Interview Staking Facilities – enterprise-grade web 3.0 infrastructure & services – Robert Dörzbach
Describe your company and business case – what product / service are you offering to the blockchain ecosystem and your clients?
- We are a Munich-based, Web 3.0 infrastructure, and service provider. We run industry-grade, highly secure physical infrastructure co-located in certified data centers within reach of our company headquarters. Guaranteed uptime, biometric security, and redundant power supply reinforce a continuous and secure operation. Through our state-of-the-art monitoring, we always know about the status of our servers and are alerted immediately if any abnormalities occur. We also provide white label validator solutions for institutional clients. For Proof-of-Stake token-holders, we offer non-custodial staking services, personal support, and tools for a variety of thoroughly vetted public Proof-of-Stake blockchains. Furthermore, we offer Web 3.0 services such as running oracles for Chainlink or providing indexing services for The Graph.
What is your investment thesis – how do you select new blockchain protocols and how do you decide to support new protocols very early?
- The internet is in the early stages of its’ evolution from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, which is the convergence of different technologies such as AI, IoT, and blockchain technology. We believe that the latter is facilitating a new data economy with enhanced production, distribution, and consumption of data. Ultimately, blockchain technology redefines the data structures in the backend of the web by introducing decentralized data management and storage through a peer-to-peer network and novel protocols. While we saw a proliferation of open-source software, decentralization, and digital assets in the last decade, we are still only at the cusp of what Don Tapscott called the ‘Blockchain Revolution’. Therefore, we mainly focus on investments and the support of Layer-1 protocols. However, with the gradual shift to mainstream adoption, we are also investing in/supporting protocols that are higher up the Web 3.0 sack such as DeFi projects. We base our investment decisions on several factors such as the tokenomics, team, community as well as vision, the novelty of the project, and last, but definitely not least, an in-depth technical analysis.
We follow a holistic approach when supporting a network: infrastructure, education, and tooling.
How do you support these new protocols?
- While the provision of infrastructure remains the core and main focus of our business, we support our portfolio projects beyond the mere provision of infrastructure. We follow a holistic approach when supporting a network: infrastructure, education, and tooling.
- We are strong decentralization advocates, which is why we deploy our own, custom-built hardware rather than spinning up nodes in cloud instances. This also allows us to set up an operation that best caters to the respective networks’ needs. In addition, we assemble and stress-test each validator before putting it to action to guarantee outstanding performance.
- We empower token holders to participate in the respective network through step-by-step guides and tutorials as well as personal customer support so that they can contribute to the networks’ security and ultimately earn staking rewards for doing so. On our homepage, we distil the main characteristics, metrics, and FAQs about each network in a comprehensive subpage for the respective network. Furthermore, we initiated the Staking Academy, a content aggregation platform for everything blockchain, staking, and DeFi related. All of this serves the purpose of educating as many people as possible about Web 3.0 and ultimately driving its diffusion through onboarding new users.
- Finally, we build tools such as the Staking Wizard, Graphlets, and Solana Beach to equip the networks’ stakeholders with the necessary means to explore, analyze or participate in the respective network.
- We believe that our holistic approach supports each network through building up grass-roots support and a well-educated, engaged community.
Which regions (Europe, Asia, USA) are you most focused on?
- We do not have a specific geographic region that we focus on since we believe that Web 3.0 is a movement that supersedes national borders. That being said, we currently offer our services exclusively in English.
What does the investment process and investment cycle look like?
- This differs with each project. After carefully studying the technology, tokenomics, and team, we usually start with supporting the network in its’ early stages by participating in testnets. Furthermore and for the most part, we acquire the respective tokens either on the open market, pre-sales or ICOs to ensure a certain self-bond so that our incentives are always best aligned with those of our delegators.
What are you most excited about (Web 3.0, DeFi, Interoperability, Liquidity, Farming, Layer 1/2/3, SSI, NFT, etc.)?
- This is a tough one – we are quite excited about all of the above. However, our main focus remains on Layer-1 protocols, with a slight tendency towards DeFi, and interoperability projects. However, we remain extremely excited about the whole Web 3.0 space.
What are the major roadblocks for the adoption of Web 3.0 / blockchain-based finance (DeFi)?
- Due to the novelty of some of the projects you find in the broader Web 3.0 ecosystem, there is a lack of proper regulation. Educating regulatory bodies about the operating principle, potential, and current challenges of the protocols that power Web 3.0 & DeFi is of utmost importance. We believe that once central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are operational and there are legally recognized SSIs solutions, the Web 3.0 space will truly proliferate.
What protocols/networks do you support next – kindly share some insights?
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We most recently onboarded/are setting up our operations for Thorchain, Dfinity, and HydraDX.
Next steps / roadmap 2021 / 2022
- Our main focus for 2021 besides providing top-notch Web 3.0 infrastructure and services is to grow our team (s. below) as well as to constantly improve our product suite with a clear focus on Solana Beach and The Staking Academy. There are a few other projects that we are working on, which we cannot comment on as of now – so stay tuned 🙂
What are you looking for (funding, talent, network, sales etc.)
- Currently, we are looking for several talents, namely a Web Developer, a Systems Administrator, Backend Data Engineer as well as a Dev-Ops Security Engineer.
Robert Dörzbach:
How to get in contact with you?
- The best ways to get in touch with us are via Twitter, Telegram, eMail (info@stakingfacilities.com) or LinkedIn.
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