Staking is a powerful and easy way to earn passive crypto income. The thing is, though, it ties up crypto assets that could otherwise be put to work in potentially more lucrative DeFi activities. Ankr fixes that, enabling greater crypto-earning possibilities for users.
To learn more about this, and what else makes Ankr (ANKR) tick, we spoke to two of the multichain Web3 infrastructure protocol’s team – Head of Product Josh Neuroth, and Head of DeFi Filipe Gonçalves.
What is Ankr?
Hi, both. It seems like there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to Ankr. Can you describe what it is, in relatively simple terms?
Josh: Sure, simply put, Ankr is a foundation of the Web3 movement, which is essentially the concept of a decentralised internet. So, think of it like this… there are two sorts of… we’ll call them computers, or servers, that run proof-of-stake blockchains. They’re known as nodes. One is for developers, and the other is for staking crypto assets.
Together, those essentially run the network themselves. And so Ankr has over 25,000 nodes running right now. Every use case in crypto requires access to a node and that’s why I said we’re kind of like the foundational layer for Web3.
So, and this is all jargon… but you know how you have the layer 1 protocols, you have sidechains, and layer 2 solutions… you can think about Ankr more like a “layer zero”… we’re like the middleware that ties these things together… does that make sense?
Yeah, think so! What sort of real-world analogy might you apply to Ankr?
Josh: It’s not sexy to describe it like this but… If you think about the new economy [decentralised finance] that’s been enabled in the Web3 of crypto, we’re kind of like the grid infrastructure – the power company, the utility company that’s providing access and optimising the underlying layer of infrastructure that enables all this.
And so, like I said, every use case requires access to nodes. So that means something like Coinbase, or Binance, or a digital wallet app – they all need to have access to nodes. If you’re minting an NFT or transferring a fee from one party to another, all of that happens by going through a node on the blockchain.
What crypto-industry problem (or problems) is Ankr aiming to solve?
Josh: I’d say one major problem we’re solving in the space is that decentralised blockchain node networks are not easy to use, and they require a lot of technical knowledge to operate. And so, we’re basically making accessing and utilising the blockchain very easy for both asset holders as well as developers and projects that are trying to build new things in the crypto economy.
Solving the ‘capital inefficiency of proof of stake’
We’ve been hearing a bit of buzz surrounding Ankr and the term “liquid staking”. Can you tell us what that is?
Filipe: Yes, so, liquid…
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