TL;DR
After a little more than three years of providing a free Ethereum Mainnet Archive Node service to developers, students, and researchers, we (MysticRyuujin & DeFi Dude) have decided to end the ArchiveNode.io project.
Why?
The Short Answer:
We succeeded.
Our service is no longer necessary and other alternatives exist today that did not exist when we got started.
The Long Answer:
When we first started ArchiveNode.io absolutely nobody was running Ethereum Mainnet Archive nodes. You could pay Infura $250/mo for the privilege of accessing archive data, but you couldn’t run debug or trace calls against Infura (you still can’t, but that’s besides the point). The RPC provider market back then was nothing like it is today. Today we have a robust RPC provider market and almost all of the providers offer Archive access for, if not free, a fraction of the cost of what it was back in 2019/2020.
Our goal 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 or pay $250/mo to get it. It was never to make money or profit off this project.
We believe that we, along with the absolute legendary team behind Turbo-Geth (now called Erigon), played a major role in changing the landscape of the RPC provider market for archive data access forever. And that is where we would like to end the story of ArchiveNode.io.
Shoutouts
First and foremost we would like to thank the Ethereum Foundation. Without their initial grant of $10,000 in AWS credits this project would have never gotten off the ground.
Secondly, we would like to thank Dan who without his support and donation of hardware would have seen ArchiveNode not survive more than a year running only on AWS credits. Dan originally paid for our first non-AWS hosted Nethermind Archive node, and continued to fund that node for over 2 years. It served a large potion of our traffic, avoiding costly AWS bandwidth fees.
Third, the absolutely amazing team over at Nethermind. Specifically Tomasz K. Stańczak — who personally provided immeasurable support to our team whenever we needed it. Without the Nethermind team, we would not have been as successful as we were.
Fourth, Alexey Sharp (a.k.a @realLedgerwatch) — The man behind Erigon (formerly known as Turbo-Geth) who has forever changed the landscape of archive nodes and made them accessible to normal users.
Last but not least, Gitcoin and the Ethereum Community — Without your ongoing support and donations ArchiveNode would not have survived as long as it has or been able to serve as many people as we have. We used those funds to purchase hardware, fund VPS, and bare metal systems, replace and repair hardware, and pay for ongoing operational costs.
gm and gn. 🫡
