GRAND CAYMAN, Cayman Islands–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Amid preparations for Ethereum (ETH) 2.0 and ongoing concerns about Ethereum 1.0 node centralization, StrongBlock, a protocol designed to reward and reinforce the world’s expanding blockchain infrastructure, today announced the launch of its Nodes as a Service (NaaS) platform, allowing anyone to deploy an Ethereum 1.0 node with just a few clicks and start earning STRONG token rewards. Additionally, StrongBlock has made several significant improvements to its protocol, reducing gas fees for liquidity providers and adding new incentives to enhance network value.
StrongBlock rewards registered nodes running the latest stable version of Ethereum 1.0, who exhibit reliable uptime, and have few to zero outages. Now, through StrongBlock’s NaaS offering, any novice can fund the creation and management of high-quality Ethereum 1.0 nodes. StrongBlock plans to also support Ethereum 2.0 nodes in the near future as projects make the transition off of the legacy infrastructure into the new network.
Ethereum 1.0 has faced infrastructure issues in the past that have threatened the integrity of the network. A recently unannounced hard fork caused an outage with Ethereum node provider Infura, which resulted in millions of dollars of losses and chaotic disruption to several applications and exchanges including Binance, Metamask, MakerDAO, Uniswap and Compound. A post mortem of the outage revealed that out of date nodes were to blame for the glitch — an issue easily prevented using StrongBlock’s screening system.
According to Ethernodes.org, there are only about 11,000 active Ethereum 1.0 nodes today of varying quality. StrongBlock has already incentivized over 300 Ethereum 1.0 nodes, representing 2.7% of total Ethereum nodes and more than 14% of all Ethereum nodes created since the StrongBlock protocol launched. StrongBlock aims to add thousands of new nodes in the coming months.
“As we enter the next evolution of Ethereum, the integrity of nodes will become crucial,” said David Moss. “Even if we are able to reduce the amount of transaction stress on a blockchain, we will still need to nearly triple the active validators to ensure true decentralization. That, and these validators will need to run reliably enough to sustain an influx of new dApps and users. That is why StrongBlock is aggressively working to incentivize new node registrations for the Ethereum 1.0 network, and provide a decentralized alternative to services like Infura.”
ETH 2.0 is a set of interconnected upgrades that will make Ethereum more scalable, more secure, and more sustainable. The first phase of the ETH 2.0 network launched on December 1st, and required a minimum of 16,384 validator nodes. As the second largest blockchain by market capitalization, Ethereum is host to the largest ecosystem of blockchain applications. With this next batch of improvements, Ethereum plans to usher in waves of new and advanced enterprise and independent applications. However, currently Ethereum 1.0 is lacking the infrastructure support needed to move forward.
“Ethereum 1.0 nodes will take precedence in the StrongBlock protocol for now, since the majority of existing Ethereum dApps will remain on the 1.0 network until there is a critical threshold of 2.0 support,” said Moss. “The Ethereum 2.0 nodes require similar configurations to 1.0 with a few additional modifications, and we will be supporting them soon with STRONG as well. For now, anyone can easily create their own Ethereum 1.0 node using our NaaS, and receive STRONG rewards, and help make the Ethereum 1.0 network stronger.”
To create your own node today in a few clicks, go to https://app.strongblock.com/nodes/create. A contribution of 10 STRONG to the StrongBlock community is required to create a node and participate in rewards.
Want to work with StrongBlock? For partnership inquiries please email us at: info@strongblock.io.
About StrongBlock
StrongBlock, founded in 2018 and led by blockchain industry pioneers, creates blockchain platforms and protocols. The STRONG protocol is the first to reward participants for working to improve the quality of public blockchain performance. STRONG tokens grant administrative authority to holders to propose, vote, and implement changes to the StrongBlock DeFi protocol. Learn more by visiting the StrongBlock website, Twitter, or Telegram.