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Optimizing blockchain consensus mechanisms with bare metal infrastructure

Thumbnail Optmizing-Blockchain-Consensus-with-Bare-Metal-Infrastructure

Diego Lima•May 7, 2025

Blockchain networks have unique performance demands that can't be downplayed, unless you’re willing to lose some thousands of dollars and a lot of time.

When running blockchain nodes for validators, RPCs, or decentralized applications, every millisecond of latency and each compute cycle matters significantly, which is why bare metal solutions often align better with web3-related workloads (and you can deploy in just a few seconds with Latitude.sh).

Summary

Bare metal servers are very different from virtualized environments. They provide fully dedicated physical hardware with direct access to resources, eliminating the "noisy neighbor" effect that heavily impacts cloud performance.

Throughout this article, you'll understand why bare metal servers increasingly outperform cloud solutions for blockchain projects, helping you make informed infrastructure decisions that align with your performance, security, and cost requirements.

What makes blockchain infrastructure unique?

Blockchain significantly shifts how digital data is stored, shared, and secured.

Unlike traditional systems, it uses a decentralized, distributed ledger technology (DLT) with no central authority that records data in cryptographically linked blocks. Once added, blocks cannot be changed without network-wide consensus, providing:

Immutability: Data is permanent and tamper-proof.
Transparency: All participants access the same data in real time.
Redundancy: Copies of the ledger exist across many nodes, removing single points of failure.

As blockchains grow, so do storage and compute demands.

The Role of Nodes

Nodes are the backbone of blockchain networks. They:

Validate transactions
Verify new blocks
Participate in consensus
Store blockchain data (full or partial)

Full nodes keep the entire blockchain and offer maximum trust, but require significant resources. Lightweight nodes are more efficient but rely on full nodes for verification.

Consensus mechanisms, like Bitcoin’s proof of work, are extremely compute-intensive. By late 2024, the Bitcoin network reached around 640 exahashes per second, underscoring the need for high-performance infrastructure.

Public Cloud vs Bare Metal: Key differences for blockchain

Traditional cloud infrastructure often struggles with the sustained computational workloads, storage requirements, and uninterrupted uptime necessary for optimal blockchain performance.

Bare metal servers, however, offer distinct advantages for blockchain deployments:

Dedicated resources: No resource sharing means consistent performance under load, which is particularly important for validator nodes and mining operations
Hardware optimization: Direct access to physical hardware allows for customization specific to blockchain workloads
Enhanced security: Physical isolation provides stronger security boundaries, critical for maintaining blockchain integrity
Predictable performance: Without virtualization overhead, bare metal servers deliver more consistent and reliable performance

In summary, the choice of infrastructure can ultimately affect the entire blockchain network's reliability, security, and performance.

As blockchain adoption increases across industries, including finance, supply chain, and healthcare, the importance of robust, dedicated infrastructure continues to grow.

Cloud environments typically introduce additional latency due to virtualization overhead. This latency becomes particularly problematic for time-sensitive blockchain operations.

In terms of storage performance, cloud solutions generally cap throughput around 1 GB/s, whereas bare metal servers with local NVMe drives can achieve up to 20 times that rate.

This throughput difference significantly impacts blockchain nodes, which require frequent read/write operations for ledger updates.

The performance gap becomes especially pronounced under heavy loads. During peak transaction periods or network congestion, bare metal maintains consistent performance, as opposed to cloud solutions, which may experience degradation.

This reliability is essential for applications like decentralized exchanges or smart contract platforms, where transaction timing is critical.

Predictable pricing and cost efficiency

For established blockchain projects, bare metal often represents the more economical choice.

Cloud platforms typically use pay-as-you-go models with unclear additional bandwidth fees that become expensive as usage increases.

Alternatively, bare metal provides fixed, transparent pricing that becomes increasingly cost-effective for stable, long-running workloads like blockchain nodes.

This predictability helps projects plan their operational budgets with greater confidence. You can reserve instances and pay yearly or monthly bills for long-term projects, knowing how much you will spend.

Consensus Mechanisms and Their Computing Demands

Consensus mechanisms are the backbone of blockchain networks. They enable distributed nodes—often spread across different geographies—to agree on the ledger's state without relying on a central authority.

Whether it's Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), or other variants like Delegated PoS or Byzantine Fault Tolerance, all consensus algorithms serve the same goal: ensuring that transactions are valid and that the network maintains a consistent, tamper-resistant history.

To achieve this, consensus protocols require computational work.

PoW networks demand enormous hash-processing power to solve cryptographic puzzles, while PoS validators must stay online, validate blocks quickly, and maintain uninterrupted communication with the network.

In both cases, performance, reliability, and speed are critical, and that’s where infrastructure choices, particularly bare metal servers, make a difference.

The Role of Latency in Consensus Performance

Latency directly affects the efficiency of consensus. Every new block proposed needs to propagate quickly across the network so other nodes can validate it and update their copy of the ledger.

Delays in this process increase the chances of forks, stale blocks, or even missed consensus rounds—issues that degrade network performance and security.

Consensus latency is especially sensitive to network jitter and virtualized environments where resources are shared. Even slight unpredictability in response times can result in validators missing their slot or miners wasting compute cycles on blocks that won’t be accepted.

Low and predictable latency helps:

Accelerate block propagation across nodes.
Reduce the likelihood of forks or orphaned blocks.
Improve overall chain stability and transaction throughput.

Why Bare Metal Infrastructure Gives Consensus a Boost

Considering all the requirements for consensus mechanisms to work properly, it should be clear by now how bare metal helps. Still, here are the most important facts:

Ultra-low and Predictable Latency

Remember that bare metal eliminates hypervisors and shared CPU/networking layers, delivering latency measured in microseconds.

This ensures faster block propagation and more stable consensus rounds, especially when gossip protocols or peer-to-peer networking are involved.

Dedicated Resources for Compute-Intensive Tasks

In PoW, miners benefit from uninterrupted access to high-performance CPUs, GPUs, or ASICs. Bare metal servers provide maximum compute power with no noisy neighbor interference, translating into higher hash rates, better energy efficiency, and more predictable mining output.

Optimized Validator Performance in PoS

Validators need consistent uptime, fast response times, and secure connectivity. Bare metal servers offer:

High single-thread CPU performance.
Reliable network performance for fast transaction validation.
Isolation from other tenants, minimizing the risk of slashing or disconnection due to external workloads.

Uptime and Operational Stability

Consensus mechanisms rely on high availability. Bare metal providers typically offer SLA-backed uptime guarantees, redundant networking, and full root access for fast recovery.

This helps keep validator and miner nodes online and synchronized, even during network spikes or attacks.

Customizable Infrastructure for Protocol Optimization

Every blockchain protocol has specific infrastructure needs. With bare metal, teams can choose:

CPU architectures, memory size, and storage types (e.g., NVMe for faster I/O).
BIOS and OS kernel tuning.
NIC configurations for enhanced packet handling.

This customization allows protocols to fine-tune performance, reduce consensus delays, and test new consensus features directly on hardware.

Real-world use cases of bare metal in blockchain

Of the following three blockchain companies that partnered with Latitude.sh, they have cut compute costs by 30–86 %, doubled or more their processing throughput, and gained predictable billing after moving to single-tenant environments in our bare metal platform:

BTCS: Doubling Performance, Cutting Costs

Background: BTCS (Nasdaq: BTCS) runs over 500 Ethereum nodes and supports Avalanche, Cosmos, Akash, and Kava networks. It shifted from AWS to Latitude.sh bare metal to boost efficiency after early mining setbacks.
Outcome: Migration yielded a 2× infrastructure performance increase and an estimated 30 % reduction in cloud spend. Their AI-powered ChainQ analytics platform now queries blockchain data ~100× faster than on AWS.
Why Bare Metal: BTCS credits transparent, single-bill pricing, 20 TB free egress, low-latency links, and no “noisy neighbor” interference for consistent throughput, critical for time-sensitive validation and consensus work.

Decent Land Labs: 60 % Cost Reduction, Developer-Centric Control

Background: Decent Land Labs builds on-chain EVM data centers for load.network. After cloud bills spiked and resource customization proved clunky on Google Cloud, the team sought true bare metal performance with DevOps-friendly tooling.
Outcome: Switching from Google App Engine to Latitude.sh cut infrastructure costs by 40–60 % (e.g., a $1,200/month app now runs on a $300 server) and enabled complete resource control.
Why Bare Metal: The intuitive UI, Terraform-ready API, and responsive support felt like a natural fit for a startup-centric stack. The team has since migrated all applications and plans to deploy storage-intensive archival nodes using Latitude.sh’s distributed file system.

Hashgraph: 86 % Compute Cost Reduction, Reliable Infrastructure

Background: Hashgraph, the company that manages the Hedera network, relied on GCP for production, CI/CD testing, and performance validation. As workloads grew, monthly cloud bills ballooned to $60–75k.
Outcome: Moving CI/CD and test workloads to Latitude.sh cut compute costs by 86 %, dropping to $10 k/month (with only ~20 % hardware overhead) while maintaining identical capacity.
Why Bare Metal: Latitude.sh’s consistent hardware performance and customer-centric support—fixing bugs quickly, assisting with BGP setup, and offering direct account-manager access—eliminated the erratic benchmarks and minimal help Hashgraph saw on other clouds.

Optimize Your Infrastructure For Web3 Today: Sign up for Latitude.sh

Now that you know how critical the proper infrastructure is for your blockchain project, it’s time to choose a trusted bare metal partner.

At Latitude.sh, we offer everything Web3 teams need to run fast, secure, and reliable workloads—without the hassle or abusive costs of a virtualized cloud infrastructure.