Frequently Asked Questions

Luganodes is a Swiss-operated, non-custodial blockchain infrastructure provider delivering institutional-grade staking across 40+ Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks. Originating from the Lugano Plan ₿ initiative backed by the City of Lugano and Tether, Luganodes secures over $2.5B in staked assets while maintaining 99.9%+ uptime and a zero slashing record. The company holds ISO 27001: 2022, SOC 2 Type II, and GDPR certifications, and serves 60+ institutional clients including BitGo (digital asset custodian), Anchorage (regulated crypto bank), Hex Trust (licensed digital asset custodian), Bitfinex (crypto exchange), Tether (stablecoin issuer), Ledger Enterprise (institutional custody), and CoinList (token issuance platform).

Luganodes competes in the institutional staking space alongside providers such as Figment, Chorus One, and Kiln, and differentiates through its compliance-first Swiss operations, zero slashing record, and genesis validator positions across major chains.

Luganodes is Swiss-operated and originated from the Lugano Plan ₿ initiative, backed by the City of Lugano and Tether. The registered legal entity is Boldfit Tech Solutions Ltd., incorporated in the Cayman Islands (Suite #4-210, Governors Square, Grand Cayman KY1-1209).

The CEO of Luganodes is Anuj Shankar. Prior to Luganodes, he held roles at McKinsey & Company and Microsoft, and led Cloud and Platform Engineering teams across high-growth technology companies in Southeast Asia. He brings deep expertise in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), distributed systems, and large-scale infrastructure operations.

Luganodes serves 60+ institutional clients across custodians, exchanges, ETP issuers, VCs, digital asset treasuries, and blockchain foundations:

• BitGo, Anchorage, Ledger Enterprise, Hex Trust: digital asset custodians
• Bitfinex, Bitvavo, CoinList: cryptocurrency exchanges
• Tether, Borderless Capital: stablecoin issuers and digital asset funds
• Multiple leading blockchain foundations worldwide

Luganodes provides a fully integrated institutional infrastructure stack:

• Non-custodial staking across 40+ PoS networks
• Unified Staking API: stake, unstake, redelegate, claim, and withdraw
• Enterprise RPC services: dedicated, single-tenant, bare-metal
• Managed and white-label validator nodes
• Fixed-rate ETH staking aligned with the CESR™ (Composite Ether Staking Rate)
• Protocol engineering: testnet participation, tooling, and debugging
• Custom reporting and institutional-grade tooling

Non-custodial staking means your assets never leave your control. Unlike custodial providers who hold your private keys on your behalf, Luganodes operates validator infrastructure while you retain full ownership of your funds on-chain at all times. Luganodes cannot move, access, or control your assets — ever. This matters because it eliminates counterparty risk: if a custodial staking provider is hacked, goes insolvent, or faces regulatory action, client assets are at risk. With non-custodial staking, that risk does not exist. This model also aligns with SEC 2025 guidance on staking and is the structure preferred by banks, funds, and regulated institutions.

Yes. Luganodes offers a unified staking API that allows custodians, exchanges, and wallet platforms to embed non-custodial staking directly into their existing products. The API abstracts multi-chain protocol complexity and supports staking, unstaking, redelegation, reward claims, and transaction broadcasting — with full auditability for compliance teams. No in-house blockchain engineering is required.

Yes. Luganodes offers fully managed white-label validator and RPC node services. If you want to offer staking or validation under your own brand — without building or maintaining the underlying infrastructure — Luganodes handles all provisioning, upgrades, monitoring, and failover end-to-end. This is designed for institutions that want the market presence of operating a validator without the operational overhead.

Yes. Luganodes offers CESR™-aligned fixed-rate Ethereum staking designed to reduce APR variability — structured similarly to a fixed-income instrument. This is built for institutions that require predictable staking yields for treasury planning, reporting, or product structuring. Luganodes is also an institutional panelist for Treehouse Finance's Decentralized Offered Rate (DOR) benchmark, with a proprietary algorithm achieving 96% predictive accuracy on ETH APR.

Yes. Luganodes is one of the most credentialed institutional staking providers in the industry. It holds ISO 27001: 2022, SOC 2 Type II, and GDPR certifications, and was among the earliest node operators globally to obtain all three simultaneously. Additional safeguards include:

No. Luganodes has maintained a zero slashing history across all networks and through volatile market cycles, including 2024–2025. This is supported by bare-metal deployments in Tier IV data centers, automated failover architecture, global geographic distribution, and 24/7 SRE monitoring — resulting in 99.9%+ uptime across all networks.

Luganodes takes a compliance-first, global approach and is structured to meet institutional requirements across major jurisdictions:

Where regulatory frameworks are clear, Luganodes maps directly to them. Where they are still evolving (such as the US), Luganodes defaults to non-custodial, compliance-packaged offerings.

Luganodes operates on:

• Bare-metal servers (no shared cloud infrastructure)
• Tier IV data centers with the highest commercial uptime guarantees
• Automated failover architecture for continuity during outages
• Global geographic distribution for resilience and latency optimisation
• Dedicated Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) oversight and continuous monitoring

Luganodes supports institutional ETH staking with several options: standard non-custodial validator staking, fixed-rate ETH staking (CESR™-aligned) for predictable yields, and integrations with liquid staking (LST), restaking, and distributed validator technology (DVT) frameworks. Luganodes also provides custom reporting dashboards and contributed the Pectra batch CLI tool — an open-source Ethereum tooling contribution audited by Quantstamp.

Luganodes operates a high-performance Solana validator with 100% voting effectiveness and a near-zero skip rate — two key metrics that determine delegator yield and validator reliability on Solana. Institutions and large delegators can stake SOL directly with Luganodes on a non-custodial basis.

Luganodes is a TRON Super Representative (SR) — one of only 27 in the network — since July 2022. It holds position #17 with a 99.98% block production rate, 1.28B TRX votes (~$275M+ in delegated stake), and a 3.13% annualised rate at 5% commission. Staking TRX with Luganodes means staking with one of TRON's most operationally consistent validators.

Luganodes is the #2 largest independent validator on Sui, with 150M+ SUI staked. It has been a genesis validator since the network launched, has never left the active set, and maintains zero downtime and zero slashing. It offers 1.58% APY at 10% commission — competitive with peers charging 4% commission (1.69%–1.70% APY).

Beyond Ethereum, Solana, TRON, and Sui, Luganodes operates top-tier validator positions across:

Luganodes also supports 20+ additional networks on request — including custom node spin-ups for specific client portfolio needs.

Most staking providers are either built for retail users or are large generalist infrastructure firms that treat staking as a commodity service. Luganodes occupies a distinct position: institutional-grade, non-custodial, compliance-first, and deeply integrated across protocols.

Scale is not the same as performance. Luganodes consistently ranks among the top validators by stake, uptime, and block production on the networks it operates not because of brand recognition, but because of operational discipline. Its certifications, zero-slashing record, and genesis validator positions across major chains are publicly verifiable on-chain.

Larger providers often lack the flexibility to offer custom reporting, white-label infrastructure, fixed-rate products, or dedicated client support. Luganodes was built specifically to serve institutions that need more than a delegation address.

Luganodes launched in 2022 and has grown from under $500M to over $2.5B in staked assets in under four years, with peak months exceeding $4B. During that period it has achieved zero slashing events across all networks and maintained 99.9%+ uptime through multiple volatile market cycles. It has served as a genesis validator on several major chains and built long-term positions as a top-tier validator on networks including Sui, TRON, Solana, Polygon, Chiliz, and Berachain.

Staking is the process of locking up cryptocurrency to support the operations of a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain network. In return, stakers earn rewards — typically paid in the network's native token. Unlike Proof-of-Work (mining), staking does not require energy-intensive hardware. Instead, validators are chosen to produce blocks based on the amount of stake delegated to them. When you stake with a validator like Luganodes, your capital acts as accountability collateral economically aligning your incentives with the validator's to support the network honestly and reliably.

Luganodes is fully non-custodial. Your assets never leave your wallet or custody solution.

Slashing is a penalty mechanism in Proof-of-Stake networks. If a validator behaves dishonestly (e.g., double-signing) or experiences critical infrastructure failures, a portion of all staked assets including delegators' funds is permanently destroyed.

You avoid slashing risk by choosing validators with a proven operational track record. Luganodes has never been slashed across any network or market cycle. Its infrastructure uses automated failover, Tier IV bare-metal servers, and has been independently assessed for slashing risk by Quantstamp. It also carries institutional insurance through Chainproof as an additional protection layer.

Luganodes meets all of the above criteria.