São Paulo and San Francisco, Jan. 26, 2022 -- Today, Ankr, a leader in the digital asset space as a software platform and decentralized infrastructure provider, announced a strategic partnership with bare metal provider Latitude.sh. Through this partnership, Latitude.sh's global bare metal cloud platform will monetize existing unused server capacity through Ankr Protocol, while supporting a more distributed global node network that will benefit the growth of Web3 platforms, applications, and services.

Approximately 40% of all Ethereum nodes are hosted in the United States, suggesting a pressing need to further distribute nodes that support critical decentralized networks. With a global bare metal cloud platform available in North America, Latin America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, Latitude.sh is well positioned to support Ankr’s goals of expanding distributed global networks and improving the latency of inter-node communication.

“Web3 adoption is surging globally. Ankr is now serving over 200 billion requests to the blockchain per month and to keep scaling this, we need performance that only dedicated, custom servers can provide. These nodes need to be in close proximity to DeFi users. Latitude.sh's global platform can help with this. We are particularly excited to partner with Latitude.sh in Latin America, a region with a growing demand for nodes,” said Josh Neuroth, Ankr’s Head of Product.

Latitude.sh will be delivering more than 100 bare metal servers to Ankr across 13 global Edge locations — two of which— Buenos Aires, Argentina and Bogotá, Colombia are opening in February 2022 specifically to serve Ankr’s heavy requirements in the region. Latitude.sh's strong presence in Latin America includes existing locations in São Paulo, Brazil, Santiago, Chile, and Mexico City. Ankr Protocol currently serves over 700 million RPC requests from Argentina every month, and over 1 Billion RPC requests monthly from Brazil. Ankr Protocol’s infrastructure is geo-localized, providing projects that integrate Ankr RPC with lower latency for their users. 

In order to accommodate the explosive growth of blockchain, Latitude.sh is using high-performance AMD servers with highly scalable storage. The bare metal that Latitude.sh is setting up for Ankr is chain agnostic, so it can support RPC Full Nodes for all available blockchains.  Processing over 200 billion RPC calls per month, Ankr Protocol supports all leading blockchains like Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Fantom, Polygon, Polkadot, Solana, and more. The bare metal servers will be available to qualified projects to run on behalf of Ankr Protocol, further contributing to infrastructure decentralization. 

“We understand the need for Web3 infrastructure to meet the requirements of emerging networks and node operators and we are excited to enter the blockchain space and support Ankr by customizing an infrastructure for this unique market, using high-performance servers and specific and expandable storage to manage the growing mass of data being generated on the blockchain,” added Guilherme Soubihe Alberto, CEO of Latitude.sh.

Latitude.sh will be paid in ANKR tokens in exchange for running blockchain nodes via Ankr Protocol on their new customized high-performance servers, enabling Latitude.sh to monetize existing unused server capacity. Latitude.sh is recognized in the data center industry for its many international, high-profile online game, media streaming, VPN and cybersecurity customers. This partnership represents Latitude.sh's entry into the world of blockchain and Web3. 

The Ankr Protocol, introduced in October 2021, is a decentralized web service (DWS) portal for Web3 development, designed to incentivize the creation of a distributed global network of node providers to create a performant global supercomputer. Ankr Protocol’s open marketplace, powered by the ANKR token, enables node providers to monetize their infrastructure and scale their operations to meet the surging global demand for Web3 services.

To learn more about Ankr Protocol today visit ankr.com/protocol/public/.

About Latitude.sh

Latitude.sh is a global provider of on-demand bare metal cloud for businesses of all sizes. Its mission is to help make the Internet faster and safer by providing powerful, secure, scalable infrastructure solutions. Latitude.sh has a presence in São Paulo, Santiago, Mexico City, New York City, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Sydney, Tokyo, and London with upcoming locations in Buenos Aires and Bogota. For more information, visit www.latitude.sh.

About Ankr

Ankr is a leader in the digital asset space as a software platform and decentralized infrastructure provider. Built to support the growth of Web 3, Ankr provides scalable plug-and-play multichain DeFi solutions for the builders of the new internet economy supporting more than 50 proof-of-stake chains with an all-in-one portal for the public RPC, APIs, developer tooling and staking. The utility token Ankr, is tradeable on Coinbase and Binance. Learn more at www.ankr.com.