Ankr, the blockchain-powered distributed computing ecosystem, announced today it is now possible to seamlessly run a Binance Chain node on the Ankr cloud. The Binance Chain node application has been added to the app store and is fully available on the Ankr cloud platform.
For Ankr, this marks a major milestone, as this is the first of many blockchain nodes that can be deployed and run with just a couple of clicks and be paid for using Ankr tokens.
While running a Binance Chain node does not offer any token rewards, it is important because it provides trust, security, and privacy to users.
Blockchain Nodes on Ankr
The Ankr platform is connected to top-end specification servers, hosted globally from the data centers owned by some of the largest companies on the planet, to provide the highest quality to the Ankr nodes.
At the moment, its data providers include DigitalOcean, telecom giant Telefónica, and more which are spread out over 5 continents, the Ankr team is planning for many more world-class providers to come.
These data centers guarantee a global scope of the platform. While services such as Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft Azure offer only 20 global locations, Ankr can offer many times more, by virtue of each data center provider being a location in their own right, each with different global configurations.
This results in the latency of an Ankr-hosted blockchain being minimized and the compute power maximized, meaning transactions will be smooth, efficient and lightning-fast.
Moreover, Ankr is significantly cheaper than public cloud providers, and its approach to cloud computing is notably eco-friendly since it uses idle resources that would otherwise still be consuming power. By optimizing the use of existing hardware rather than adding to the global footprint, Ankr presents one of the most ecologically sound solutions possible to the cloud computing market.
“We are working on the integration of many more well-known blockchain nodes on our platform, and some of them will be live pretty soon, which means you will be able to easily run a blockchain node for many different public blockchain projects and earn rewards in the process!”
– The Ankr Team
Overview Binance Chain
The purpose of the Binance Chain and Binance DEX is to create a decentralized marketplace directly on the blockchain. Assets are not sent to an exchange or wallet that is controlled by a single platform or entity. Instead, the order book and transactions take place on the blockchain. There are no middleman fees but only network costs, and users are fully and solely in control of their assets.
Node Types
There are three types of nodes on the Binance Chain:
- Validator node
- Witness node
- Accelerated node
The node offered in the Ankr app store is a Witness node.
Validator Node
Validators are a group/IT infrastructure that takes the responsibility to maintain the Binance Chain/DEX data and validate all the transactions. They join the consensus procedure and vote to produce blocks. The fees are collected and distributed among all validators.
The initial validators are selected from trusted members of the Binance community, and will eventually expand to more members as the Binance blockchain and ecosystem matures, this responsibility will be distributed.
Witness Node
Witness nodes represent the majority of nodes in a Binance Chain deployment. Although they do not join the consensus process and produce blocks, they take care of:
- The witness consensus process.
- They serve as data replicas and help to propagate the chain state around the network.
- They receive transactions and broadcast them to all other nodes including Validator nodes.
Accelerated Node
These are high-specification, high-performance Validator Nodes, usually hosted by different organizations, in diverse global locations. Used for rapid platform utilization.
