What Changes Can Decentralized Node Services Bring to the Blockchain Industry

Apron Network
8 min readJun 30, 2021

Apron Network launched its recruitment program for node service providers earlier this month and has received applications from 15 teams. In order to encourage more service providers to join, Apron initially offered a number of incentive programs to service providers, and the Apron team will also provide technical services to support some of the teams.

This step on Apron Network represents an important step toward formalizing the platform as a decentralized infrastructure services Network, and the introduction of the Node Service Plan will change the track in a real way compared to what was just a paper plan.

We know that the current node service track is still full of greater competition, but the competition is just the same latitude under different players fighting for a share in the market, and the Apron Network since its launch will chose a more grass-roots platform in this direction, its forward still few competitors on the track, thus occupies a lot of first-mover advantage.

So, what does Apron Network’s announcement mean for the industry in terms of its development and the evolution of node services?

With the renown of DeFi and NFT, the current development of public chain cannot meet the increasing demand for nodes and data throughput of blockchain applications. More and more teams working to develop critical technologies to solve the pain points facing them, Node Services has become one of the hot tracks for a while.

However, the risk of protocol centralization is increased when most applications choose to use the same node service provider, and the Infrua outage of 2020 was a wake-up call. As a node service provider, Infrua provides the infrastructure services needed to handle the short-term spikes that often occur during token startup, as well as the necessary long-term extension solutions, and is committed to facilitating application access to Ethereum and enjoying the opportunities provided by Ethereum, which greatly facilitates developers on Ethereum.

As the node service provider used by many of the stars of Web3.0 projects (Metamask, Aragon, Gnosis), Infrua provides necessary and convenient tools for applications, but when Infrua goes down, it can cause huge losses to some platforms and users.

There is no doubt that we cannot rely on a single node service to handle the hundreds of millions of requests on the public chain network every day, and the market urgently needs new solutions to avoid such centralized risks. Apron relied on its unique decentralized infrastructure services platform to deliver a novel solution called decentralized node services.

What does Apron’s decentralized node service change for the industry?

1.One-to-many node service to make user experience better

Apron Network, which offers one-to-many node services, is focused on giving users a better experience.
First of all, we need to know what is one-to-many node service. As the name implies, multi-node service refers to a management unit composed of multiple nodes for transactions. Such a management unit can reduce the load of the server, distribute data and flexibly apply it. Such a structure has big advantages.

For projects with large traffic, if there is not enough bandwidth resources in the peak period of network access, it is bound to cause network congestion, slow access speed, and even lead to the phenomenon of node service downtime. However, the use of multiple nodes will greatly increase the bandwidth to ensure fast access and improve the stability of the application.
At the same time, the increase of bandwidth can effectively increase the defense ability of the server against high traffic attack and improve the stability of the whole network. Moreover, the use of multiple nodes improves the availability of the whole network. If a system failure occurs, we can transfer the application program on the failed server to the backup server, so that the cluster system still operates, greatly reducing the downtime of the server and application.

The one-to-many node services can also effectively protect privacy, and the use of Apron middleware effectively avoids the collection and disclosure of user data by the centralized node service providers. At the same time, one-to-many node service increases the diversification of the project. Developers can choose different node service content according to their own needs, and obtain rich bandwidth and traffic resources to meet their diversified needs.

2. The cost of use will be reduced and customers will get better experience

Faced with a wide range of commodities, we always hope that there will be a platform that can sort and classify all the commodities, and have functions such as price comparison and service evaluation, so that we can shop around.
With the development of blockchain, more and more DEFI applications are coming out in endlessly, and the increase of gold diggers naturally attracts many businesses dedicated to gold diggers, and this is all kinds of middleware service providers dedicated to DEFI. Although The middleware track is still subdivided into node service, on-chain data query, prophecy machine and other directions, The benefit effect of Infura, Chainlink, The Graph and other leaders also attracts a lot of teams to join this blue ocean, and The blue ocean becomes relatively crowded and no longer so blue. There are a lot of competing projects just for Prophetry, so integrating middleware services like Apron into its platform and having them display prices, provide reviews, and display reviews, like Taobao, is a tough requirement for developers.
Similarly, with respect to node services, the incentives provided by this Apron are to attract node service providers to the Apron platform. When they provide services, they can access the Apron platform by providing “services as mining” and receiving APN incentives. At the same time, Apron’s own traffic also feeds to these node providers, so you can do two things with one stone. Users who use the Apron service will be able to access the decentralized node services provided by the Apron platform and will be able to select the most appropriate node service providers for a better experience by shopping around and viewing ratings. For Apron itself, this node-service incentive will bring in a lot more node-service providers and users. This is a win-win-win situation.

Apron Network, on the other hand, is compatible with Ethereum, Filecoin, BSC, and many other public chains, and there are many types of services available today. With Apron Network, both users and customers can access the node services they need in a one-stop shop, and use multiple blockchain ecosystems and cross-chain innovation at a low cost.

Current advances and future developments in the Apron node services

As is known to all, node service providers are actually a kind of BaaS products, behind which is a load-balanced API node cluster, which enables DAPPs to quickly access the public chain ecosystem without the need for local running nodes, and promotes the release of necessary network capacity for projects with large traffic. Simple understanding is that a single node is limited in the capacity of traffic, multiple nodes together can carry more traffic, improve throughput and performance.

However, when such an API node cluster is attacked by hackers or bugs causing downtime, the related applications and public chains will be greatly affected. There is no doubt that it is easier to attack such a node cluster than the public chain.

Apron, on the other hand, provides a one-to-many, decentralized solution that allows users to select a feature directly rather than a service provider. For example, if a user chooses a node service, Apron automatically provides multiple node services to the user in a two-way, anonymous manner. Hackers do not know who the user is or who the service provider is. At the same time, because there are too many service providers, it is difficult for hackers to break through single points. In this way, using decentralized node services on Apron increases the difficulty of hacking and reduces the probability of outages, effectively increasing the security of the public chain system.

Service interruption and data delay will occur only if the node service provider is down. As long as there is a node service provider that can provide services, the decentralized node service can be carried out smoothly. Undoubtedly, the public chain will be more secure while ensuring the capacity expansion of the public chain.

From our analysis, we can see that decentralizing node services can bring us many benefits, not only for the industry, but also for a safer experience for individual participants.

As a result of the benefits we discussed above, Apron Network has partnered with a number of quality projects within the ecosystem to meet their needs for a variety of infrastructure services such as node services, on-chain data indexing, quotes, and random numbers.

  • Overview of partners

In the past, Apron has secured strategic partnerships with more than two dozen star programs within the Poca ecosystem, These include Patract, the well-known smart contract ecosystem platform of Boca WAASM, Substrate First Chain Chainx, Phala Network, the privacy computing platform, and Bifrost, the Defi base protocol of Boca Ecology.
Meanwhile, the beta version of the Apron Network prototype, which now provides node services for the most popular BSC and HECO ecosystems, was completed on version V2 and is currently in development on version 3.

As the current block two important ecological chain network, we can see that the BSC with Heco has been carrying a lot of application, the application’s team also need some nodes in the chain of service or as data query, machine and other middleware services, therefore, Apron in targeted early developed is suitable for the ecological infrastructure services, There’s been a lot of positive feedback so far.
As hiring of node service providers follows, more of them will come to Apron, giving users or partner programs more options to avoid systemic problems like Infrua.

  • Future development plan

As we know, one of the most important things Apron Network does as a service platform is to improve user accessibility and give the technical team a sense of professionalism. For this purpose, Apron Network recently updated its Dashboard with overall improvements and UI redesigns to make its interface simpler and easier to use. It’s also more in line with the usage habits of developers. At the same time, the functional aspects have been optimized and the previous problems have been fixed.

We know that Dashboard is the front end of Apron Network’s application for displaying clustered information on the platform and interacting with the back-end APIs that developers can quickly access and use, so it’s been a team effort to improve the application and fix some of the problems that Apron had. The goal with each update is to make it more comfortable and easy to use.

Future, Apron will continue to introduce more nodes service, to meet the needs of different programs or users, service has become a real node decentralized, rather than the so-called “hole” in the decentralized state, it is also a Apron team has been the pursuit of goals, is also looking forward to more service providers to join us, Build a new decentralized infrastructure platform.

About Apron Network:

Apron Network is a decentralized infrastructure service platform built by employing Polkadot technology in the blockchain world. Apron has adopted the idea of being a decentralized platform which belongs to a middle service that provides a connection between the blockchain and the application software. It aims to make transactions for infrastructure software services simple, efficient, and reliable by connecting service providers and users in the decentralized service market. Apron has obtained fund-raising from NGC, Monday Capital, DFG, CMS and other institutions and Web3 Foundation Grant.

Apron Network will connect to multiple public chains such as Ethereum, BSC, Filecoin, Helium, including Layer 2, providing developers with low-cost various blockchain ecological infrastructure services in the forthcoming future.

🛎 Reach Apron on:

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Apron Network

An infrastructure platform for DAPP development, DAPP users, and basic operation services.