Ankr backed by Binance Labs after several initiatives in support of BNB Chain

Ankr has secured a strategic investment from Binance Labs in order to fuel its Web3 infrastructure, doubling down on its industry RPC service and build out its Web3 developer suite, including its Liquid Staking SDK, Web3 Gaming SDK, and App Chains As a Service.

The venture capital arm and accelerator of Binance is backing Ankr following the latter’s significant open-source contributions to the BNB Chain, BNB Liquid Staking, and its continued support for the ecosystem.

Ryan Fang, the Chief Operating Officer at Ankr, said: “We are very excited to count Binance Labs as a strategic investor. BNB Chain is by far the chain with the highest number of daily transactions and active users. We are committed to support BNB Chain further scale, enhance BNB token utility by enabling DeFi composability using BNB Liquid Staking, and expand Binance Application Sidechain (BAS) ecosystem to enable innovative use cases requiring a highly scalable infrastructure, and other innovative infrastructure services opening the gates to permissioned sidechains.”

How Ankr has supported BNB Chain toward Web3 adoption

The protocol serves an average of over 7 billion blockchain requests per day across the 18 blockchains it hosts RPCs for, according to the firm.

Ankr has made upgrades to the BNB Chain, having built out the network’s core infrastructure including the Erigon upgrade, which the firm claims reduced the storage requirements by 75% and increased the RPC request performance by 10x.

Other upgrades to the BNB network include the Archive Node and the latest BNB Application Sidechain (BAS) scalability solution.

In addition, Ankr supports BNB Liquid Staking, giving BNB token holders an array of options when choosing how to earn in DeFi with their assets – with the ability to combine strategies like staking, farming, lending, contributing to vaults, and more simultaneously.

Ankr empowers developers to integrate staking

Ankr helps blockchain companies run their blockchains faster, enabling them to offer users the best Web3 experiences. The firm has recently launched a line of staking software development kits (SDKs) for developers who wish to integrate liquid staking solutions into their projects and platforms.

The SDKs will start by covering staking on five different blockchains – Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Avalanche, and Fantom, the San Francisco-based Web3 infrastructure announced.

Blockchain developers will be able to use Ankr’s Staking SDKs to allow their users to stake tokens to earn rewards and receive back a liquid staking token, which can then be used to gain additional yield and services across web3.

The solution can be integrated using JavaScript and TypeScript or directly with smart contract APIs, and requires users to connect their wallets, and choose what they want to stake in order to receive rewards daily. The staking functionality can be integrated via Smart contract APIs and RESTful-like APIs.

According to Ankr, the staking SDKs have undergone rigorous security audits before going live on projects like Sikka Protocol, Helios Protocol, and Clover Finance.

Any project is suitable to integrate the new staking solutions on the backend, which connects to Ankr Staking, which then delegates tokens to the most suitable validators and mints new liquid staking tokens that the stakers can claim to their independent wallets, the firm added.