Flare has announced the onboarding of professional infrastructure providers including Ankr, Figment, Restake, Luganodes and NorthStake, as both validators and data providers for the network’s native oracles.

Flare becomes the first smart contract platform for whom these institutional validators also provide decentralized data feeds for builders on the network. By combining validation with data provision, Flare will be able to give developers fully decentralized access to the broadest range of data, at scale and for minimal cost.

The world revolves around data, and securely bringing in real-world data via oracles is critical for many decentralized applications. In this way, Flare aims to expand what is possible with blockchain, enabling new use cases through the provision of a far wider variety of decentralized data.

Flare currently has a total of 91 network validators across the globe, all of whom also act as data providers for the Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO), placing the FTSO among the most decentralized and reliable oracles available to developers.

Hugo Philion, Flare CEO & Co-founder, said, “The fact that institutional validators of the quality and scale of Ankr, Restake and Luganodes are willing to extend their business model to also provide decentralized data specifically on Flare gives proof positive to Flare’s vision for a fully decentralized network for data.”

Anuj Shankar, CEO of Luganodes, added, “Luganodes has always been committed to offering institutional-grade services in the blockchain infrastructure space and we find Flare’s new model of decentralized data provision very interesting. It’s not something we’ve done before, but being part of the Flare ecosystem as both a validator and a data provider to their native oracle aligns perfectly with our mission to provide reliable and secure blockchain infrastructure solutions – and we are keen to see how it improves decentralized data access for developers.”