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Blockchains store a ton of data, and the bloat is only growing bigger.
A little over a year ago, Nirvana Labs released its cloud offering. It promised a crypto-tailored computing service that could undercut Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud — the industry computing incumbents — on price.
Now, Nirvana has raised an additional $6 million in seed extension funding co-led by Jump Crypto and Crucible Capital, Lightspeed has learned exclusively. RW3 Ventures, Castle Island and Hash3 VC all also participated in the round, which brought Nirvana Labs’ total funding to $11.8 million.
Some blockchain node operators use cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud because the services make it possible to use servers and storage without housing their own physical hardware. This reliance on the internet giants for computing resources creates some centralization risks, however, and it can also prove costly for crypto operators — especially on a high-throughput chain like Solana.
“[A] single Solana Archive Node is 700TB — that’s an insane amount of storage,” Crucible Capital founder and general partner Meltem Demirors said in a text message. “AWS and Google Cloud own 80%+ of this market today, which makes no sense because one month of NVME storage on AWS costs almost as much as just buying the hardware outright.”
Nirvana makes use of bare metal infrastructure where each server houses a single client, as opposed to traditional cloud providers which pool computing resources. Nirvana also boasts CPUs optimized for demanding workloads — like those faced by blockchain operators — and data center diversity that could make blockchains more resilient against things like outages.
The crypto cloud service can also be much cheaper than AWS or Google Cloud because Nirvana leases hardware directly from data centers and co-locates storage, which removes middlemen, Demirors said.
Demand for Nirvana’s services tends to come from infrastructure and tooling providers like BitGo and Fireblocks, as well as protocol foundations like Avalanche and Berachain, Demirors told me. Nirvana is also planning to work as a frontend to help organizations deploy on the internet filtering startup DoubleZero.
In a press release, Nirvana Labs said its revenue has grown by 26x since January 2024, and the cloud service now handles more than 2,000 terabytes of blockchain data.
Following the round, Demirors will join Nirvana Labs’ board, where she will be joined by Nirvana’s CEO and chief technology officer, a representative from RW3 Ventures, and a final “independent,” likely to be an industry executive, Demirors said.
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