Nirvana Labs introduces its Nirvana Cloud computing service specifically intended to work with blockchain workloads.
CEO Dan Burke told Blockworks that the startup has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding and counts blockchain platforms such as Chainlink and Avalanche as customers.
According to Burke, the company hopes to lure Web3 projects away from more mainstream cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, which are widely used in many industries, including the crypto space. But Nirvana isn’t building a decentralized computing platform, a la Golem, nor a decentralized storage solution like IPFS. Instead, it takes the centralized status quo and specializes for Web3.
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AWS and Google Cloud provide public cloud services that enable the purchase of resources such as servers and storage over the Internet. This arrangement is often cost-effective because it eliminates the need for companies to maintain their own physical hardware. However, blockchain applications are typically compute-intensive, which drives up the Web3 costs that companies pay to public cloud providers.
Crypto is especially big business for Amazon, which hosts 35% of all Ethereum nodes, according to the ethernodes website.
Nirvana Cloud says it can deliver much lower costs and better efficiency for blockchain workloads compared to AWS by doing away with unnecessary virtualization.
In computing, virtualization enables the creation of virtual machines (VMs) that operate independently of their underlying physical hardware. This essentially turns one physical computer into many virtual computers, allowing each computer to perform its own tasks as if it were a separate machine. In short, virtualization makes it possible to run many different applications and processes without the need for multiple physical computers.
This allows cloud service providers to provide customers with a more efficient and flexible service.
But traditional services like AWS and Google Cloud, while versatile, often take a general-purpose approach that may not be as cost- or resource-efficient for specific applications, such as the energy-intensive applications in Web3.
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Nirvana Labs addresses this by shrinking the virtualization layer. It reduces the software intermediary and focuses the hardware on the specific needs of Web3 technologies, such as cryptocurrency transactions or smart contracts. The result is a setup that is not only faster and more reliable for these tasks, but also more cost-effective.
A Nirvana Labs document reviewed by Blockworks shows that for a setup with two virtual CPUs and 8 gigabytes of RAM, Nirvana Cloud costs about 19.5% less than AWS and 26.91% less than Google Cloud Platform per month.
According to the company, Nirvana Cloud distinguishes itself by offering a ‘bare metal’ cloud service. Unlike typical cloud environments where server resources are shared among multiple consumers, each Nirvana server is dedicated to a single client. This approach, which does not pool hardware resources, aims to ensure superior performance for compute-intensive tasks, such as blockchain validation, by maximizing service efficiency and reliability.
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However, some argue that solutions like Nirvana’s don’t go far enough – and that computing resources will always remain a risk to crypto unless the base layer is decentralized.
“We have decentralized payments. We have decentralized storage. We need to have decentralized computing or this whole decentralized world isn’t really decentralized,” said Tom Trowbridge, co-founder of decentralized computing platform Fluence.
But in the meantime, more research into the cloud layer wouldn’t hurt. Burke said the Web3 development community often doesn’t think enough about what’s happening at the zero layer of the technology.
He jokingly added, “I mean, we have a company in the space called LayerZero that is literally built on Google Cloud.”