In the world of Web3, data flows nonstop. But making sense of it can feel almost impossible.
Fragmented across thousands of protocols, and riddled with cryptic structures, blockchain data changes constantly and can remain stubbornly inaccessible to companies trying to build on it.
For even the most sophisticated institutional players, it can be hard to answer a simple question, such as how much of a stablecoin moved through the system last week.
“It’s almost a magical experience for Web3 enterprises.”
Andrew McFarlane, Validation Cloud
“You shouldn’t need to know how to understand protocols or how they work at a deep level,” said Andrew McFarlane, Toronto-based Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Validation Cloud. “Just like you don’t need to know HTTP to use the Internet.”
Validation Cloud saw a gap. In a world flooded with complex blockchain data, what if you could ask a simple question and get a simple answer?
The company’s vision would require solving some of the hardest problems in Web3, problems that demanded not just technical ingenuity, but infrastructure that could scale globally and securely. So, they turned to a longtime partner, AWS, to go deeper.
Staking the claim
Validation Cloud’s vision started to take shape four years ago when the founding team, spread across Canada and the United States, came together to build the foundational layer for Web3 finance.
Headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, Validation Cloud began by focusing on two essential services: staking and node APIs. From the start, AWS was part of the picture, supporting Validation Cloud’s infrastructure as they scaled these early services.
“Those are the foundational layers of Web3,” McFarlane said, explaining that staking helps secure blockchain networks by supporting the consensus mechanisms that keep them operational and trustworthy. At the same time, node APIs act as the access point, allowing enterprises, developers, and applications to reliably connect to these decentralized networks.
In McFarlane’s words, the node API serves as a global connectivity layer for Web3, engineered for high throughput and low latency.
Validation Cloud’s early success was built on performance and trust. McFarlane said its staking service now secures billions of dollars in assets, and its node API ranks as the world’s fastest, as measured by CompareNodes, a Web3 benchmarking company.
Those achievements have earned Validation Cloud a growing roster of institutional and enterprise clients.
But infrastructure was only the beginning. For the team, the bigger goal was unlocking the intelligence hidden within Web3’s scattered, chaotic data.
Mavrik thinking
Validation Cloud’s next move was to build Mavrik, an AI engine designed specifically for blockchain. Unlike general-purpose AI models that aim to cover every domain broadly, Mavrik dives deep into Web3 protocols, translating decentralized activity into real-time, usable insights.
The goal is to build the AI-powered Web3 equivalent of Bloomberg, which offers searchable real-time data for the traditional financial markets.
Mavrik connects directly to the protocol layer, and provides network-specific logic, and actionable insights through a simple interface.
Enterprises can ask questions like, ‘What volume of USDC moved across protocols last month?’ or ‘Which tokenized real-world assets are gaining traction?’ These are queries that previously required days or weeks of manual data extraction and interpretation.
“It’s almost a magical experience for Web3 enterprises, because the industry is used to going through so many different steps just to get the kinds of answers they can now get by simply prompting with natural language,” McFarlane said.
Validation Cloud has already begun onboarding early users to its Data x AI product and is rolling out the platform in stages. According to McFarlane, some protocols that had built their own in-house data solutions are already migrating over to use Validation Cloud’s system instead.
Behind the scenes, AWS has played a critical role in Validation Cloud’s evolution, from securing blockchain networks through staking and node APIs to helping launch Mavrik.
“When I mentioned that we ranked number one for global performance with our node API product, it’s in part because AWS’s global infrastructure gave us the building blocks to make that possible, and to make it scalable,” McFarlane said.
Hardwired for scale
Beyond providing global, high-throughput infrastructure, AWS helped Validation Cloud achieve SOC 2 Type 2 certification, a critical step in earning the trust of institutional clients. It also gave the company a running start on scaling its AI platform, with tools like Amazon Bedrock helping accelerate model development.
“There’s not only great support from AWS on the commercial side, but there’s also a real understanding of the technical domains, specifically for blockchain and AI,” McFarlane added.
The collaboration between Validation Cloud and AWS will be visible in Toronto this week at Consensus 2025, where they are co-hosting the AWS VIP Welcome Reception alongside Caldera, Privy, and Zero Hash.
As Validation Cloud rolls out early to Data x AI powered by Mavrik and grows its institutional footprint following a $15-million USD Series A round, McFarlane sees AWS as key to moving faster and scaling bigger.
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Feature image courtesy of Unsplash. Photo by charlesdeluvio.