ThreeFold

A new approach to the Internet Architecture

The Edge internet needs a different approach. So, we started as from scratch and shaped a totally new approach..

🔗ThreeFold’s technology does not follow the traditional IT model

The Edge internet needs a different approach. So, we started from scratch and shaped a new approach. ThreeFold’s open-source technology addresses the scalability, security, storage, energy, and operating issues by simplifying architectures and not relying on third-party software. This drives down costs and improves efficiencies.

🔗What is ThreeFold’s Technology Toolbox?

ThreeFold’s technology is based on three primary building blocks: Stateless Computing, Self-Healing Technology, and Blockchain technology - this is the core of our “Technology Toolbox“.

Stateless Computing: a stateless operating system, Zero-OS, enabling distributed hardware to form an Edge Internet grid generating IT storage and compute capacity
Self-Healing Technology: controls and operates a distributed cloud and reserves, procures, and executes workloads on the grid using our Jumpscale platform. It delivers autoscaling and automation frameworks that enable self-healing and can be adapted for any kind of IT workload.
Blockchain Technology: Via Rivine - our secure, scalable “proof of stake” blockchain, along with our identity management platform, ItsYou.online. Our blockchain technology enables user authentication, access controls, secure workloads, and heightened security.

🔗Enabling Stateless Computing

The global decentralized internet will be composed of thousands (millions?) of nodes distributed geographically. This means the decentralized internet must be powered by a stateless operating system that can be booted via the Internet (as opposed to living on the node locally). This removes the complexity of upgrades, truck rolls, etc.

Open-source components have been developed, Zero-OS, for the deployment of bare metal machines functioning as Internet nodes and application hosts. Our Zero-OS platform runs containerized applications and software code on secure and distributed IT infrastructure. Zero-OS can be deployed on off-the-shelf hardware by anyone willing to make server and storage capacity available in their markets and within our network.

🔗The benefits of Stateless Computing are substantial, including:

Performance: lightweight OS without overhead for running bare-metal machines.
Free: finds the optimal performance of server & storage nodes at no cost.
Private: no data footprint remains while workloads move from one node to another.
Distributed: capacity is generated without the need for data centers: At The Edge.
High-available: easy creation of clusters while applications run in fragmented segments.
Portability: moving software from one node to another within the grid is instant.
Secure: open-source distributed software with transparent code. No security backdoors
Sustainable: energy-efficient OS resulting in very low node power consumption.

🔗Technology that is self-healing & self-driving

ThreeFold’s Jumpscale framework and ZeroBot allow the creation of blueprints to auto-deploy applications within the compute environment. The bots are constantly checking the health and uptime of the infrastructure, and runtime environments, to guarantee the performance and availability of applications at all times.

🔗The benefits of our self-healing technology protocols include the following:

Self-Healing: the platform regenerates when health issues that cause downtime for infrastructure and applications are detected.
Intelligence: agents capture information from the grid and make intelligent decisions to provide an ideal and optimal host environment for software code and containerized applications.
Lifecycle Management: the status of the infrastructure and the lifecycle of running applications are constantly checked and recorded.
Autoscaling: the platform automatically scales to meet application and infrastructure performance.

🔗Blockchain Technology to execute workloads and applications via smart contracts

The engineers developed new blockchain algorithms based on proof of stake for validation purposes and turned this into our Rivine open-source blockchain software.

Unlike the “proof of work” blockchains that currently dominate the space, our Rivine blockchain is scalable, green, and secure - and does not rely on huge mining resources. We run our blockchain on approximately 200 dedicated nodes and do not rely on any third-party software.

In addition to our blockchain technology, we have also developed ItsYou.Online, an identity, and access management platform. Itsyou. online uses three-factor authentication to manage access on our network and facilitate execution.

🔗The benefits of TF blockchain technology and identity management platform include:

Sustainable: our algorithms to reach consensus use a minimal amount of energy and electricity compared to other blockchain software and networks.
Lowest possible cost: of transactions make it an efficient and fast payment system.
Neutral: state of the network and applications are recorded in a transparent and immutable manner.
Payment fulfillment: transactions are automatically paid using ThreeFold Tokens.
Smart Contracts: fully automated execution of contracts from customers buying Internet IT capacity.

All of our technology is open-source and can be accessed in the following Github Repos:

Zero-OS: https://github.com/threefoldtech/zos
Jumpscale: https://github.com/threefoldtech/js-ng
BCDB : https://github.com/threefoldtech/bcdb

May 12, 2018

Solving the Blockchain Dilemma

Blockchain technology has the power to change the world of IT. There are a huge number of new initiatives using blockchain technology around the world, with countless use cases.

🔗Introduction

Blockchain technology has the power to change the world of IT. There are a huge number of new initiatives using blockchain technology around the world, with countless use cases.

In general, there are two types of blockchains: proof of work blockchains and proof of stake blockchains. They are consensus algorithms on how transactions are verified and added to the ledger (forever, as blockchains provide an immutable record of events). More on these two types of blockchains below.

🔗Blockchain Basics

A blockchain is, as the word says, a chain of blocks of information. These “blocks” contain information on transactions. For instance transactions like the transfer of value of a digital currency (token) from wallet A to wallet B. The “chain” aspect comes when part of the information is stored in a block as a link to the previous block (a unique number). This is a very simple representation of what a blockchain is.

🔗Private, Permissioned or Public Blockchains

The complexity around a blockchain comes from how the blockchain software is run. The software can run in two different ways: a small (or large) number of nodes controlled by one single entity (private blockchain) a person or a company, or a large (or small) number of nodes controlled by multiple entities (public) that do not know each other and where anyone interested to run a blockchain node can join.

By running blockchain software under the supervision of one entity (private, centralized) you can quite easily make sure the information stored in the blockchain (transactions) are not tempered with by only operating a small number of nodes and deploying them in very safe physical locations (private data-centers, vaults, basements of offices, etc). A private blockchain does not allow unknown entities to join and run the blockchain software.

A permissioned blockchain is operated by known entities such as stakeholders of a given industry. It is a mix of both private and public blockchains. In this type of blockchain network, a participant may not need permission to join the network but needs permission to transact with another network participant.

A public blockchain allows anyone to join the blockchain operation and create a new blockchain node. The blockchain is run by multiple entities (decentralized, public) that have no relationship nor knowledge about each other

For these three types of blockchains, there are different mechanisms to protect and guarantee the validity of transactions and make them tamper-proof.

🔗Private Data and Anonymous or Pseudo-Anonymous Data?

For private blockchains, it is straightforward to see that all data that is stored on private blockchains is private and creates 100% anonymity for its users. The only entity or person that has access to information stored on the blockchain is the blockchain operator. This is comparable to how a bank operates. The bank knows everything about all of its customers and the customers only know about themselves - the non-bank customers do not know a thing.

On a public blockchain, people can join and operate a blockchain node on which all information of that blockchain is stored. While private blockchains get their security from putting their blockchain nodes in secure buildings operated by trusted people a public blockchain achieves its security from having a large number of nodes that have the same data replicated over and over. A consensus algorithm is required in order to accept new data (new blocks) to the chain.

🔗Consensus Protocols for Public Blockchains

The main consensus protocols used today are Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake.

🔗Proof of Work (High Cost in Compute and Energy)

The proof of work consensus protocol is best explained as a race. The consensus is achieved by having all participating nodes solve a puzzle. The puzzle is a one-way translation of an amount of information consisting of the following items:

All the data that present the transactions in the block - all the data is known by all participating nodes
The number of the previous block. Remember a blockchain links blocks of information together.
A (variable) number. This number is the part that can be changed.

The “work” is done by changing the variable number and see what the translation of all data brings. The translation of all this data is a new number, and the requirement is that that number needs to be smaller than what is known as the “difficulty level”. The difficulty level number has a fixed amount of numbers but when the first digits of the number are zero the overall number is lower. So a higher difficulty is built by having a number that has more zeros at the start in the difficulty number.

Once the block is completed, all nodes will get the complete block of transactional data, everyone knows the previous block number and will start to change the variable number to get output from the puzzle algorithms comparing it to the required difficulty level.

The node that will find the number first will announce that it has found a solution matching the required difficulty level and the variable number of shared with all nodes in the network to verify that his solution is correct. If a large portion of the nodes has verified the solution to be valid the solution is accepted and the block is added to the chain because consensus is reached.

🔗Proof of (Block) Stake (Low Cost in Compute and Energy)

With proof of stake consensus algorithms, the consensus algorithm does not solve puzzles in a race to be the first. The first step is to identify and allow a certain number of nodes to be part of the blockchain. This is called a permissioned blockchain because you need to have permission to partake. This permission is given by distributing stakes.

Proof of Stake consensus mechanism is solving a puzzle, but the puzzle contains only static elements - not variables - based on different characteristics:

The block number
The content (part) of blocks a long time ago (>2000 blocks)
The transaction number (between the first and the last transaction) in the block of the stake transfer transaction all participating nodes needs to
The current timestamp

All these numbers are fixed but the time stamp and every node in the block stake blockchain will solve this puzzle every second until the output of this puzzle matches the required difficulty level.

To make sure the one node that has solved the puzzle to match the difficulty level cannot introduce information in the block which allows him to tamper with the next blocks this node cannot use his used stake for a period amount of time for creating new blocks.

The fact that the puzzle-solving includes historic block data and once a node is assigned to create the block and put it on a chain will not be able to use that block state for a period of time makes it very costly to try to tamper with the content of the block (and the next blocks).

🔗The Blockchain Dilemma Problem

Public and private blockchains have their specific advantages and disadvantages and are very good for specific use cases - but not all. If we list the specifics of both we end up with a table like this:

| * | Public Blockchains | Private Blockchains | |—|—|—| | Security | Provided by having a large number of nodes running it | Provided by having them in secure controlled places | | People | Build, managed and controlled by unknown people | Build, managed, and controlled by known people |
| Speed | Slow by design - all data needs to be copied to all of them | Fast(er) and more efficient by design - a smaller number of copies of the blockchain data |

So what if we want to have a secure, performant, and easy to manage blockchain solution? This is not what can be delivered by either type of blockchains. We have to create a new type of blockchain that combines the best of both worlds and delivers.

The key element in finding a solution for this problem is to take the human element out of it. The fact that when you deploy blockchains solutions in locations without human intervention means that you need to create a different deployment mechanism that takes out people touching code, compiling code, deploying code, and in the end operating the machine in which the code runs.

A way to get around the trusted people problem is to select a platform on which software can be downloaded, compiled, installed, and operated without human intervention. Such a platform is a unique platform that has not been developed and launched. Such a platform would have to have the following characteristics. To make this system work and solve the blockchain dilemma we need to have three components working together in an orchestrated way. The three elements are:

Zero-OS: A (simple) operating system that does not allow local and remote logins - a closed operating system that receives instructions to launch or kill applications. This operating system needs to be stateless to keep as simple as possible:
3Bot: A virtual system administrator that is able to perform system administration tasks to make the system operate, self-heal and execute instructions from authenticated and authorized sources.
Zero-Chain: A ledger or database to store information with regards to authentication, operational and financial transactions.

This system architecture allows for authenticated and trusted virtual system administrators to download, compile and deploy software on a grid of secure Zero-OS nodes with an immutable ledger that records all transactions, operational and financial. This presents a platform on which a public (permissioned) blockchain can be run securely without requiring trusted people to operate the nodes.

In such architecture, we can build and deploy a high-performance secure blockchain which are the combined benefits of a public and private blockchain.

Kristof de Spiegeleer

March 7, 2018

Datacenter Myths

Hyperscale realities are very different to what most people think. Myth 1 - Bigger data centers are more efficient.

“This article was originally published by Andreas Hartl, a former member of ThreeFold Foundation.”

🔗Hyperscale realities are very different from what most people think

🔗Myth 1: Bigger data centers are more efficient

There are advantages in building larger-scale data centers, like economies of scale and sheer bulk buying power, but these are not as significant as what people think. The average cost per rack in a hyper-scale data center is $20-35K USD including all energy requirements and safety systems. The cost of hardware per rack is around the $200-300K USD mark.

What is often forgotten is that anything that is of enormous scale and highly concentrated comes with complexity and specific problems to deal with. For example. resource requirements such as investment, operational costs, knowledge, and people increase significantly with size.

In reality, keeping things simple, small, and distributed is much more cost-effective than large complex environments.

🔗Myth 2: Big data centers can be sustainable

The carbon footprint of a big data center is enormous. To improve the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of most data center farmers have adopted wind, hydro, and/or solar power technologies, which indeed helps drop their PUE by an estimated 20%. But is this leading to more sustainability?

This 20% looks great on paper and in the farmers’ corporate social responsibility reports. However, it just represents an improvement in the cooling technology and sourcing of energy. It doesn’t actually impact the energy consumed by the equipment that runs in their data centers (servers, storage chassis, physical disks, etc.) which is the equipment responsible for the carbon footprint. PUE only refers to overhead power consumption, i.e. cooling the facility, opening, and closing doors, maintaining power security systems, etc.

Real improvement lies in deploying technologies that actually consume less power to deliver the actual Internet capacity to run workloads, real CPU chassis, physical disks, and storage cabinets. Improving on how hardware is being more effectively used can have an impact of up to a thousand percent and lead to ten times more power-efficiency.

🔗Myth 3: Redundant systems have better uptime

A lot of us believe that systems need redundancy mechanisms to improve their operational uptime and reliability. While it may make sense to IT experts, let’s translate this for the non-IT world?

To make a car more reliable we add redundancy (as we do in IT). So for the risk of having a puncture, we add one extra tire for all the tires we use continuously. This adds 4 extra tires to the car. Then a decision needs to be made: Do we put those tires in a structure where they are always running along with the primary tires or do we choose not to have them “online” all the time, wearing and tearing in the same way as the primary tires?

Building such a system would take a large number of engineers to come up with a solution, and would change cars as we know them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to think outside the box and solve the root of the problem by making tires un-deflatable?

The IT industry has gone overboard with the concept of redundancy, having forgotten to look at the root cause issues. This has spawned a whole new industry of itself, which has a financial interest in creating complicated and expensive redundant systems.

🔗Myth 4: Big companies optimize better

Big companies with a certain track record will know better how to optimize as they have more people and resources.

At first glance, this sounds logical, but in reality, ninety percent of the innovation within the IT space comes from startups. The giant IT companies have a heritage they hardly can overcome. They are locked in old infrastructure designs, and building outside of that infrastructure would be costly, timely, and probably put the breaks on their businesses.

Real innovation gives way to fix the core symptoms rather than taking the problem pain-killer approach.

Sam Taggart

October 12, 2017

Creating solutions that respect humanity and the planet

Respect Human Rights, Respect Human Effort, Respect Human Experience

Organizations should always respect human rights, human effort and human experience. To enable a sustainable and prosperous civilization and world, we need a strong value system.

*Ideas and texts were inspired from https://ind.ie/ethical-design/. We added our own twist to it.*

🔗Respect Human Rights

Sustainability: It is important for a very simple reason: we cannot maintain our quality of life as human beings, the diversity of life on our planet, or Earth’s ecosystems unless we embrace and protect its balance.
Equality: Everyone should have a right to learn, dream, partake and succeed. Equal access also means affordability, not ownership by big greedy companies.
Decentralization: To better distribute power, value and opportunities, we need more decentralization. Technologies and solutions should be available everywhere to improve equality and sustainability.
Openness & Interoperability: Allows technologies to work together in an open way, without limitation, and therefore expands the possibilities for innovation and sharing.
Accessibility: Whatever the location or situation, people should benefit from easy and fast access to information and solutions.
Security & Privacy: Protect people from being put in situations of danger or exploitation. People should be empowered to be independent and they should be the sole owners of their experiences.

🔗Respect Human Effort

Reliability: Make sure technologies are reliable and last longer.
Simplicity: We need to keep things simple: no unnecessary complexity - less is more.
Transparency: Let people and companies work together in a 100% transparent way.
Collaboration: It’s all about the greater picture. We are stronger together and have to help each other in reaching our common visions.

🔗Respect Human Experience

Ergonomy: Products and solutions should empower productivity, safety and comfort, while reducing human error.
Inclusiveness: Design should always be global and inclusive. We are all equal.
Design: Products should be visually appealing and should achieve it’s purpose.
Transparency: Organisational records and strategies should be accessible to everyone.

Photo by Renee Fisher on Unsplash.

Kristof de Spiegeleer

June 6, 2017

The need for ThreeFold's neutral internet

The Internet is no longer the neutral place it used to be. +80% of the Internet capacity is delivered by a handful of companies.

**The Internet is growing like crazy and is now a trillion dollar problem. Together we can build a new neutral Internet.**

🔗An introduction to the problems

The Internet is no longer the neutral place it used to be. +80% of the Internet capacity is delivered by a handful of companies. This results in a loss of neutrality and openness and breeds inequalities.
To support the continuous growth of the Internet and connect billions to new Internet Of Things devices, 400 million new servers are needed by 2020. The world therefore needs another 4,000 large-scale data centers that each consume 200 MWe of electricity: see source.
Today, about 4 billion people have no access to the Internet due to the high costs of connectivity and capacity. We believe these people have the fundamental right to have low-cost access to digital resources such as online identity solutions, education, health information and more. For this to happen, solutions that can lower the cost by a factor of 10 are required.
Bandwidth does not follow Moore’s law. The growth of bandwidth required is much higher than the speed at which new capacity can be delivered. This is even more important in emerging markets.
Current blockchain technology is not scalable and not sustainable. Example: the Bitcoin blockchain alone uses more energy today than Croatia.

🔗Current Internet and Cloud capacity

Today, the cloud computing industry represents a 100 billion dollar industry - mostly owned by about 20 global cooperations. Experts such as Bell Labs and Cisco believe the capacity requirements in the next decade will dramatically exceed existing infrastructure - requiring many more data centers and billions, if not trillions in investments.

The spectacular growth and advancements in cloud computing that occurred over the last decade resulted in large part from “hyper-scale” efficiencies - i.e. centralizing Internet infrastructure in very large billion dollar data centers. However, demand for Internet capacity already surpassed the available infrastructure with emerging technologies such as Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology. The existing hyperscale cloud architecture cannot cope with this growing demand as the requirements for land, power and funding are becoming outrageous.

The challenges facing the Internet includes the following:

Trillions of Investment Required. In the next decade, the global Internet infrastructure requires another 4,000 data centers (250M - 1B dollar investment each) to meet demand which would cost trillions - this money could be better used in education, healthcare, or sustainable innovations.
Impossible to scale the networks connecting users to the hyperscale data centers. Since hyperscale data centers are built in large “central” locations, the network leading to these data centers is congested. Even more, remote regions that are less connected to the Internet cannot benefit from these data centers’ IT services.
Non-local data and capacity. Governments around the world are becoming more and more concerned about data leaving their borders. To tackle this centralization issue, they would need local IT infrastructure. Also, IoT workloads need local capacity to deliver constant real-time computing and storage requirements - for certain applications and workloads (e.g. driverless cars), latency is not an option. Hyperscale data centers can simply not match these requirements.
Not secure / at risk of choke point failures. There are plenty of recent well-publicized problems around security, outages and loss of data. The reason for this is that centralized hyperscale architectures are inherently insecure - and failures at a single hyperscale location can cause widespread contagion and outages.

🔗The ThreeFold Solution

Our solution to these trillion dollar problems is to migrate Internet capacity to the Edge (closer to user location) - i.e. a “hyper-distributed” network architecture, located close to users (in cities, schools, offices, homes and even vehicles).

Edge networks will not necessarily replace the existing hyperscale capacity powering today’s cloud - rather, they will scale to meet the increased capacity demands going forward. However, if the current hyperscale capacity can be decentralized to improve energy consumption and reduce costs, this would be a huge global success.

By 2025, 60% of new Internet infrastructure will be decentralized and located at the edge of operator networks by using alternative locations which have stable (renewable) power and reliable connectivity.

🔗ThreeFold’s technology main benefits:

Security: The ThreeFold Grid is distributed and benefits from our ItsYou.Online identity management platform - making it much more secure.
Decentralized: The solution enables to bring capacity closer to where users are located, enabling a Cloud at the Edge.
Sustainability: The technology removes the need to build huge power hungry datacenters and by decentralizing the architecture enables up-to 1000% energy savings.
Making IT a true utility: We always approached IT as Energy. Today we provide 3x more uptime and between 3-10x more cost effectiveness.
Neutrality: The solution enables 100% neutral & private Internet IT capacity. Our blockchain technology provides security, neutrality & scale.

🔗The ThreeFold Zero-Node

The Zero-Node provides compute, network and storage capacity to the internet and ThreeFold’s blockchain. This capacity can be used for any possible workload. Here are some characteristics of ThreeFold’s Zero node:

Modularity: Scaling from 8 vCPUs and 3.5 TB of storage (smallest) to clusters with 8000 vCPUs and 2 PB of storage (large), there is a range of possibilities at hand.
Sustainability: Storing the hardware uses about 10x less energy, and about 2-3x for other workloads.
Decentralized: The Zero Operating System (“Zero OS”) is ideally suited for Edge networking - where automation, self-healing and hyper-distribution are must-haves.
- The Zero-Nodes are deployed as close as possible to the consumers of Internet IT capacity (IoT, residential, business, government, education, …).
- This results in massive bandwidth savings, we estimate to be able to keep 99% of the required bandwidth locally which has a huge impact on cost.
- This is the only viable solution to be able to provide internet to the 3.2 billion people waiting.
Self healing: The architecture is designed to ensure that workloads and data can be accessed at all times.
Neutral & private: A lot of work has done using blockchain (technology which powers crypto currency) to guarantee privacy and net neutrality.
- Designed around simplicity to be used by everyone.
- The technology provides anyone with the autonomy to deliver complex IT applications without the need for complex integration services.
Empowers equality: Our technology should be usable by the “other billions” that remain unconnected. Due to the low cost-points, low energy requirements and reduced need of backbone network capacity.

Kristof de Spiegeleer

June 1, 2017

🔗ThreeFold’s technology does not follow the traditional IT model

🔗What is ThreeFold’s Technology Toolbox?

🔗Enabling Stateless Computing

🔗The benefits of Stateless Computing are substantial, including:

🔗Technology that is self-healing & self-driving

🔗The benefits of our self-healing technology protocols include the following:

🔗Blockchain Technology to execute workloads and applications via smart contracts

🔗The benefits of TF blockchain technology and identity management platform include:

🔗Introduction

🔗Blockchain Basics

🔗Private, Permissioned or Public Blockchains

🔗Private Data and Anonymous or Pseudo-Anonymous Data?

🔗Consensus Protocols for Public Blockchains

🔗Proof of Work (High Cost in Compute and Energy)

🔗Proof of (Block) Stake (Low Cost in Compute and Energy)

🔗The Blockchain Dilemma Problem

🔗Hyperscale realities are very different from what most people think

🔗Myth 1: Bigger data centers are more efficient

🔗Myth 2: Big data centers can be sustainable

🔗Myth 3: Redundant systems have better uptime

🔗Myth 4: Big companies optimize better

🔗Respect Human Rights

🔗Respect Human Effort

🔗Respect Human Experience

🔗An introduction to the problems

🔗Current Internet and Cloud capacity

🔗The ThreeFold Solution

🔗ThreeFold’s technology main benefits:

🔗The ThreeFold Zero-Node

FEATURED POST

The Building Blocks of the Internet

March 4, 2024 - Emilie Ouwerx

ThreeFold stories and project info

A new approach to the Internet Architecture

Solving the Blockchain Dilemma

Datacenter Myths

Creating solutions that respect humanity and the planet

The need for ThreeFold's neutral internet

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