An example to illustrate this challenge is the fact that up to 60% of Ethereum (the world’s second most-popular blockchain) nodes run on centralized cloud providers and 25% of them run on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

While the topic is being addressed, it isn’t being solved at scale. The good news is that ThreeFold can play a large part in solving it.

🔗Why should blockchains make this move?

The blockchain movement, as mentioned, is very heavily tied to the movement around decentralization. Cryptocurrencies represent the move away from centralized banks as the authorities and gatekeepers around money – just as ThreeFold and similar projects represent the move away from centralized clouds as the authorities and gatekeepers around data. The thing is, if blockchains are to rely on centralized cloud for hosting, they aren’t truly embodying decentralization.

Understandably, many blockchains have chosen centralized cloud providers in the past because there wasn’t much of an alternative. But now, the Decentralized Cloud (DeCloud) movement has changed all of that.

Here is how some specific audiences can benefit:

🔗For Node Operators

Any full node or validator node can run on ThreeFold’s Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Cloud, making that particular Blockchain even more community-owned, and more decentralized from an IT/cloud level. Any node operator can choose to run their nodes from any farmer location on the ThreeFold Grid, totally peer-to-peer between the chosen farmer and the node operator. The deployed workloads are computed in a P2P manner, no middle party involved.

🔗For dApp Developers

Web3/Blockchain developers can use ThreeFold’s P2P Cloud - offering both compute and storage - to build and power their applications in a truly decentralized cloud infrastructure, both blockchain-native and cloud-native. A strong advantage here is that developers have the ability to leverage Kubernetes, Docker, S3, and other cloud-native tools (all compatible / integrated with the ThreeFold) to power and optimize their data processing capabilities, as well as the overall functionality of their dApps. But the sweet spot is that it is deployed on a decentralized IT infrastructure, close to where users would be located.

🔗But why choose ThreeFold over other DeCloud projects?

There may be bigger names in the space, but ThreeFold’s technology and offerings are much more comprehensive than the rest. ThreeFold provides decentralized storage, compute, and network all under one roof (whereas most other projects offer only one of the three) and as mentioned, we have created an environment for developers which is highly-compatible to the developer tools and solutions they use today. Further, ThreeFold is building new infrastructure from the ground up (rather than relying on extra space in data centers) and the technology is truly peer-to-peer.

We already have a number of partners in the space who recognize these advantages.

Any blockchain protocol or dApp, whether operating DeFi, NFTs, DEXs, etc, will at some point need to leverage the power of the decentralized cloud and escape from centralized cloud providers. We’re seeing some of that adoption from a decentralized storage side with IPFS, which has been adopted by many dApps, and others – but as a developer, you will have to think twice, not just about where your/your users’ data is being stored, but also about how (and where) your app is computed and powered.

Participate now in our quest to fully decentralize the Internet by becoming a node on our grid or buying TFT.

🔗What is compute?

While storage and network are fairly intuitive concepts – where data lives and how it gets around – compute is about the more mysterious realm of data processing and ultimately computer programming. Don’t worry though, you don’t need any technical abilities to gain a deeper understanding of what’s happening behind the scenes when we use apps or interact with web sites.

As mentioned in the first part of this series, compute is basically what happens with data once it reaches its destination. Compute gives data relevance, by processing it according to the instructions provided by developers in their source code. When talking about what the ThreeFold Grid offers in terms of compute, it’s mostly about how the code that developers produce gets executed in order to provide the services we enjoy.

With ThreeFold, this actually happens for the most part using the same tools and systems provided by traditional cloud services, meaning that it’s highly compatible with existing cloud applications. What really makes the Grid different is that it’s been designed to provide a level of efficiency and security that simply isn’t possible without starting “from the ground up”. Before we get into specifics of compute offerings built into ThreeFold’s Zero-OS, let’s briefly explore what computing is.

🔗Playing with zeroes and ones

Everything a computer’s central processing unit does is based on a limited set of instructions that includes basic mathematical functions, logical operations, and ways to control the flow of a program. At their core, computers are really just automated adding machines that execute specified operations on whatever input they receive. It may be hard to believe that simple math creates all of the vibrant digital experience we enjoy, but at a certain low level, that’s the truth.

Take a messaging app as an example. Within a computer, all of the text, emojis, and images we see are represented by numbers. When we search for some text within a chat, matches are determined by checking if the numbers corresponding to the words we typed are equal to some numbers corresponding to words that appear in the chat history. This information is then converted into the list of results we see on screen.

In this context, compute is mostly responsible for organizing all of our messages based on the individual or group we were talking with, the time that the message happened, and whether or not we’ve opened it yet. Typically, a messaging app stores data both on our local devices and on a back end in the cloud. Compute is also how the service decides to copy messages you sent on one device to other devices where you have the same app installed.

Here is an important distinction about how the ThreeFold Grid operates. In a traditional cloud environment, it is impossible to know for sure what is happening on the backend, even if you are the one running the service. The administrative access retained by the cloud provider can be used for surveillance and tampering that can be very difficult or impossible to detect.

Zero OS offers a unique assurance that no one can abuse the Grid in this way, because it operates autonomously with no facilities provided for human intervention. In order to utilize compute capacity on the Grid, individuals and organizations deploy their choice of several “primitives,” or basic components, that provide an environment for code to be executed and create the magic we experience as online applications.

🔗ThreeFold Compute Primitives

Since we’re getting a bit into the technical weeds here, we’ll just take a brief look at each primitive and what makes it special.

🔗Zmachine

Zmachine is a lightweight virtual machine (VM) implementation that’s been developed in a uniquely efficient way by ThreeFold. VMs are essentially computers within computers, allowing multiple operating systems to run on a single physical system. A common example is running the Windows operating system on a Mac that’s already running MacOS.

In the cloud world, virtual machines are a classic way to manage complex deployments with flexibility and resilience – by packaging different components into different VMs that can be run side by side and moved between different physical servers with ease. While VMs have been replaced in many cases with the new container paradigm, which we’ll cover next, they are still widely used and provide a simpler solution than containers that’s sufficient for many use cases.

🔗Flist

The Flist is a next generation container format which extends the industry standard Docker container concept in an efficient and secure way. It is supported directly at the operating system level on Zero OS, and in its latest version on ThreeFold Grid 3.0, provides a unique advantage over traditional containers via the use of mini virtual machines.

Containers provide greater efficiency and flexibility than VMs, by sharing parts of the host operating system between containers rather than duplicating the full operating system for each component. This, however, means that containers typically come with less of an assurance that different workloads and their data remain isolated from each other. By employing mini VMs, the Flist concept provides better isolation than traditional container systems while retaining the advantages that containers offer over full VMs.

🔗Kubernetes

Containers usually represent small parts of a full solution, which are created, interconnected, and destroyed on an ongoing basis. Kubernetes is the industry standard container orchestration system, and it’s used to manage many of the largest and most complex cloud deployments. Kubernetes solutions are defined through configuration files that specify the types of containers, how updates are handled, and the network architecture both between containers and with the outside world.

Multiple physical servers or VMs are typically used for a Kubernetes “cluster” which provides redundancy and scalability. The ThreeFold Grid provides a lightweight Kubernetes VM that can be used to create clusters according to specific needs. Kubernetes users can, for the most part, simply bring their existing configuration files and recreate their deployments on a Grid based cluster seamlessly.

🔗Wrapping up

Taken together, the compute primitives offer a comprehensive alternative to existing cloud compute providers. Users of Docker, Kubernetes, and virtual machines can bring their deployments to the Grid with a minimal amount of migration effort. This is distinct from other decentralized cloud projects, which either offer a single solution like Kubernetes or a completely new environment that developers must adapt their code to run within.

Better yet, each compute offering on the ThreeFold Grid benefits from the unique efficiency and security features of Zero OS, as well as the unique aspects of the primitives themselves. Thanks again for joining me on this journey into the wonderful world of ThreeFold technology. In the next episode, we’ll cover the last element of the cloud infrastructure triad: network.

• ThreeFold Forum
• ThreeFold Main Chat
• ThreeFold Farmers Chat
• ThreeFold Testing Chat
• ThreeFold Foundation GitHub
• ThreeFold Tech GitHub

🔗So what is the partnership all about?

Together with ThreeFold, Artheon aims to create the world’s largest open art database – made for everyone, and owned by everyone. We will provide access to art and cultural heritage to people around the world, without borders. Not just access, but a high-quality and high-resolution virtual reality experience where people can really immerse themselves in their surrounding environment. With Artheon, people can now even touch and hold paintings or artifacts, something that would clearly not be possible in real life. And while today, only a select few (relative to the total global population) have the opportunity to travel and to experience museums and cultural & sacred sites, Artheon will change that!

It’s not only about experience, though, it’s also about community and education and providing a more equal access to art and cultural objects. We’ll bring together a global community of museums, artists, and art seekers who can not only enjoy, but also teach and learn about the art and cultural objects housed within the Artheon universe. For Artheon, it’s imperative that people are able to access information about the artists and the art itself, and then make and share their own perceptions as well. No need or pressure to follow the direction of the current system’s ideology. This is a different angle from how we traditionally learn at school, where narrow or accepted views and concepts are imposed upon us. A key aim of Artheon is to bring different perspectives through collective, participatory, and experiental teaching and learning.

Looking ahead, the vision is that people will be able to create their own virtual spaces and expose them on Artheon. They can create something from scratch or even re-imagine a historical site as it was long ago and share it with the community.

🔗How does ThreeFold benefit Artheon?

From the start, there was a clear connection between Artheon and ThreeFold from a vision, values, and ethos perspective. But there are also some more specific reasons why Artheon chose and benefits from ThreeFold, which mainly revolve around the decentralized nature of the ThreeFold Grid.

Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) provide significant benefits to our new digital reality. These technologies open new ways of sharing information in areas such as the arts in the case of Artheon, allowing for upgraded and immersive experiences for users.

Decentralized clouds have been associated with the promise of new digital applications and services that come with a hyper-connected life. Because the graphics of VR/AR experiences require heavy rendering, on-device processes are augmented by splitting workloads between the VR/AR device and a decentralized cloud. So, graphics rendering on a decentralized cloud like what the ThreeFold Grid provides would be significantly improved by achieving a much lower latency. Another advantage of the ThreeFold Grid is that it provides an extremely high level of security and privacy, empowering Artheon and its users with real data sovereignty.

And finally, Artheon experienced an unfortunate event earlier this summer where their servers suffered from an intense heat wave and essentially burned up. There was no backup, and this would have been catastrophic in the scenario of them having millions of users. Good thing they aren’t live yet, but this is a great example of how centralized models fail. With a decentralized infrastructure like ThreeFold, this type of situation would not have occured, as data would be hosted on many locations.

So, by distributing the computing power closer to their users, a VR experience such as Artheon would not only improve their latency speed, security, and privacy, but also the resilience of their business model. 

🔗What is the status of Artheon (and its partnership with ThreeFold)?

Over the past year, Artheon has been making incredible improvements to the graphics and experience, and adding as many new pieces of art as possible into the universe. As you can imagine, the possibilities really are endless, but here are some of the milestones planned for the rest of this year:

• Planning to add partial DLC (downloadable content) support and photogrammetry-scanned locations for users to experience
• New UI for desktop (Windows, MacOS, Linux)
• Implementation of desired social features such as follower and friend system
• People will be able to see who of their friends or people they follow are online – from that, they can connect to a server and join them to share experiences together
• People will also be able to see how many people are online at the moment and where they are located on the globe (if permissions are allowed)
• Allow the possibility for museums to host free or closed paid exhibitions
• Artheon will be hosted on the ThreeFold Grid!
  

🔗What can you do now to get involved?

If you’re reading this section, we’re thrilled you are interested in what is happening with Artheon! We are, too! As Artheon is not yet live, the best option for you is to join the Artheon Early Access chat on Telegram where you can stay tuned there for updates and ask questions directly to Artheon’s creators and contributors.

Welcome back for the second part of this introductory series on ThreeFold Grid technology. Last time we took a high level view of all that the Grid offers. This time, we’ll be zooming in on storage, covering the low level components and how they can provide a familiar experience like the cloud “drives” and “boxes” we use today.

The ThreeFold Grid offers several different storage primitives that can be combined in various ways to meet the needs of developers and end users of Grid capacity. Ultimately, all storage services are a way of presenting the underlying hardware to software workloads in various ways, according to the desired features. ThreeFold has created a few unique storage offerings, providing distinct benefits over legacy cloud infrastructure. From the start, every component has been designed for optimal efficiency and they work together to offer an unprecedented level of security.

Our most basic storage primitive is a “volume”, which simply offers some disk space to an application in a generic way. We’ll focus more on the innovative solutions that are built on the Zero Database, or Zdb. These are compatible with existing use cases but also represent a quantum leap forward for privacy and security. They are called Zdbfs, Zstor, and QSFS. Let’s take a look at each component and how they work together to provide a complete set of tools for developers building on the Grid. We’ll also see why this matters to end users of services that are hosted on the Grid.

🔗Zdb

Zdb is a low level offering that implements with a subset of features from the popular Redis protocol. It is a key-value store, which means that information is indexed like a dictionary. Each “word” in the database is associated with a “definition” or piece of data. Zdb is super fast and efficient, along with operating in an “append only” manner. This means that all new data is added to empty space following the end of existing data, never overwritten. It’s like writing in pen on paper without leaving any white space.

Append only has many advantages, including extending the life of certain hardware and offering archiving features out of the box. The disadvantage, of course, is that old data is retained even when no longer needed. However, this can be addressed by periodically “compacting” the data, to remove what’s no longer needed and restructure what remains with the same level of efficiency. We use Zdb as a base layer for more complex storage implementations that benefit from these features.

🔗Zdbfs

While Zdb has all of those neat properties, it requires that applications utilize a specific database interface. To expand its capabilities, we have the Zdb Filesystem. With Zdbfs, the back end Zdb is exposed through the most common interface used for storing and retrieving data: a filesystem. This is the same format we’re all familiar with from the file explorers on our computers. When running Zdbfs, a new “folder” appears on the system, allowing reading and writing to the connected Zdb without any concern for the underlying database. With Zdbfs, nearly all existing tools for working with data can be plugged in to and benefit from the advantages of Zdb.

🔗Zstor

So far, we’ve been discussing solutions that utilize storage space on a single node only. While this offers flexibility for developers with a variety of needs, it is also limited in the sense that the failure of a single node would result in the loss of all data. With that in mind, we offer the Zstor solution for spreading data across multiple nodes in a way that provides both resilience against failures and unprecedented security.

Zstor takes a single file as input, to be stored among a number of nodes as specified in its configuration. The system is flexible and able to cater to different needs for performance, redundancy, and geographical distribution. Understanding what happens behind the scenes requires a little math, but I’ll provide as simple an explanation as I can. Zstor has a very unique property: it does not actually upload any of the user’s data to the back end nodes, but it is able to reconstruct the data later based on the descriptive information that is stored.

🔗The magic of erasure encoding

Sounds like magic? Well, let’s explore briefly how this is possible. Zstor relies on a technology known as erasure encoding, which was originally designed to protect data against errors that sometimes occur in the normal operation of computer hardware. Rather than simply making copies of the data as backups, a clever scheme is used to efficiently offer the same benefit. With basic redundancy, four extra copies would be needed to accommodate four failures without a loss of data. Erasure encoding can accomplish the same failure tolerance using less than half the space needed for the original data.

While erasure encoding can be implemented by storing the data itself along with some extra data known as “parity”, it can also be implemented without storing the original data at all. As a simplified example, let’s say that we want to store the number 13. First, we take each digit individually, 1 and 3. Next, we calculate 1 + 3 = 4 and 3 - 1 = 2. By storing 4 and 2, along with the instructions to reverse these calculations, we have everything needed to get back to 13. If we add one more equation, say 1 - 3 = -2, we can restore the original data using any two of the numbers we’ve computed.

Each of our values would be stored on separate nodes, while the instructions to recombine them would be stored in yet another location. If an attacker were to compromise one of these nodes, they would only have a number that’s meaningless without the other elements. If a single node fails, the original data can be restored using the remaining nodes, and we can add a new node to bring us back to our desired state. By tuning these values, additional security or redundancy can be achieved. We might decide that we want 9 of 10 values to be present for reconstruction, representing a high level of security. Alternatively, a 2 of 10 arrangement would provide high redundancy, tolerating the failure of 8 nodes.

🔗Quantum Safe Filesystem

With all of these components working together, we have ThreeFold’s flagship storage solution, the Quantum Safe Filesystem or QSFS. It uses Zstor to backup data written to a Zdbfs. This provides the convenient and highly compatible filesystem interface along with the exceptional security and redundancy benefits of Zstor. We call it quantum safe, because even an attacker with a quantum computer would not be able to decode users’ data, if they managed to hack into one of the back end nodes—already an extraordinary feat given the exceptional security of Zero OS.

🔗Bringing it home

So, we’ve toured a good bit of technology which might be feeling a bit abstract at this point. Bringing this home, our front end experience with these technologies can feel no different than any of the “drives” and “boxes” we use to store our files in the cloud. In fact, ThreeFold has already developed a prototype file browser based on QSFS which has many cool features like editing documents and viewing media directly in the web interface. It’s one piece of a full suite of solutions we’re excited to showcase and invite the community to test soon.

I hope you found this piece informative and approachable. Thanks for joining me to learn and explore the wonderful world of ThreeFold technology. We’ll cover more aspects of what makes it all tick in future parts of this series. Do you have questions or feel like chatting about what’s possible with ThreeFold’s technology? We’d love to hear from you on our forum or in our Telegram group.