Luganodes

Luganodes is a Swiss-operated, non-custodial blockchain infrastructure provider that builds and runs validator nodes for institutional clients across more than 40 proof-of-stake networks. The company launched in 2022 out of the Lugano Plan B program — a joint initiative between the City of Lugano and Tether aimed at accelerating blockchain adoption as the financial backbone for the Swiss city. That institutional origin shapes everything about how Luganodes operates: its compliance posture, its client profile, and its insistence on non-custodial architecture that keeps asset control entirely with the client.

Origins and Team

Luganodes was created directly from infrastructure and relationships developed under Lugano Plan B, giving it an unusual founding story in the validator space — anchored to a public-private municipal initiative rather than the typical crypto startup path. The company is led by CEO Anuj Shankar, who came to blockchain infrastructure from McKinsey and Microsoft, where he ran cloud and platform engineering teams across high-growth technology companies in Southeast Asia. That background informs the company's emphasis on enterprise-grade operations, institutional service delivery, and compliance-first infrastructure.

What Luganodes Does

The core offering is non-custodial staking: clients delegate or stake assets to Luganodes-operated validators while retaining full custody in their existing wallets or custodial solutions. Luganodes never holds private keys or takes custody of staked assets.

Around that core, the company has built four product lines:

Luganodes Staking covers direct validator delegations across all supported networks, targeting institutions that want straightforward access to staking yields without operational overhead.

Managed Nodes is a white-label product where Luganodes runs a fully branded validator on behalf of a client — a foundation, exchange, or custodian that wants to operate a named validator but outsource the infrastructure.

Staking API provides enterprise-ready programmatic integration so custodians, exchanges, and fintech platforms can embed staking into their own products without building validator infrastructure.

RPC Infrastructure gives production applications low-latency, scalable access to supported networks, complementing the staking services with data access.

Security, Compliance, and Track Record

Luganodes positions compliance as a primary differentiator in a market where institutional clients face strict internal standards for vendor selection. The company holds ISO 27001:2022 certification, SOC 2 Type II attestation, and maintains GDPR alignment — making it one of a small number of staking providers to carry all three. The infrastructure has been independently assessed for slashing risk by Quantstamp, and institutional clients can access Chainproof insurance coverage.

Operationally, the company maintains a zero slashing record across all networks since launch and reports 99.9%+ uptime across its validator fleet. Validators run on bare-metal deployments in Tier IV data centers with automated failover and 24/7 SRE monitoring.

Scale and Client Base

As of mid-2025, Luganodes reports more than $2 billion in total staked assets across its infrastructure, with peak months exceeding $4 billion. The company serves 60+ institutional clients spanning custodians, exchanges, ETP issuers, venture capital funds, corporate digital asset treasuries, and blockchain foundations. Named clients include BitGo, Anchorage Digital, Ledger Enterprise, Hex Trust, Bitfinex, Bitvavo, CoinList, Tether, and Borderless Capital.

Solana Presence

Luganodes operates a Solana validator that has established a meaningful institutional footprint on the network. In Q3 2025, the validator maintained an average stake of approximately 1.48 million SOL, generated 24,921 SOL in delegator stake rewards plus 2,115 SOL in block rewards, and delivered a delegator APY of 6.9%, outperforming the network average during much of the quarter. Voting effectiveness reached 99.90% with a voting latency of 1.037 slots and sustained uptime of 99.92%.

Luganodes holds a genesis validator position on Solana, meaning it participated in the network's initial validator set — a distinction that signals early commitment to the ecosystem. For institutional clients already holding SOL through custodians like BitGo or Anchorage, the ability to delegate directly to a compliant, insured validator that those custodians already work with reduces integration friction considerably.

Supported Networks

Beyond Solana, Luganodes operates top-tier validators on Ethereum, Polygon, Polkadot, Sui, TRON, and Hyperliquid, among more than 40 networks total. The Solana-focused blog reports the company publishes — covering quarterly validator performance and annual ecosystem analysis — indicate active, ongoing participation in the Solana validator community rather than passive delegations.

Ecosystem Fit

Luganodes occupies a specific position in the Solana validator landscape: it is not a community staking pool for retail delegators, nor a native liquid staking protocol. It is an institutional infrastructure layer — the validator that a bank-grade custodian, a sovereign wealth fund's digital asset arm, or a blockchain foundation routes its SOL through when operational compliance, legal agreements, and insurance coverage are prerequisites. As staking increasingly enters regulated investment vehicles, including crypto ETFs with staking yield components, that institutional layer becomes more structurally important to how Solana's staked supply is managed.