CoinGeek Weekly Livestream: Edgevana CEO Mark Thiele digs deep into blockchain and its value

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The latest CoinGeek Weekly Livestream puts the spotlight on Edgevana, a company that helps high-growth blockchain platforms overcome the most difficult challenge—uncompromising scalability. CEO and Co-Founder Mark Thiele and Kurt Wuckert Jr. digs deep into what the company does and how it is helping the fastest blockchain in the world, Solana. 

What is Edgevana

Edgevana’s initial highest-level goal is to cloudify the consumers’ access to global infrastructure. As Mark explains, “Historically, if you’re buying infrastructure, you could take months just to get into one data center, imagine trying to expand an actual solution across multiple data centers in different or distributed geographies, we’ve attempted to solve that with Edgevana.”

Edgevana works with both sides of the customer equation in helping blockchain companies distribute their preferred infrastructure in a decentralized manner while offering a white glove deployment and management strategy. The company benefits its consumers by deploying a customer-focused delivery of hardware and solutions, producing effective work productivity and profitability results.

Edgevana also focuses on celebrating the diversity of locations but keeping them under one management umbrella. 

As Mark explains, “It is easier for you as the buyer to target tens or hundreds of locations but treat it from an overhead and from a management standpoint as if you’re buying from one.” By doing so, Edgevana can accelerate hardware deployment and the time to value. As proof, Mark reveals that they have “deployed 32 sites in 22 countries in five months.”

How Edgevana is helping Solana

Mark says that Solana and its overall need matched the basis that Edgevana was built from an original standpoint of being web 2.0 oriented. 

“It was almost picture-perfect for what a distributed architecture for a blockchain company might want as their infrastructure,” he said.

Solana onboarded Edgevana to participate in one of its programs that focuses on improving speed and cost while simultaneously building a broadly distributed environment that could help avoid the possibility of a crash. For his part, the latter requirement was the real challenge.

“The table stakes that other people were struggling with were this ability to do a broadly distributed environment that had a wide range of ASN numbers for network access, multiple data center providers, so that there’s not one network of support or management tooling that could cause the environment to crash,” he states. “That picture overall was really what helped us win the business.”

Regulating blockchain

On this episode of CoinGeek Weekly Livestream, Kurt and Mark spoke as industry experts about the blockchain industry and where it is heading. A recurring subject in their discussion is the contentious topic of regulation.

Mark stated his desire for blockchain to succeed, adding that he sees the technology’s value. He was keen to point out that a major drawback to its success sits among industry leaders and participants who focus too much on currency prices and blockchain’s unregulated capacity. He raised a good point by speaking about opportunities for blockchain’s potential regulation, comparing it to the early days of the internet.

“The opportunity of solving that [problems] in a lightweight, consistent manner actually has the opportunity of getting us to the Internet that we originally wanted,” Mark noted. 

In contrast, Mark points out the unique capabilities blockchain provides to the world: solutions for global issues such as human sovereignty, state data sovereignty, and long-term data protection.

Overall, Mark sees an opportunity to fulfill opposing needs. One is solving for the assurances that a financial network needs essential for blockchain’s participation in global finance. And the other is solving for speed, authentication, and keeping the middlemen out.

“There are two areas of opportunity for not only solving from an assurance, a comfort standpoint, but solving for this cross-chain problem and this location or residency of data problem that needs to be mitigated,” he said.

“I really see blockchain and the future of smart contracts as an opportunity to open up a future market for transactions the likes of which would make the first ten or fifteen years of the Internet pale in comparison,” Mark concluded.

Check out the previous episodes of CoinGeek Weekly Livestream on YouTube.

Watch: The BSV Global Blockchain Convention presentation, Making Blockchain Easy for Real World Use

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VSsozyJNQI