Bitcoin exchange and mining giant BTCC has donated and deployed 100 full bitcoin nodes across five continents to support the bitcoin network.

Full bitcoin nodes, which enforce the rules of the bitcoin network by serving a full copy of the bitcoin blockchain and validating blocks and transactions, have been in decline of late, arguably leading the network towards centralisation. The network has seen a 19% decrease in viable nodes over the past year to 5,280 at the time of publishing.

While bitcoin miners are rewarded with bitcoins for generating transaction confirmations, nodes are not compensated for hosting the blockchain database and relaying transactions. BTCC's chief operating officer Samson Mow said that the company deployed the nodes in order to do its part in helping maintain the bitcoin network.

Mow said: "As a proponent and believer in bitcoin, we see both supporting core development and well as the bitcoin network itself as our duty. The nodes we deployed today will help to preserve the network as the number of full bitcoin nodes continues to decrease."

BTCC's chief technology officer Mikael Wang said ten of the nodes were set up as DNS seed nodes. BTCC DNS seed nodes provide the bitcoin community with secure and trusted full nodes to help new nodes synchronise with the network.

Wang said: "BTCC has deployed ten powerful DNS seed nodes with unrestricted network access that are publicly available for anyone to use when hosting their own bitcoin core nodes. Simply connect to seed.btcc.com:8333."

BTCC deployed 19% of the nodes in Germany; 19% in Singapore; 13% in China; 21% of the nodes in the United States; and 7% each in Australia, Brazil, Ireland, and Japan. A list of all the full bitcoin nodes that BTCC has deployed is available here.

BTCC's chief executive officer Bobby Lee added: "Most reachable full bitcoin nodes are located in the US. So we intentionally distributed the nodes we donated in countries that rank low on the full bitcoin node geographic distribution list. We encourage other bitcoin companies to join us in contributing to the bitcoin ecosystem by sponsoring powerful full nodes."

BTCC was originally founded as BTCChina in 2011, and is the longest-running and one of the largest bitcoin exchanges worldwide. BTCC is involved in every area of the bitcoin ecosystem - mining, exchanges, payment processing, consumer wallets, and blockchain engraving.