NaaS — Nodes-as-a-Service — The troubles of growing — Part 1

Ring (RING.financial) claimed to be a fork of Strongblock… but the differences were many, to begin with.

Strongblock allows the user to create a real node:
- in one of their different locations, (Singapore, London, etc.),
- with a real RPC api (A Remote Procedure Call happens to be the most straightforward form of an API which allows developers to communicate to a server in order to remotely execute code)
- and for 2 different networks (for now) Ethereum and Polygon, with Sentinel coming soon.

The Ring team rode the wave of success of Strongblock by re-using the concept of “creating a node” meaning the users would put in an amount of money to create a fixed income out of something they were calling “a node” on the UI, but it was only a treasury or a fund to invest with and generate the returns to the users.

Ring Financial was also promising a slightly higher daily return than Strongblock, that way it attracted a lot of users in a short time, putting the team with a huge problem in their hands, that they probably never thought about: loads of cash to invest. It’s not easy to quickly find good projects in the crypto space in a short term, for people that clearly never had experience in managing big investment funds.

Ring Financial is now gone.

After the implosion (or rug pull) of Ring Financial, it didn’t take long for other projects to pop up across different networks. People who lost money on Ring Financial were lacking the transparency and professionalism that clearly the Ring Financial team didn’t have.

I have started collecting a list of new projects that start between December 2021 and January 2022 and others older or about the same age as Strongblock. Stay tuned for the 2nd part of the series.

I’m not a Financial adviser and this article reflects only my personal experience and it’s written for entertainment purposes only.