01NODE

The Chainlink ecosystem directory lists 01NODE as a live node operator and channel partner on Ethereum, with September 2, 2020 as the date of the integration. In its announcement, 01NODE wrote that it had joined Chainlink as a reviewed node operator and that its node supported Price Reference Data feeds on mainnet, among them the feed for ENJ/ETH.

A Chainlink price feed combines the signed answers of several independent node operators into one value that a smart contract reads. 01NODE argued at the time that its own hardware in tier-3 data centers, with few cloud dependencies, adds a node that shares no failure point with operators in the large clouds.

In December 2022 LinkPool launched stake.link, a liquid delegated staking protocol for the Chainlink network, and named 01Node among the Chainlink node operators that joined as initial members. Holders who stake LINK through the protocol receive stLINK, a liquid token that earns the staking rewards, and can wrap it into wstLINK for lending and liquidity pools.

01NODE Funding SRL is registered in Bucharest, where the company runs its validators on servers it owns in a data center rated Tier III. In the third quarter of 2020 it moved from a hybrid cloud setup to its own colocation racks. In 2022 it obtained its own autonomous system number, AS41536, so that it controls the routing and peering of its network itself.

The company names AMD EPYC servers, ECC memory, NVMe storage with ZFS and hardware security modules for the validator keys. A bank or asset manager that reviews an outsourced staking or oracle service asks where the servers stand and which cloud providers they depend on, as part of its ICT third-party risk assessment under DORA.

On Ethereum, 01NODE runs validators with distributed validator technology, or DVT, where several operators share the key of one validator. Between March and August 2024 the company joined five clusters of the Simple DVT module of Lido, four built with Obol and one with SSV Network, each confirmed by a signed message on Etherscan.

Beyond Ethereum, 01NODE has run a Wormhole Guardian node since December 2020 and has indexed data for The Graph since the same month. The company was a genesis validator of SKALE in September 2020 and has secured Bitcoin staking on Babylon as a finality provider since December 2024.

Token holders delegate their tokens from their own wallet to a 01NODE validator, and the network pays staking rewards for the blocks and votes that validator produces. The rewards depend on the network, and the validator keeps a commission before the rest reaches the delegator. According to the company, more than 50,000 delegators have staked assets worth over 540 million dollars with its validators.

A Chainlink node operator runs the Chainlink node software, fetches data such as asset prices from several sources and signs its answer for each update of a feed. Since Chainlink Staking v0.2 in November 2023, operators that serve Data Feeds can stake up to 75,000 LINK, which can be slashed when a feed misses its updates.

Claudiu Nae founded 01NODE in 2019, and Cristian Chirculescu has led its infrastructure engineering as chief technology officer since the same year. The team counts eight people, and Claudiu Nae holds the CISA certification for information systems auditing.