Weaving a New Web - ThreeFold
ThreeFold has embarked on a journey to give the world an autonomous internet. One that is secure, scalable, sustainable and self-healing. Are we ready for it?
When
Kristof De Spiegeleer started his career in the 1990s, the internet barely
existed. It was a free place where one would know all websites by name. Cut to
2020. There are 1,744,517,326 websites as on January 1, 2020. That’s how much
the internet has grown.
Today,
the internet consumes 5 per cent of the world’s energy supply – almost the same
as the global airline industry. Plus, it is largely centralised with less than
20 companies owning more than 80 per cent of its IT capacity. The questions
that often troubled Spiegeleer were: Is this sustainable? Is this fair?
His first
experiment began a decade ago with the newer cloud, but it largely stayed
centralised so didn’t serve the purpose. Spiegeleer soon realised the need for
a completely decentralised, scalable, secure and sustainable internet. That’s
when the ThreeFold story began to unfold.
“We
thought of building IT in a way that it delivers compute and storage power. We
called this concept IT as energy and built our own blockchain. We introduced
ThreeFold tokens, so that people could buy and sell IT capacity,” says
Spiegeleer, Co-founder and Chairman, ThreeFold Foundation.
The next
step was to ensure people don’t interfere with the operating system (OS). For
that, it needed to be autonomous – self-healing. Three-Fold created its own OS
to ward off people trying to enter the system. It also invented smart contracts
for IT, which allowed people to give consensus or denial but not interfere with
the blockchain and get access to the workload.
The
ThreeFold technology is extremely energy efficient and sustainable. For it
allows an internet to be created that would consume up to 100X less energy,
wouldn’t have data centres, would be 100 per cent powered by locally-produced
renewable energy, and would need 10X less international fibre network capacity.
Interestingly,
the idea didn’t face much resistance – a fate often met by other new ideas – by
anyone who came to know of it, claims Spiegeleer. In fact, it was the very idea
that helped them in their funding and bringing people together. They felt
welcome.
But what
about the Amazons and Googles of the world? Considering they are a significant
part of the centralised internet, won’t they resist a decentralised internet?
“Today,
we have a lot of capacity and our technology empowers more internet capacity
compared to all infrastructure blockchain projects together. Still, we need
much more and once we reach a point of expansion, these big companies will
certainly endorse what we do and even use it,” says Spiegeleer. His logic: Why
wouldn’t they like a cheaper way to use IT as energy and raw capacity to their
own benefit?
Currently,
ThreeFold’s community of token holders consists of approximately 2,500 persons
and over 60 farmers in more than 21 countries. And, it is promoting its
technology to find more ‘farmers’ across the globe, particularly in Africa,
where internet is expensive and has less penetration. ‘Farming’ is basically
the process of loading the ThreeFold OS on the system, connecting it to the
grid and getting tokens in exchange. That’s how the internet grows and also
gets decentralised, and people get a return for helping it grow.
The more
farmers, the more reach (access), and greater the potential adoption of
ThreeFold’s Internet grid. In India, too, ThreeFold is trying to gain ground
through its farmers. Manish Kumar, founder, MobiProbe is a ThreeFold
ambassador. “We set up the first node here on the ThreeFold testnet in August
2019. The node was set up by my company within STPI Mohali (a government of
India run incubation centre). We are also in talks with local universities and
students and trying to bring them on board.”
From an
organisational standpoint, there are two entities at play in the ThreeFold
Universe – the ThreeFold Foundation: a non-profit organisation focused on
driving forward the ThreeFold Network and expansion of the ThreeFold Grid; and
ThreeFold Tech: a for-profit Belgian-based software company that has developed
some of the core technology components behind the ThreeFold Network.
ThreeFold
plans to make a lot of noise in the market this year. From promotions to
upgrading the grid to going on public exchanges, it wants to go all out to tell
the world they have arrived.
“Let’s
say we are the best kept secret,” says Spiegeleer.
WHAT IS THREEFOLD?
The
ThreeFold Network is the world’s largest decentralised IT capacity network. The
TF Grid connects 40M GB of capacity and 15,000 CPU cores across 21 countries.
The technology allows it to consume up to 100X less energy, does not need data
centres, and can be fully powered by locally produced renewable energy
THE
TECHNOLOGY
ThreeFold’s
three main building blocks:
ZERO OS
Simple,
scalable and lightweight operating system makes it cost and energy efficient
ZERO
PEOPLE
Autonomous
IT self-driving/ healing software
ZERO
CHAIN
Decentralised
consensus blockchain platform
KEY
COMPONENTS
TF GRID
A
neutral, decentralised and sustainable network of autonomous storage and
compute internet capacity, peer-to-peer, collaboratively owned
3BOT
An
autonomous digital assistant that performs several tasks – helps reserve
capacity, transfer tokens and run workloads
TFT
A
decentralised digital currency used to buy affordable and scalable, autonomous
and decentralised internet services
It is
essential that we have a new internet that is owned by everyone and is
accessible everywhere.
An
internet that goes back to where it all started – a network, connecting people
who can freely communicate, and who can use this network to build out their
digital lives in all freedom and neutrality
KRISTOF
DE SPIEGELEER
Co-founder
and Chairman, ThreeFold Foundation
The
ThreeFold technology has advanced impressively since our investment in it in
2018. It is now ready to launch for customer workloads, marking the public
debut of ThreeFold’s innovative solution to the challenges presented by the
explosion in data generation over the next decade
MICHAEL
WELLESLEY-WESLEY
Founder,
Green Edge Cloud Network
Source | Times of India | 11th
February 2020
Regards
Mr. Pralhad Jadhav
Master of Library &
Information Science (NET Qualified)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge
Repository
Khaitan & Co
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