Ankr has solidified itself as the fastest growing Web3 infrastructure provider in the industry, but what exactly does this mean? In short, we’re adding more nodes and node providers to Ankr Protocol, serving immense volumes of RPC (NYSE:RES) requests to blockchain networks, and supporting more public RPC endpoints than any other infrastructure providers.
In this article Investing.com, explores why more and more developers are choosing Ankr for their Web3 infrastructure needs, and see exactly how Ankr excels. Let’s dive in!
Overall Growth in Every Category
Ankr is quickly adding more and more nodes to Ankr Protocol, in part thanks to our node provider program that allows independent node operators to serve network traffic and earn ANKR rewards.
Alongside this program, Ankr is also quickly outpacing competitors in the Web3 infrastructure space with the sheer number of blockchain networks we support and provide free, public RPC endpoints for (at the time of writing, we’re at 15, and always working to add more). Ankr Protocol is currently serving a staggering 6+ billion requests per day to these various networks — and traffic volume is increasing daily.
With an ever-increasing number of nodes supporting Ankr Protocol from all over the world, latency is constantly decreasing as Ankr works to provide developers with the fastest and most reliable connections possible — available at the cheapest pricing.
Ankr’s community of developers is growing exponentially because we are providing the features they care about most:
- Scalability to support high volumes of requests
- Multi-chain development tools
- Increasingly distributed and decentralized node infrastructure
- Affordability
In the following sections, we’ll break down each of these features one-by-one.
Staggering Volume, Intelligently Balanced
Ankr Protocol currently has hundreds of nodes distributed all around the world serving traffic from our RPC load aggregator, with more being added constantly. These nodes are serving around 6 billion requests daily across 15+ blockchain networks, and we are only serving more traffic every day.
This means that Ankr Protocol is well equipped to handle increased traffic as projects scale and need more infrastructure to support their growth. Developers are turning to Ankr to meet the growing demands of their dApps as they achieve mainstream success and popularity.
The node infrastructure of Ankr Protocol is designed to handle extremely high volumes of traffic, with each RPC endpoint capable of serving approximately 86 million requests per day. Constant system monitoring ensures that RPC endpoints are synced in real-time to underlying nodes. Whilst, network traffic monitoring uses intelligent caching to optimize speed and automate routing to the best available node at busy times.
Serving More Blockchains for Multichain Developers
Ankr Protocol supports free, public RPC endpoints to 15 different blockchain ecosystems, with additional networks constantly being added. With this infrastructure, Ankr has quickly developed more RPC endpoints than most other infrastructure providers, giving our community of developers maximum accessibility when it comes to multi-chain development. Start using the 15 RPCs currently available via Ankr Protocol immediately — no signup, email, credit card, or KYC required.
Ankr Protocol gives developers access to 15 blockchains from one convenient dashboard, and offers AnkrScan as a multichain block explorer that allows users to explore transactions, addresses, blocks, and assets across 11+ blockchains.
Increasingly Distributed & Decentralized
Ankr Protocol serves blockchain requests from any location with incredibly low latency, thanks to our global distribution of nodes. Ankr has a long track record of distributing node infrastructure among independent data centers globally in order to protect against the single points of failure and other centralized vulnerabilities. Ankr Protocol currently has nodes hosted by Ankr, Iotex, Fantom, Debooks, Polygon, Quicknode, and other independent providers.
Looking forward, Ankr is shifting to increasingly decentralize its services by preparing to welcome many more independent node providers to join Ankr Protocol and participate in serving network traffic from the load balancer.
An Affordable Solution for Web3 Development
Alongside Ankr Protocol’s free, public RPCs, feature-rich Premium Plans are available for developers at extremely affordable prices. Ankr Protocol’s Premium Plan provides developers with:
- Prioritized requests without rate limiting
- Exclusive RPC endpoints
- WebSockets capabilities
- Advanced analytics and support
- And more
With this in mind, Ankr is incentivizing Ankr Protocol users to become premium customers in the form of Ankr grants. These grants will be made available to the early adopters and biggest users of Ankr Protocol in order for them to enjoy access to Ankr Protocol’s premium RPCs for up to one year or more at no cost. Ongoing payment for Ankr Protocol will follow a pay-as-you-go model, replacing our previous annual plan.
Even with a pay-as-you-go pricing model, Ankr Protocol is still significantly cheaper than other competitive offerings. The average cost per request comes out to about $0.0001 USD.
Take, for example, SpiritSwap which uses Ankr Protocol and processed 8.59 billion requests using Ankr’s infrastructure over a 30-day period. With standard list pricing, that volume of requests would cost $1.68 million per month with Infura, and $268,000 per month with Alchemy. Comparatively, the cost associated with that volume of requests would be only $86,000 with APV2.
Not only does Ankr Protocol come with a much smaller price tag, but it’s important to note that users are paying for more decentralized, geo-distributed infrastructure that affords them more reliability, less latency, and improved security.
Ankr in Practice
As an infrastructure provider, Ankr both 1) provides node infrastructure to blockchain networks and 2) provides RPC access to clients needing to communicate with those networks.
In terms of node infrastructure, Ankr grew by 2000% in serviced requests in 2021 alone, becoming the main infrastructure provider to Binance, Fantom, and Polygon. Ankr also became the second or third largest provider for 13 of the other top 15 PoS networks.
In terms of users, Ankr is proud to be integrated with projects like Celo, The Graph, Compound, Synthetix, Syscoin, Iotex, Ferrum, PancakeSwap, SpiritSwap, and many others. All kinds of Web3 projects benefit from integrating with Ankr infrastructure including exchanges, staking platforms, wallets, dApps, data aggregators, and so much more.
Updates Coming Soon…
All this comes ahead of the highly anticipated launch of Ankr 2.0 (the newest version of Ankr Protocol) that will place the ANKR token at the center of the entire ecosystem with brand new utility. This major structural update enables more independent parties to join Ankr Protocol and earn ANKR in exchange for serving network traffic — further growing and decentralizing the protocol.
