Liquid Staking Protocol Ankr Docks $1.5 Billion Volume

Following a partnership announcement with Microsoft, liquid staking decentralized finance protocol Ankr swiftly reached over $1.5 billion in 24-hour trading volume, with its token sailing past $0.06 in a matter of hours, almost doubling over its previous averages.

Ankr's partnership with Microsoft entails the launch of a suite of enterprise-grade blockchain nodes, customized according to specifications for global deployment and varying use cases. Ankr says that they have developed optimizations for data querying with serverless functionalities. The protocol also allows end users and enterprise clients to track node performance and analytics through RPC (remote procedure call) clients with access to usage data and telemetry for over 38 blockchains.

"This was a critical step in bringing blockchain infrastructure to a growing sector of the digital economy. The partnership, while an incredible milestone for Ankr, is also a key indicator of how far the decentralized web has come in integrating with the crucial players in every layer of web systems. The end result will be an era of extremely prolific building for blockchain-based applications from new Web3 projects as well as large enterprises entering the space," shares Chandler Song, co-founder and CEO at Ankr.

The integration will see Ankr's blockchain infrastructure innovation being merged with cloud solutions advanced by Microsoft, providing enterprise-grade node deployment services with remote, low-latency blockchain access. Such a partnership is crucial as Web3 arrives at a threshold, with companies and projects rapidly forming incursions into the space.

This recent surged was also influenced by the protocol's partnership with Tencent, a China-based technology conglomerate. Ankr's partnership with Tencent Cloud operates with roughly the same parameters and features, working primarily with Ankr's decentralized network of RPCs and blockchain APIs, fused with Tencent Cloud's global availability and provenance.

Liquid staking tokens and the blockchain infrastructure built around them have been regarded as a rising asset class, especially given the current regulatory climate in crypto post-FTX. Exchanges that offered traditional staking have been subjected to regulatory sanctions, resulting to multiple platforms either modifying their operations or totally shutting down, such as the case with Kraken, which paid fees amounting to $30 million to the SEC.

At the time of writing, Ankr has posted $165.2 million in TVL (total value locked), distributed across Ethereum and BSC ($96m and $68m, respectively), as well as other chains such as Avalanche, Fantom, Polkadot, Gnosis, and Kusama.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. The author was previously engaged with Ankr in 2020 as a consultant but does hold any significant amount of the cryptocurrencies mentioned.