Bison Trails: Build new nodes 100x faster

Blockchain infrastructure company Bison Trails has launched a new service, Global Blockchain Sync, designed to “enable faster deployment” of new blockchain nodes.

The new feature “is able to reduce the time it takes for new nodes to sync from typical weeks or months to mere hours, decreasing a protocol’s initial sync by over 100x,” the company said in a Feb. 16 release. 

Bison Trails CEO Joe Lallouz said the new service can save firms adding new blockchain protocols a lot of wasted lead time. He noted: 

“A significant pain point when launching new nodes is the time it takes for them to catch up to the rest of the network before they can begin performing useful work… Newly launched nodes must sync from the genesis block, which can take hours to months to be fully synced”

The GBS service can set up an EOS (EOS) archival node within 72 hours as opposed to six months, while Ethereum archival node setup time is cut from over 14 days to 12 hours, Bison Trails said. Other supported networks include Polkadot (DOT), Kusama (KSM), Cosmos (ATOM), Celo (CELO) and NEAR (NEAR). 

Bison Trails said that Global Blockchain Sync also helps customers recover faster from downtime caused by issues like a cloud provider’s outage faster, reducing the risk of slashing penalties—the fees levied by proof-of-stake protocols when a node goes down, potentially degrading the blockchain’s performance.

This makes it easier for companies to manage nodes from different blockchain networks, the firm said. This is particularly important for protocols like Polkadot, which incentivizes staking participants to distribute their stake across many validator nodes. 

Lastly, the Bison Trails also claims that the new feature will allow its customers to quickly add support for new blockchains.

As Modern Consensus reported in late January, Bison Trails was acquired by the leading U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. The blockchain infrastructure firm is also part of the Diem Association—the organization formerly known as Libra that is developing Facebook’s stablecoin—and launched tools for the network in November 2020.