BlockJoy Secures Nearly $11 Million from Gradient Ventures, Draper Dragon, Active Capital, and more to Launch Decentralized Blockchain Operations

BlockJoy, the company providing a whitelabel blockchain nodes-as-a-service for node hosting enterprises, today announced the successful close of nearly $11 million in combined Seed + Series A funding from Gradient Ventures, Draper Dragon, Dragon Roark, Active Capital, Borderless HNT, and Renegade Ventures, among others. The funding will be used to support the launch of BlockVisor, the company’s patented node management software, which is now open for beta sign-ups. BlockJoy enables customers to deploy and run decentralized blockchain nodes on any infrastructure while maintaining a cloud-like experience at up to 80 percent cost reduction from traditional cloud providers.

Created to combat the lack of decentralized infrastructure suitable for blockchains, BlockJoy provides a node management solution that is two to three times less expensive than traditional cloud providers. Enterprises can deploy and manage blockchains, nodes, validators and ETLs (extract, transform, load) with a click of a button, anywhere in the world. 

BlockJoy began as a staking service side project for CEO Chris Bruce and CTO Sean Carey’s friends and families. However, the venture quickly took off once the founders began leveraging their platform to run nodes for businesses. Before founding BlockJoy, Bruce was on the founding team of four venture-backed companies with two exits, including Lumeo, Diversion, Sproutling (acquired by Mattel), and Rupture (acquired by Electronic Arts). Carey co-founded Helium with a $1.2 billion valuation and scaled the popular GIF-sharing and creation website, GIPHY, from millions of requests a day to billions of requests per day.

“Through BlockJoy’s unique technology and our focus on blockchain-specific Web3 infrastructure, we can shrink the costs of node-running further than your typical cloud provider can,” said Chris Bruce, co-founder and CEO of BlockJoy. “We are making it possible for our customers to run their own servers in any data center, much like how it was back in the web 1.0 days, but without the headaches.” 

Additionally, BlockJoy has developed technologies that allow businesses to support new protocols within weeks instead of the usual four to six months.

As displayed by the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX in early November, current centralized models for online exchanges do not protect customers. BlockJoy offers customers a more decentralized approach to operating Web3 infrastructure. Customers have complete control over where they deploy their infrastructure without being locked into high-cost cloud services. 

“Since switching to BlockJoy, we are now able to run our API nodes outside legacy cloud providers and we anticipate saving over 60% of our operating costs,” said Marc Nijdam, CTO, Nova Labs. “This partnership has also saved our team hundreds of hours a month by no longer having to manage daily fires. The cost and time saved, have already made a significant difference for us in our operations, and we’re excited to see how far this partnership takes us.”

In addition to ridding customers of these obstacles, BlockJoy supports node operators. Today’s leading enterprise node operators, including Blockdaemon, Bison Trails, QuickNode, and Alchemy, will start to see price pressure from increased competition in the marketplace. BlockJoy’s decentralized approach can benefit companies like these greatly, as the solution significantly lowers operating costs and streamlines the time it takes to support new chains. 

“We’re at an inflection point with blockchain technology. Investing in its infrastructure development is more than ever important because it will pave the way for the entire industry,” said Anna Patterson, Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures. “We believe BlockJoy has a chance to become indispensable to the Web3 economy and are excited to back Chris, Sean, and their team.”

Six months into its launch, BlockJoy was running 1,200 validators for the Helium Network, with up to 80 percent cost efficiency. Alongside Helium, BlockJoy’s customers include Binance, Crypto.com, Indodax, Seeed Studio, and Gate.io. BlockJoy is quickly onboarding new chains including Ethereum 2, Cosmos, Polygon, Solana, Algorand, and Avalanche. By the end of its initial beta run, BlockJoy will have full push-button support for 25 blockchains including those built on top of so-called Layer 0 chains.