ThreeFold’s Decentralized Internet
March 17, 2022
Over the last few months, I’ve been peeling back the many layers that are reshaping our decentralized future. Much of my research has been around decentralized applications (dApps) and the expanding connection points bridging use from the web of yesterday (web2) to that of tomorrow (web3). Before we can interact with dApps at scale, we need further evolved infrastructure and to some capacity, we must rethink the internet and how it operates. This week I sat down with Kristof De Spiegeleer, Founder of ThreeFold who’s been thinking this way for more than a decade, building the Decentralized Internet we need for tomorrow and beyond.
With the efforts of he and his team, the future is looking bright and well connected. Here’s our conversation together on the Decentralized Internet to Quantum-Safe Storage, to Farming, and more. Enjoy.
Kyle: What is Decentralized Internet?
Kristof De Spiegeleer: Today, the Internet is way more centralized. And people realize you have these large, complex data centers which hold our data. Since the Internet became so important in our lives, they have our applications and anything we do today. But whenever we do something, our data travels to a data center somewhere very far away, then travels back to where we are all going through these monster data centers.
Less than twenty companies worldwide own more than 80% of the Internet capacity. That, of course, has many downsides. For instance, how do we know the information we receive is accurate?
We need to go back to a different type of Internet where we can all participate, a little bit like what a solar panel does for electricity. For example, rather than taking electricity from a nuclear plant in your country, you can put a solar panel on your roof and generate electricity for the people around you. We’ve done the same thing, not for electricity, but for what we call “Internet capacity,” which is the compute storage network capacity. Now any computer can download this software; we have instantly become a part of the global compute and storage capacity grid. Now, we have become the Internet, we are the Internet, or we give the Internet to the people around us.
For developers, anything which runs on standard computers can be on top of this, so people can use this to deploy their own applications. One no longer has to use centralized locations anymore. It allows us to be freer again, and it’s much faster and more green.
That is what we call a decentralized Internet. It’s more than decentralized, and we like to call it a peer-to-peer Internet. It’s like I give the Internet to my neighbors who can give it to their neighbors, and we give to each other, and it stays local.
What Are Example Use Cases and Applications (or dApps) That We Might See in Action?
Anything that runs on Linux can run on the ThreeFold Grid today. That means anything to do with Blockchain, or old web, or new web, or decentralized web, etc., can run on this “missing layer,” as we call it. We are like an infrastructure layer for everyone else to build on top of, and it’s very generic and open.
There is a network part, a compute part and a storage part. A developer can combine these to become whatever they need for an application. On top of this could also be a blockchain, or it could be a social media app, a website, or something very complicated such as a banking app. Whichever the case, they can all run on the same infrastructure. It’s really up to the community to choose, rather than putting it somewhere centralized, far away from the users, to let us run on our grid much closer to where the users are. This method is greener, faster, and more secure.
What Is Decentralized Storage, and How Is It Quantum-Safe?
Since the 2000s, data centers, cloud and Internet, and storage have been the main issues to resolve. Resolving storage is a massive undertaking as the solution needs to avoid loss and be fast enough and close to where one is. For a large part of the last thirty years, we have been thinking about storage and trying new methods. About fourteen years ago, there was another significant iteration. The change was called “forward-looking error-correcting codes.”
This new method delivers error-correcting codes for reading error-correcting codes, hence any. Why can we use that concept for storage? We tried it nearly fourteen years ago, and we got excellent results.
We got help from Intel and some other smart people because it was way too slow initially. Now it is fast and generically available. Rather than storing information in one location or making copies, which typically happens on a blockchain or in a standard storage system, you will make copies. Most people think that if I don’t want to lose my data, I must always have enough copies to find it back and restore it. However, there are many issues because you can only use encryption or something else to keep it close to you. There can be a lot of information leakage if you do that, and it’s also a lot of overhead. If you want to use four locations, you will need five copies.
Our Quantum-Safe Storage system works more like the Sudoku puzzle. As long as you have enough pieces, the computer is smart enough to determine which pieces go where. And if we have enough of them, the puzzle makes sense. So that’s what we did. While a user doesn’t see it, underneath, the data goes to locations they choose, providing them complete control. The data is also stored in such a way that we do it over 20 locations. To get back to the data, you will have to be physically in 60 locations or 20, know the encryption key, access the data, AND understand the algorithm. We think it’s pretty much impossible, so we call it quantum-safe. Because a quantum computer, as bright as it can be, simply does not have all the information to work with to put the puzzle together because the information is not there. It’s not quantum storage; it’s quantum-safe. You are guaranteed the only person who can get to it, and it doesn’t get replicated, it’s not copied, and you have complete control over where it’s stored. It’s still very efficient, and it’s still very fast, and it can never get corrupted. Even if a disk would have some issues, or it would automatically get recovered, you wouldn’t even see it. This is quantum-safe storage.
What Learnings Have Arrived For You and The Team in This Journey?
So many. This idea started about ten years ago. We had an idea of where we wanted to end up, but there was a lot of trial and error. About five years ago or so, we realized that we had to rebuild an operating system. And then many people were like, “Kristof, you’re out of your mind, you’re going to rebuild an operating system. That’s just too crazy!” Was it? Yeah, but we had no choice because we needed to be closer to the hardware to be more efficient. There are many layers. So we took a Linux kernel and started building this new operating system, Zero-OS, which was a complicated undertaking, making it a minimalistic operating system.
We had to make sure that people could build other things on top of this new operating system. Underlining the infrastructure, TFChain blockchain controls the operating system itself, but it’s not Blockchain. It has these primitives insights about storage, networking, and so on, like the storage system. There’s no shell or server interface. It’s a safe operating system close to the hardware, making this third-generation possible. We realized that the closer you were to the hardware, the easier it became as fewer things to consider. Now people can download it, install it, and play with it.
You Just Established the World’s First Neighborhood Cloud in Partnership with Paradise Hills; What Impact Will This Have on Future Neighborhoods?
It’s an amazing project, and we need to thank the people from Paradise Hills. In Dubai, there is a significant amount of data center capacity, and it is running out as the area is growing a lot. As an alternative to just building more data centers, we are working with real estate developers to give every home some data center capacity in the neighborhood, instantly providing them a compute and storage network. For this project, there are about 170 homes that are interconnected, creating a distributed data center. A true decentralized data center, if you will, where the storage and the compute capacities are distributed over these homes, but in such a way that the data can never get corrupted or lost. All the people now become the capacity providers for this new sort of distributed data center.
Now governments or anyone in that area who wants to have storage or more compute can go to data centers, but they can also get it from that neighborhood instead. Cost and security-wise, it’s incredible, and it’s super reliable because of what we just spoke about.
The project is a win-win. A win for our partner company developing the homes as a way to reward people buying a home; they each become part of this new Internet and have a financial reward from it. It’s a benefit for the planet. We’re not burning energy, and we don’t have to build a data center. It’s a benefit for Dubai in this case because they have more access to data center capacity without building a data center. So it’s a fantastic example of how we can build out Internet capacity without constructing data centers.
What is Farming, and How Does it Play in the ThreeFold Ecosystem?
In a traditional crypto project, mining means you are contributing to a digital currency or crypto project; we call this farming because we didn’t want to have the connotation of burning energy. So what is farming? Anyone who wants to extend that Internet can buy a computer, install Zero-OS, connect the computer to the existing Internet, and now you provide compute and storage capacity to your friends. As a farmer, we get a benefit in the form of threefold, our currency. As a farmer, each month, as a reward for the capacity you’ve contributed [on TFChain], you’re rewarded Threefold Tokens (TFT), our currency. People who want to use that capacity need to purchase Threefold Tokens. And that way, we have an ecosystem where farmers produce capacity and get tokens rewarded, then people who need the capacity, purchase those tokens to use to capacity.
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.
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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.
