BlockJoy raises $12 million to reduce operating costs for companies running blockchain nodes

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

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

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

Carey, who is also a co-founder of Helium, and Bruce, a four-time founder, started BlockJoy as a contribution services side project. “We started this completely by accident,” Carey said. “We wanted to stake tokens and the systems to do that didn’t make sense […] so Chris and I worked together to create this project and the birth of BlockJoy happened.”

BlockJoy was “never meant to be a company — it was supposed to be for friends and family,” Bruce said. “But after six months, people came in and staked nodes with us, and six months after 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 allows users to run blockchain nodes on any infrastructure in an automated, cost-effective manner through a “point-and-click” user interface, Bruce said.

This means businesses 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 start a node anywhere they want on our infrastructure, their infrastructure or even through the cloud,” Bruce said.

“BlockJoy is a web3 infrastructure company at a fundamental level,” said Bruce. “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 is currently working with a handful of crypto companies, including Binance, Crypto.com and the Helium Foundation, Carey shared. It also brings new blockchains including Ethereum 2, Cosmos, Polygon, Solana, Algorand and Avalanche. By the end of the beta launch, BlockJoy aims to support about 25 blockchains, Bruce said.

“We allow them to operate these nodes in a decentralized way, just as they run them on the cloud with software specifically designed for blockchain nodes,” Bruce said. It usually takes node operators four to six months to implement new protocols, but BlockJoy can implement them in 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 for anyone to do it, Bruce said. “We want to offer infrastructure that is completely simple, but not centralized. We want to see the spread of web3, and this is step one.”