Most crypto venture firms never touch the infrastructure layer. They write checks to back protocols, collect a bag upon TGE, and move on.

RockawayX is different: we run our own data centers in Europe, operate bare metal servers that power leading decentralized networks, and have been doing so since 2020.

That hands-on infrastructure experience shapes our perspective on the bare metal versus cloud question, which we’ll break down in this article. As you read, you’ll learn the practical differences between bare metal and cloud for crypto infrastructure, why we default to dedicated hardware for production, and get a framework for making the same decision.

Why Production Crypto Infrastructure Defaults To Bare Metal

The case for bare metal in production comes down to four operational realities: performance variance, storage behavior, cost structure, and stack control.

Performance: Validators Do Not Like Variance

In validator operations, raw throughput matters, but variance often matters more. When a node shares hardware with other tenants, noisy-neighbor effects can show up as CPU contention, inconsistent disk IO, and network jitter that makes block propagation less predictable.

Dedicated bare metal reduces those sources of variance because the hardware is not shared with other tenants. As such, bare metal can provide a better experience than virtualized environments for high-performance node infrastructure.

For a validator with meaningful stake, the goal is not maximum peak performance but minimum performance variance over sustained operation. Even small performance fluctuations can translate to missed votes, slower catch-up after restarts, and degraded reliability during periods of network stress.

Storage And State Growth: Disk IO Becomes The Bottleneck

A lot of infra conversations focus on CPU and memory, but for many chains and node types, disk becomes the gating factor.

As chain state grows, validators and RPC nodes need reliable storage throughput. If storage performance degrades, you feel it in longer catch-up times, slower replays, and higher operational risk during periods of heavy disk activity.

One practical issue in public cloud is credit-based storage performance, where throughput can degrade after burst credits are consumed. For validators that need consistently high disk performance, this creates real performance cliffs under sustained load.

With bare metal, you choose the exact NVMe configuration and filesystem layout. There are no burst credits, no throttling thresholds, and no surprises during sustained writes.

Costs: Bandwidth-Heavy Systems And Metered Egress

For production infra, pay-as-you-go often becomes pay-for-every-surprise.

Two cost drivers show up repeatedly:

• Bandwidth egress - Peer-to-peer networks and node APIs can be chatty, and metered egress can dominate your bill.
• Usage spikes - Upgrades, volatility events, and network incidents can create sharp demand spikes that turn into sharp billing spikes.

Cloud compute and bandwidth can be dramatically more expensive than bare metal equivalents, and egress is especially punishing for bandwidth-hungry P2P systems. Usage-based metering also introduces cost unpredictability during network activity spikes, hitting hardest at the exact moments when validators need stability most.

For teams running always-on infrastructure across multiple networks, this cost unpredictability becomes a real operational burden. Fixed-cost dedicated hardware makes capacity planning straightforward and removes billing surprises from the equation entirely.

Control And Reliability: Tuning The Full Stack

Bare metal tends to win when you need to be precise about CPU characteristics, NVMe layout, filesystem choices, RAM capacity, and networking. In practice, teams running serious node infrastructure care about selecting specific hardware profiles and tuning them end-to-end.

Cloud can be extremely reliable for many workloads. Its operational model can hide hardware failures, migrate workloads, and provide resilient managed services in ways most teams cannot replicate alone.

But validators and always-on node services often optimize for a different definition of reliability: consistent performance, predictable failure behavior, and the ability to control the stack end-to-end. When something goes wrong on dedicated hardware, the failure mode is local, visible, and diagnosable. When something goes wrong on shared cloud infrastructure, the failure mode can be opaque and outside your control.

How RockawayX Approaches Infrastructure

Most crypto infrastructure operators rent capacity from third-party providers. We instead own and operate our own data centers, develop and test our own hardware, and conduct R&D into emerging technologies for continual improvements.

Since 2020, our engineering and research teams have supported protocols to launch, sustain, and improve their performance. Today, we're consistently a top performer on Ethereum, Solana, and other supported networks, and that performance record is built on hardware we selected, configured, and maintain.

Our infrastructure division is staffed by engineers who are experts in both traditional (Web2) infrastructure and crypto-native systems—a rare combination. It makes it possible for us to build bespoke hardware configurations, monitor them around the clock, and iterate on performance in ways that generic hosting providers cannot match.

And, importantly, our infrastructure efforts contribute to other RockawayX divisions.

In addition to infrastructure, we operate a venture fund, a credit fund that is one of the most active liquidity providers in DeFi, a smart contract security business (Ackee), and a solver and on-chain market making division. These verticals reinforce each other: the credit fund provides liquidity that makes the solver division faster and more resilient, the infrastructure provides the low-latency backbone, and the venture side identifies protocols worth supporting early.

For infrastructure specifically, this cross-functional positioning means we're not making bare metal versus cloud decisions in isolation. We make them in the context of running validators, powering solvers that settle cross-chain transactions, providing RPC services, etc.

The DoubleZero Collaboration

A concrete example of our operator-first approach is our work with DoubleZero, a high-performance fiber network purpose-built for decentralized systems (starting with Solana). DoubleZero replaces the public internet's limitations for blockchain traffic with dedicated low-latency fiber infrastructure. The protocol filters spam at the network edge using FPGA-powered devices, verifies transaction signatures at wire speed, and routes clean traffic over private, congestion-free bandwidth. For validators, the result is faster slots, fewer missed blocks, and dramatically reduced packet volume before anything reaches the consensus layer.

We backed DoubleZero's $28 million funding round and became the first European contributor to the network. The collaboration has been hands-on from the start: in early 2025, we installed a physical Point of Presence (PoP) in Frankfurt, housed in the same data center as Deutsche Börse's servers. From there, we connected Prague via a private DWDM fiber line achieving round-trip latency under 7 milliseconds. Two DoubleZero Devices (DZDs) were published on-chain, two validator-facing endpoints went live, and we monitored live routing behavior under real-world conditions with close collaboration on performance benchmarks and network configuration.

The partnership continued to expand. In August 2025, we launched a DoubleZero co-branded validator on Solana as part of DoubleZero's 3 million SOL Delegation Program, which delegates stake to high-quality operators in underrepresented geographies to improve global network resiliency. In 2026, we’re continuing our work with the team.

This kind of hands-on partnership, where infrastructure operators physically deploy hardware, contribute bandwidth, and validate performance in production, is the standard we apply across our infrastructure operations. It reflects a broader conviction: if you cannot envision yourself bootstrapping and sustaining a decentralized network's physical layer, you do not fully understand the system you are operating on.

When Cloud Still Makes Sense

Cloud is often the right tool when you need speed more than efficiency.

It is a strong fit for:

• Spinning up testnet infrastructure quickly.
• Benchmarking in multiple regions.
• Short-lived indexing or backfill jobs.
• Prototyping infra changes before moving to production.

The operational model of the cloud, where provisioning is fast, teardown is free, and you pay only for what you use, is genuinely superior for workloads that are bursty, short-lived, or experimental. The tradeoffs only shift when workloads become always-on, bandwidth-heavy, and performance-sensitive.

A common pattern is to use cloud where speed is the main requirement, and reserve bare metal for mainnet workloads where predictable performance and predictable costs matter most.

How to decide

The decision is less about ideology and more about what you are optimizing for.

Choose Bare Metal If:

• You are running production validators with meaningful stake.
• You cannot tolerate performance variance.
• You expect sustained high network and disk activity.
• You want predictable monthly costs.
• You need to select and tune specific hardware profiles.

Choose Cloud If:

• You are in an early phase and need rapid iteration.
• Workloads are bursty and short-lived.
• You need to test multiple regions quickly.
• Speed of provisioning matters more than long-term cost efficiency.

For always-on crypto infrastructure, cloud optimizes for speed and flexibility. Bare metal optimizes for consistent performance, predictable costs, and end-to-end control. We default to bare metal for production because that is what best matches the operational realities of running critical infrastructure for decentralized networks.

Conclusion

The bare metal versus cloud question does not have one universal answer. But it does have a right frame: what are you optimizing for, and over what time horizon?

For early-stage teams, cloud is a reasonable starting point. It moves fast, costs little upfront, and lets you iterate without committing to hardware. The tradeoffs only compound once workloads become always-on, bandwidth-heavy, and performance-sensitive.

For serious production validators and node operators, the calculus shifts. The unpredictability of shared environments, metered egress, and burst-based storage starts to work against you. Bare metal is not cheaper by default, but it is more predictable, more controllable, and better matched to infrastructure that needs to perform consistently over years, not sprints.

For us, this is not a tradeoff we revisit often. We made the decision to own and operate our own hardware because it is the right foundation for everything else we build on top: validator performance, solver speed, DoubleZero contributions, and the reliability that operators and protocol teams depend on.

The physical layer is not an abstraction for us. It is the job.

FAQs

Is bare metal always cheaper than cloud?

Not always. For short-lived, bursty workloads, cloud can be cost-effective. For always-on systems with heavy bandwidth and sustained disk usage, dedicated capacity tends to be easier to budget for because you are paying for fixed hardware rather than metered usage.

Why do validators care so much about performance variance?

Validators are sensitive to unpredictable latency and IO, because variance can show up as missed votes, slower catch-up, and degraded reliability under stress. Dedicated servers remove one major source of variance: competing tenants on the same underlying hardware.

Does running on bare metal mean you cannot use cloud at all?

No. Many teams use both. Cloud works well for bursty, short-lived workloads where speed of provisioning matters. Bare metal is the better fit for mainnet infrastructure that needs to perform consistently over time.

What does RockawayX actually run on bare metal?

RockawayX runs production validators on Ethereum (via Lido), Solana, and other supported networks, as well as RPC services, solver infrastructure, and DoubleZero network endpoints. All production workloads run on dedicated bare metal servers in data centers the firm owns and operates in Europe, with no public cloud services used for production infrastructure.

How does RockawayX's infrastructure connect to the rest of the firm?

RockawayX operates across venture, credit, infrastructure, security (Ackee), and on-chain market making. The infrastructure division provides the low-latency backbone that powers the firm's solver and settlement operations, which in turn are backed by the credit fund's liquidity. This cross-functional structure means infrastructure decisions are made in the context of real production workloads, not hypothetical benchmarks.

What is DoubleZero and why does it matter for validators?

DoubleZero is a high-performance fiber network designed to replace the public internet for blockchain traffic. It filters spam and verifies transaction signatures at the network edge using specialized hardware, then routes clean traffic over private, low-latency fiber. For validators, this means faster slots, fewer missed blocks, and significantly less compute wasted on duplicate transactions. While Solana is the first supported network, the protocol is chain-agnostic and built to support any high-throughput distributed system.

How is RockawayX involved with DoubleZero?

RockawayX both invested in DoubleZero's $28 million funding round and became the first European contributor to the network. The team physically deployed Points of Presence in Frankfurt and Prague, connected them via a private fiber line with under 7ms round-trip latency, and launched a co-branded validator on Solana as part of DoubleZero's 3 million SOL Delegation Program. The firm is now working on 100G links across Europe to expand the network further.

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