The white label blockchain nodes as a service provider BlockJoy has revealed that it has collected a total of $12 million across seed and Series A funding rounds.

Co-founders Sean Carey and Chris Bruce told that their Boston-based company’s goal is to cut operational expenses for businesses who host staking nodes and APIs as a service by as much as 80 percent.

“On AWS, it would cost $200 a month per node, but we rethought the web3 architecture and we are able to operate those identical nodes for roughly $11 a month, saving about 80% cost,” Bruce added.

Carey, co-founder of Helium, and Bruce, founder four times over, started BlockJoy as a side business to provide a staking service. It was just accidental, Carey said, that we got started on this. Because existing methods of staking tokens were infeasible, “Chris and I worked together to establish this initiative, and BlockJoy was born.”

“BlockJoy was never meant to be a corporation — it was designed to be for friends and family,” Bruce said. Six months after debut, however, “people started coming in and staking nodes with us,” and the Helium Network was up and operating with 1,200 validators.

An extensive list of backers includes names like Gradient Ventures, Draper Dragon, Dragon Roark, Active Capital, Borderless HNT, and Renegade Ventures.

According to Bruce, the startup’s “point-and-click” user interface for managing blockchain nodes, BlockVisor, is automated and cost-effective. It allows customers to operate blockchain nodes on any infrastructure.

Carey pointed out that this implies blockchains, nodes, validators, and ETLs (extract, transform, load) can be deployed and managed with “a click of a button” for businesses utilising BlockJoy’s service.

BlockVisor, which is now in beta testing, will be released with the funds. Bruce explains, “It enables anybody to establish a node anywhere they want, on our infrastructure, their infrastructure, or even via the cloud.”

Bruce characterised BlockJoy as “fundamentally” a web3 infrastructure firm. We have a platform that is useful for node operators, such as Blockdaemon, Alchemy, or any other exchange or company that operates nodes for its own purposes.

Carey said that the group’s existing crypto industry partners include Binance, Crypto.com, and the Helium Foundation. Ethereum 2, Cosmos, Polygon, Solana, Algorand, and Avalanche are just some of the new blockchains it’s supporting. Bruce has said that at the conclusion of the beta release of BlockJoy, support for about 25 blockchains is planned.

With blockchain node software, “we enable them to operate those nodes in a decentralised fashion exactly like they’re operating them on the cloud,” Bruce said. According to him, new protocols usually take node operators four to six months to instal, while BlockJoy can do so in days or weeks.

BlockJoy’s long-term goal, according to Bruce, is to make operating a node simple enough that anybody can do it. For our infrastructure, we aim for dead simplicity while avoiding a centralised model. This is the first step toward our goal of a widespread adoption of web3.