Ethereum mainnet Archive Node service ArchiveNode.io said it will be shutting down, claiming the project has been a success.
On April 4, ArchiveNode.io announced that it was “retiring” its services after more than three years of providing free Archive Node services from the Ethereum mainnet to developers, students, and researchers.
An Ethereum archive node is an instance of an Ethereum client configured to create an archive of all historical states. This type of node is a useful tool for querying historical blockchain data that cannot be accessed in full nodes.
While we appreciate everyone’s support over the years, it’s time for ArchiveNode to hang up and say gm one last time.
This is not a sad ending, but a happy one: we are simply not needed anymore and we are closing.
gm and gn. https://t.co/truuXmDgbT
— Archive Node (@ArchiveNode) April 3, 2023
Also, file nodes are not required to participate in block validation, so in theory they can be built from scratch; however, they require a much larger storage capacity.
The announcement was made by “DeFi Dude”, who started the project and claimed that the project was being shut down because “we made it”, before adding:
“Our service is no longer necessary and today there are other alternatives that did not exist when we started.”
He added that no one was running Archive Nodes when he started the project. The only option was to pay the Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura $250 per month to access the archive data.
The goal of the project was to “put archive data in the hands of developers, students, and researchers who wanted to create cool stuff, but didn’t have the time, money, or resources available to run their own archive node.”
He confirmed that the project was never to “make money or profit.”
Related: SEC lawsuit claims jurisdiction because ETH nodes are ‘clustered’ in the US.
He added that there is currently a robust remote procedure call (RPC) provider market offering access to archival data that renders the project obsolete.
ArchiveNode.io thanked the Ethereum Foundation for their seed 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 all nodes were hosted on AWS, according to data at the time.
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