Sharing blockchain nodes between small node runners

Hi Community.

I am a node runner from France and I would like to try a new approach to run my node and serve the network in the best and most efficient way while staying profitable. The main issue we face small node runners like me is that we need to run our own blockchain nodes besides of the main Pocket node, which requires quite a lot of time and hardware resources to set up, maintain and follow-up. We, unlike the big node providers, we cannot escalate our efforts by setting up hundreds of Pocket nodes because we are not a business and we luck the capital and resources they dispose.

That being said, we, small node runners, can help each other and be most efficient if we exchange, in a peer-to-peer basis, our blockchain nodes with other Pocket runners that are geographically close. The idea is, for instance, to share my Polygon, BSC and Avalanche nodes against other 3 nodes provided by other peer(s) based preferably in France so that we both get the mutual benefit of running 6 blockchain nodes instead of 3 which will be beneficial for the overall QoS and ourselves. The main goal will be to achieve to serve the maximum of 15 blockchains per node which would be extremely complicated to achieve by ourselves.

Of course, I am looking for peers having a high uptime and being able to communicate before hand whenever they need to shut down the node for maintenance or system upgrade purposes. The communication in this regard will be of utmost importance so that their peers can adjust the Pocket node configuration accordingly.
Please, if you are a Pocket runner from France or any country around, your are probably facing the same issue. If you are interested in giving this a try, let me know so that we can help each other.

Thank you.

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My team is building middleware software for this - to encourage node sharing. Some of the things that need to be built is bascially a smaller version of infura that allows:

  • Rate limiting
  • easy integration/onboarding
  • authentication
  • observability/monitoring for consumers
  • integration with payments

It is quite a massive undertaking to get where we want to be, but our goal is to get this out before V1 hits the ground floor.

V1 solves a lot of the “blockchain” problems we face today, but nothing about the effiency of our how our node runners operate. I 100% agree with your idea - and if you’re interested in helping, please send me a DM :). We intend to make our road map and plans open to the public soon-ish

4 Likes