On a recent trip to the US someone at a financial institution described Launchnodes as the HashiCorp of staking, I blushed hard. This is undeserving high praise. However the lens that HashiCorp put on software development and how it helps to do things at scale in the cloud is something that has guided us in terms of how we build useful tools for staking ETH. HashiCorp tools today provide a control plane for each layer of the cloud, enabling enterprises to make the shift to a cloud operating model. Each of their products is a lego brick that addresses specific technical and organisational challenges of cloud infrastructure automation. In the past they helped everyone understand
that putting useful software into production is like conducting an orchestra where the instruments are tools, process, people and code. For me HashiCorp invented or at least scaled the general idea of “Orchestration” in software. If Launchnodes can help make staking a generalised activity done by as wide a range of people as possible then for me we will have fulfilled our mission of being consistently useful.
I try to be more interesting than simply pumping different reasons to stake and buy our nodes. However we have learned that some clients need to run validators on their own hardware in their own data centres, due to legal and regulatory reasons. Doing this also allows them to class the activity of staking as operating income and not investment activity. This is interesting at many levels, but the idea that you use validator nodes running on your own hardware but leverage a third party to take the pain and complexity of Beacon Nodes makes our managed beacon node services on AWS really useful. As I keep saying really useful is our raison d’être.  This use case is not only for the enterprise. If you as an individual or a group of individuals want to run a validator on your own hardware (assuming you know what you are doing) and just use Launchnodes for our Beacon node, you can, bringing the cost of staking down to $200 USD per year.
It feels like a long overdue correction in the price of ETH and BTC has started. My medium and long term view on both assets makes me a perma bull. But these assets are now part of the global economy and cannot escape the impact of real world economic news. The fiat printing presses seem like they might be turned off or down in 2022. An increase in interest rates and a flight to quality assets could have markets pooping in their pants sooner rather than later.
Happy staking
Jaydeep Korde
CEO, Launchnodes
