Ethereum mainnet archive node service ArchiveNode.io says it will be shutting down, claiming that the project has been a success.
On April 4, ArchiveNode.io announced it was “sunsetting” its services after more than three years of providing free Ethereum mainnet archive node services to developers, students and researchers.
An Ethereum Archive Node is an instance of an Ethereum client configured to build an archive of all historical states. This type of node is a useful tool for querying historical blockchain data that is not accessible on full nodes.
While we appreciate everyone’s support over the years, it’s time for ArchiveNode to hang it up and say gm for the last time.
This isn’t a sad ending, but a happy one – we just aren’t needed anymore, and are shutting down.
gm and gn. https://t.co/truuXmDgbT
— Archive Node (@ArchiveNode) April 3, 2023
Additionally, Archive Nodes are not required to participate in block validation so they can theoretically be built from scratch; however, they do require much greater storage capacity.
The announcement was made by “DeFi Dude,” who initiated the project and claimed it was being shut down because “we succeeded,” adding:
“Our service is no longer necessary and other alternatives exist today that did not exist when we got started.”
He added that nobody was running Archive Nodes when the project started. The only option was to pay Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura $250 monthly to access archive data.
The goal of the project was to “get archive data into the hands of developers, students, and researchers who wanted to build cool shit, but didn’t have the time, money, or resources available to run their own archive node.”
He confirmed the project was never to “make money or profit.”
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He added there is currently a robust remote procedure call (RPC) provider market offering access to archive data making the project obsolete.
ArchiveNode.io thanked the Ethereum Foundation for their initial grant of $10,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to get the project off the ground.
According to a Cointelegraph report from August, just three centralized cloud providers account for more than two-thirds of Ethereum nodes. More than half of the total nodes were hosted on AWS, according to data at the time.
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