largest crypto-focused media outlets in France. Sami Ben, its founder and editor, has also become one of the country’s most popular crypto hosts on YouTube.

But, even with the huge following he amassed, keeping a media outlet profitable turned out to be harder than it looked.

Speaking to Cryptonites‘ Alex Fazel at the Paris Blockchain Week, Sami said that the company could have made easy money by promoting any number of sketchy crypto projects. However, doing this would seriously damage the integrity he worked so hard to build.

In the search for a solution that would allow the company to keep its integrity, cryptocurrency foundations appeared as an unlikely savior. Getting in touch with foundations that supported the development of various blockchain ecosystems enabled Journal du Coin to create content that was valuable to the crypto ecosystem. By collaborating with foundations directly, the company was also to keep the high standard of content production its readers were used to, Sami explained.

Through the process of creating content that caters to a wide variety of users, Sami identified the need for a unified infrastructure that would support staking. Journal du Coin’s position as a leading media organization provided it with a significant advantage when it comes to staking, as it allowed it to run its own nodes.

But, Sami didn’t want to stop there. With a huge readership and an even bigger reach, Journal du Coin was in a perfect position to offer educational resources that would make the very technical process of staking available to a wide audience.

This has led him to create Node Guardians, a non-custodial staking provider with a goal to become the market’s go-to source for staking education. Sami explained that the goal of the project was to create and market content that’s useful not just to developers, but also to anyone looking to get more involved with a particular blockchain or a programming language.

For example, Node Guardians plans on creating a comprehensive ecosystem for learning Cairo, Starknet’s programming language. Aside from easy-to-follow tutorials about the programming language itself, Node Guardians will also offer a platform where users can submit projects they’ve built using the language and receive feedback from experts in the field.

Sami noted that this opened up a lot of possibilities, including having foundations on the platform offering users grants for projects. His goal is to create a platform that would act as a one-stop shop for anyone looking for educational material about running nodes for Proof-of-Stake blockchains.