It may be easier said than done sometimes, but we must avoid allowing the tumultuousness of the markets to distract us from noticing which projects are actively building things. One such project is Ankr (ANKR), which describes itself as “the fastest-growing infrastructure provider in the Web3 space.” If you want to dive into the technical particulars of what Ankr actually does, their website has plenty of documents to peruse. The short version is they provide a global, decentralized network of full nodes, which Web3 developers can connect to remotely to build their blockchain applications.
Ankr is indeed growing at a swift pace. I first started paying attention to it around the time it got listed on Coinbase in March of 2021. Since that time, I’ve noticed one blockchain project after announcing partnerships with them. Most recently they added Tron and Optimism to their list of Web3 partners.
Many crypto projects primarily function as simple currencies or focus on a single, niche product. While Ankr does maintain its own native token, clearly the team has grander ambitions in the Web3 space. Ankr is in fact building steadily at the infrastructural or foundational level and is immersed in nearly every facet of blockchain-related web development. Here’s a brief list just to give you an idea of the scope of Ankr’s offerings:
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- Liquid Staking solutions with a plethora of prominent blockchain options-
- Game development kits to allow projects to incorporate cryptocurrency and GameFi elements into their video games and easily integrate with Web3 wallets.
- Ankr Scan – Ankr’s multi-chain block explorer and analytics platform
- Ankr App Chain tools for people to quickly and seamlessly launch their own blockchains and tokens
- Community RPC Endpoints
- Node Service – Remotely launch nodes and access them from anywhere
- Integration with Binance sub-chains
- Multi-chain development tools
A distinguishing characteristic of Ankr is that they are not only involved in building products and infrastructure, but also in providing the development tools for others to erect their own applications. Already interwoven with so many different projects, applications, and blockchain ecosystems, Ankr is acting as a sort of decentralized, elastic fabric that’s holding the whole fledgling young Web3 enterprise together. With hosting, services, apps, analytics, etc. they are positioning themselves to be a one-stop shop for all things Web3, similar to the role Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud have occupied for so long in the Web2 era.
All of that may sound grand and impressive enough, but I have to admit that what initially gave me a modicum of confidence in Ankr was that they use a 4-letter .com domain name. It might seem like a trivial thing to notice in this day and age, but most crypto projects use crap-tier domains with obscure extensions. As a veteran of the vintage Web 1.0 world who cut his teeth in the salad days of e-commerce, banner advertising and the dot com bubble, I still appreciate the value, rarity and seriousness conveyed by a short .com domain. Those high quality names take effort and money to obtain now, so when someone flashes a 4-letter .com domain in 2022 you can be pretty certain they mean business. That’s clearly the case here. It’s difficult to predict the future in crypto, but Ankr is deadly serious about building decentralized Web3 infrastructure, and they have already built a substantial amount of it.
Disclosures: The author is a member of the ANKR Ambassador program