Expanding Our Future Internet Capacity With ThreeFold
Continuing my deep-dive series into the ThreeFold ecosystem, I sat down last week with Sacha Obeegadoo, who leads as the Head of Marketing and Ecosystems for the ThreeFold, to go beyond the surface of the Decentralized Internet and speak about the network's efforts around farming and expanding the future internet capacity. Enjoy.
Kyle: What is ThreeFold’s Role in the Future of the Internet?
Sacha Obeegadoo: As many know, Bitcoin has transformed the way we exchange value. It’s a decentralized alternative to banks, doesn’t require intermediaries, and permits people to exchange value across borders. In a way, ThreeFold was inspired by the spark of Bitcoin. In its early days, between 2010 and 2015, the technology reminded our co-founders of the original Web 1.0. The web was then decentralized and peer-to-peer before the injection of centralized corporations and governments, turning the Internet into much more. During that time, our co-founders acknowledged that the only way to achieve a genuinely peer-to-peer open source internet and cloud would be to start from scratch because the current version of the Internet was centralized. So they embarked on that mission together.
A few years later, in 2022, we’re about to launch the better version of ThreeFold, the world’s first fully comprehensive, full-stack, open-source, peer-to-peer internet infrastructure. So what does that mean? Similar to how Bitcoin removes the need to have any intermediary and monetary systems, ThreeFold removes the need for any centralized server internet systems, which would allow anyone to communicate and exchange value peer to peer without any server in the middle.
How is that a game-changer? On today’s Internet, every time I would send you a message, or even in this call, we’re using Zoom to record this recording. Zoom can tamper with this information and store it in their data centers to use the services’ free offering. On ThreeFold’s model, that wouldn’t happen because the power would be given back to the users. There wouldn’t be any server in the middle able to tamper with or collect information without us giving permission.
Kyle: How does Farming play a role in expanding internet capacity at ThreeFold?
Sacha: Farming is our sustainable alternative to mining, like mining, extracting minerals from our Earth, it is not a very sustainable practice, in essence, and farming for us was a bit more connotated with something more sustainable. So that’s why we use the term farming. So similar to how mining is all about adding computing resources to a blockchain network to decentralize its operation.
Farming is the process of adding internet capacity to decentralize the internet grid, which we call the internet grid, in our case, the ThreeFold Grid. And because of our decentralized operating system, zeros boot it. So the process of forming is straightforward. Any hardware being Intel or the processor chip powered, whether it be a server, hardware, computer, minicomputer, or even a laptop, can be converted into nodes and provide the internet capacity, the storage capacity, and the computing power of that device to the whole network. The other three-four blocks blockchain, and every month for the storage and compute provided to the network, farmers earn ThreeFold Tokens ($TFT), the native token of, ThreeFold.
Kyle: Is there a DAO to govern the overall network that may help or oversees the farming reward structures?
Sacha: Absolutely, the role of the DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) allows all the people that become validators, and also the delegated stakeholders that stake to those validators to have a say in the rewards, the reward mechanisms involved in the ecosystem, i.e., farming rewards. The Proof of Utilization, another reward mechanism that we have in the ecosystem, on the utilization side and the APIs, works to incentivize the ecosystem and the future developments of the grid.
We are researching a lot and looking at several different mechanisms that could support a maximum decentralization across the ecosystem, once the Tendermint protocol will be established, of course, will launch the validators and they will take over the decisions around the incentivization of the network, as well as the future developments of the grid. We’re still researching to decentralize ThreeFold completely. Our goal is that in a few years from now there is no need for any team in the middle of ThreeFold, but that it’s a truly distributed peer-to-peer decentralized internet network owned by humanity.
To learn more about ThreeFold, visit www.threefold.io
Writer’s note: The above interview has been edited and reduced in summary for this article.
ThreeFold is decentralizing the Internet by tapping into the combined processing power of over 2 billion computers worldwide, including servers, desktops, and laptops, to create an open-source, peer-to-peer, carbon-negative Internet for the deployment of any current and future technology. By applying blockchain technology to the Cloud, ThreeFold solves the security and autonomy issues of the Internet while also allowing the infrastructure to scale to anywhere electricity and network exist, using less energy and at a more affordable cost than any comparable alternative.
