Weaving a New Web - ThreeFold

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!

Librarian                                                                                                                                                     

Rizvi Institute of Management