/biz/ - Business & Finance

I think we can work out the income you could make from a node based on the number of monetised API requests that are being made nowadays by traditional businesses and the amount they charge.
>https://nordicapis.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-pricing-your-api/
Assume that smart contracts requiring external data become mainstream and the crypto API economy reaches the same size as the regular API economy now.
Let’s take the “hobbyist” from nordicapis.com as equivalent to a NEET running a chainlink node. That’s 688,991 calls per month. Per year it’s 8,267,892 calls. Say you charge $0.01 per call, which nordicapi reports, and is the minimum Oraclize charges. That’s $82,678.92 a year. IBM Watson charges $0.0025 per call which would be $20,669.73 per year.

Docusign says for their API that "You may not exceed 1,000 API requests per account per hour". So 1000 per hour is 24,000 a day, times 1 cent per job is $87,600 per year per node operator. With 19,000 node operators (Sergey's number) serving 1000 API requests per hour that's a total revenue of all nodes of $1,664,400,000 per year. That’s only 0.08% of $2.2 trillion (estimated total value of API economy in 2018).