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So it's basically a mirrored server to help Zappl performance? Does it carry the entire Steem blockchain on it as well so that it's not bottlenecked and dependent on other Steem servers? I've always been curious how many full instances of the blockchain there are around the world.

Not sure how many full there is https://status.steemnodes.com/
Uh yeah i guess you could say its for performance reasons.

What this said ^