Bison Trails, a blockchain infrastructure platform-as-a-service company, announced today the launch of its Global Blockchain Sync (GBS) feature. Global Blockchain Sync expands the functionality of the Bison Trails platform by making it quicker and easier for customers to launch new nodes across diverse protocols, as well as for Bison Trails to respond to potential adverse events like a cloud provider outage.
Global Blockchain Sync enables new nodes to quickly catch up to the current state of the network, reducing the time it takes for new nodes to be production-ready by over 100x. Bison Trails’ Global Blockchain Sync currently supports customer infrastructure on protocols including Polkadot, Kusama, Ethereum, Cosmos, Celo, NEAR, EOS, and more.
Important benefits of Global Blockchain Sync include:
- Reduced downtime risk and slashing penalties: Many proof-of-stake protocols penalize validators for downtime because this behavior degrades overall network performance. Global Blockchain Sync enables customers to recover from adverse events like a cloud provider outage in minutes, significantly reducing the risk of downtime slashing or missed rewards.
- Active management for optimized participation: Global Blockchain Sync makes it easier to participate in a number of networks, particularly protocols like Polkadot that require more active node management. Polkadot’s reward mechanism incentivizes customers to distribute their stake across multiple validators. However, staking requirements change frequently, potentially requiring customers to access new nodes to re-distribute their stake in an optimal way. With Global Blockchain Sync, new Polkadot validators can be launched in as early as 20 minutes, compared to the 30+ hours it would otherwise typically take.
- Reducing costs and increasing scale: Global Blockchain Sync also allows for dynamic management of Bison Trails’ QT read/write infrastructure used by leading custodians, exchanges, wallets, and others to build products and services that connect to blockchain data. With GBS, organizations can add or remove synced nodes in a matter of minutes and respond to fluctuating demand while reducing operational costs.
- Quick, efficient support for new protocols: Global Blockchain Sync with QT Archival enables companies, such as large exchanges and custodians, to add support for new protocols quickly and easily. Archival nodes provide a complete record of everything happening on a blockchain on a block-by-block basis – meaning they have to sync with very large amounts of data. Global Blockchain Sync dramatically reduces the timeline to make an archival node production-ready. For example, with QT Archival and Global Blockchain Sync, an EOS Archival node can be ready within 72 hours, compared to what would normally take upwards of 6 months. Similarly, an Ethereum archival node can be production-ready in 12 hours with Global Blockchain Sync, compared to 14+ days without.
“A significant pain point when launching new nodes is the time it takes for them to catch up to the rest of the network before they can begin performing useful work. Newly launched nodes must sync from the genesis block, which can take hours to months to be fully synced. Bison Trails created Global Blockchain Sync, an enterprise-grade solution to this problem, to allow customers to dynamically scale their infrastructure in response to demand, while reducing operational costs.”
– Joe Lallouz, CEO of Bison Trails
