At the core of this design is Zero OS, an autonomous, minimalist operating system purpose-built to deliver compute, storage, and network primitives without relying on centralized infrastructure, traditional sysadmin practices, or hyperscaler capital.

Zero OS has been specifically designed to ensure that:

• A high level of computer expertise is typically not required to set up a node.
• There is virtually zero maintenance after initial setup. All updates happen automatically.
• Recovery from power or network loss happens without human intervention.

🔗What is Zero OS?

Zero OS is a stateless, bare-metal runtime environment, employing a minimalist design built from scratch around the Linux kernel. It exposes a tightly scoped set of primitives for compute, storage, and networking.

• Headless by Design: Runs entirely autonomously after boot. There’s no need for user intervention post-deployment.
• Ephemeral & Immutable: The root filesystem is read-only, and all system behavior is stateless and declarative.
• Ledger-Driven Provisioning: Nodes listen to a blockchain-based reservation system and respond by deploying the workloads described in those reservations.

It has no package manager, no local user accounts, no shell access, and no remote management via SSH. This drastically reduces the attack surface and operational complexity.

The OS acts as a waypoint, converting instructions stored on a distributed ledger into real-world compute deployments.

🔗Composable Primitives

Instead of exposing bloated APIs or fully fledged orchestration platforms, Zero OS provides a narrow but composable set of system primitives:

These primitives can be composed by developers or workload orchestrators (like ThreeFold Labs or TF Grid SDKs) into more complex services, such as Kubernetes clusters, storage grids, VPNs, or decentralized databases, all without a central coordinator.

🔗Programmatic Trust via Blockchain Coordination

Instead of relying on centralized control systems like AWS Control Tower or Google Cloud IAM, Zero OS nodes operate through a decentralized model driven by TFChain and peer-to-peer communication.

Each node is associated with a Twin ID, a unique digital identity stored on TFChain. When a user wants to deploy a workload (like a VM or database), they submit a reservation smart contract to TFChain. This contract includes a cryptographic signature from the user’s Twin and a hash of the workload deployment.

Here’s how it works:

• The blockchain confirms billing authorization and verifies the hash of the deployment. This creates an auditable, tamper-proof record.
• The full deployment instructions (including specs like CPU, memory, storage, and network) are transmitted off-chain via RMB (Remote Message Bus), end-to-end encrypted, from the user to the node.
• The node monitors TFChain for reservations tied to its Twin ID, verifies the signature and hash, and then automatically provisions the workload. No human intervention needed.

This setup ensures:

• Auditable Infrastructure: Every change is logged on-chain.
• Trustless Automation: No need for sysadmins or manual approval.
• Sovereign Ownership: Each workload is cryptographically linked to its creator.
• Efficiency: By transmitting heavy deployment data off-chain via RMB, blockchain usage is minimized, reducing on-chain storage and compute load.

Just like Ethereum smart contracts execute code, ThreeFold nodes execute real-world workloads. Driven by a hybrid architecture that blends blockchain trust with encrypted peer-to-peer efficiency.

🔗Grid Networks for Safe Testing and Rollouts

Zero OS runs across several different network environments, each designed for a specific stage in the development and deployment process. This setup helps the system evolve safely without risking the stability of the live grid.

Here’s how the networks work:

This tiered model makes sure that:

• New features are tested step by step
• Production remains stable and secure
• Developers can safely build and improve the system without risk to users.

🔗True Sovereignty at the System Level

ThreeFold, through Zero OS and the TF Grid, decentralizes the cloud and rebuilds it from the ground up, with sovereignty, automation, and composability at its core.

Zero OS isn’t just an operating system. It’s a self-operating system.

And in a time when data, identity, and computational infrastructure are geopolitical battlegrounds, that changes everything.

🔗What Does it Enable?

Think about this:

• A school in Uganda can run its own local cloud with no data ever leaving its premises.
• A nation-state can build a national cloud grid without relying on a centralized provider.
• A developer collective can launch resilient apps that survive even if core internet services go down.

This is infrastructure-native sovereignty. Not just ownership of software, but autonomy over the full lifecycle: deployment, operation, upgrade, and recovery.

With Zero OS and the ThreeFold Grid, you move from dependency to autonomy.

That’s what makes ThreeFold truly sovereign tech.
Not just infrastructure. Not just decentralization.
But total autonomy, by design.

The future is self-owned, self-operated, and borderless.

Whether you’re an individual, an enterprise, or a grassroots community, the tools to build your own cloud, on your own terms, are finally here.

Start building sovereignty today.

Explore how Zero OS and the ThreeFold Grid can power your next step.

🔗A Different Internet Is Possible

We need to restore the internet to its original intent,” says Kristof De Spiegeleer, founder of ThreeFold, in a recent interview at ETHDenver. “It was much more peer-to-peer. People could express whatever they wanted. We were no longer products. That’s what we wanted to bring back.

Kristof’s perspective isn’t nostalgic. At ThreeFold, some of our team has been building internet infrastructure since the early days, when the web still felt like a community garden rather than a corporate mall. In more recent years, we have been radically reimagining the plumbing of the web. And we’re doing it from the ground up.

🔗From CERN to Surveillance Capitalism

To understand what’s at stake, it helps to go back to the beginning.

The first ever website, info.cern.ch, was hosted on a NeXT computer in a physics lab in Switzerland. The web was conceived as a universal publishing system for scientists. It used open standards, interoperable protocols, and encouraged contribution. There were no paywalls. No targeted ads. No “walled gardens.”

All that changed in the 2000s. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others turned the web into a data-mining operation.

In exchange for “free” services, users unknowingly gave up control over their digital selves. What started as a peer-to-peer web became a hub-and-spoke model, where all roads led through Silicon Valley.

Today, more than 80% of online content is machine-generated. Most of the internet’s infrastructure is owned by a few centralized companies. Many countries don’t even control their own digital backbones.

This was not at all the vision that the early pioneers had.

Tim Berners-Lee:

“The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy.”

Marc Andreessen (Netscape co-founder):

“We thought we were building a publishing platform. Instead, we built the rails for an entirely new economy.”

Jaron Lanier (early VR pioneer and digital ethicist):

“The original idea of the Internet was that it would decentralize power… Now it’s become the opposite.”

🔗Rebuilding the Plumbing

This is where ThreeFold comes in as a decentralized, peer-owned infrastructure layer. Kristof explains it plainly: “We need storage, we need compute, we need GPUs, and we need to connect these things outside of the current web monopolies.”

ThreeFold makes it simple for anyone to contribute to this new internet by running a node. Whether you’re a developer, a farmer, or just someone with an unused computer, you can dedicate a machine to the ThreeFold Grid and become part of a growing decentralized network.

🔗More Than Decentralization

Attempts to “decentralize the web” are nothing new. But most failed because they tried to rebuild the application layer without fixing the foundation. ThreeFold flips that script. It starts with the physical hardware, real nodes owned by real people, and builds upward.

Its architecture is designed for resilience. It doesn’t rely on AWS or Google Cloud. It doesn’t store your data in one vulnerable place. It doesn’t treat you like a product.

And perhaps most importantly, it invites participation. Anyone can build a node, join the network, and help create something bigger than themselves.

🔗Back to the Future?

What ThreeFold is essentially doing is reclamation.

We are reclaiming the peer-to-peer ethos of the early internet.

We are reclaiming the right to compute, connect, and create without gatekeepers.

We are reclaiming agency in a digital world that’s increasingly extractive.

As Kristof puts it: “No is simply not an option. This will be done.”

For those who still believe the internet can be more than a marketplace of user data, for those who remember what it was meant to be, ThreeFold might just be the future we were promised.

And this time, we all get to build it.

🔗The Structural Bias Toward Centralization in AI

Modern AI development is deeply centralized. Today’s most advanced models are created, hosted, and controlled by a small group of corporations with vast computational resources and privileged access to proprietary data. This isn’t mere conjecture by the way. It is the most obvious outcome of how modern machine learning works:

🔗Scale Rewards Capital

The most capable AI models are those trained on vast datasets, using enormous compute, for extended durations. That means:

• $100M+ training budgets
• Clusters of the latest NVIDIA enterprise grade GPUs
• Proprietary pre-training data pipelines

Only a handful of companies, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft, can compete. Startups, researchers, and sovereign nations without this infrastructure are locked out of cutting-edge development.

🔗AIs Are Easier to Control Than Humans

Artificial intelligences are orders of magnitude easier to control than humans:

• Humans resist control through rights, unpredictability, and emotion.
• AIs have no such friction. Their environments are programmable. Their cognition can be monitored and shaped directly.

Owning AI infrastructure doesn’t just mean “owning compute,” it means governing cognition. This is why the question of who builds and owns the infrastructure for AI is a question of societal structure and potential freedom.

🔗Regulation Often Entrenches Power

Even well-meaning AI governance initiatives can entrench centralized players if access to model development, compute, or deployment is limited by regulatory red tape.

AI regulation can either reinforce centralization or counterbalance it. Policies that restrict open-source models, limit public access to compute, or impose vague safety mandates that only large firms can meet will drive further consolidation.

🔗AI Centralization is a Civilization Risk

The centralization trajectory that we are currently on has dire implications.

Without a course correction, we risk entering a world where a small elite controls a growing share of intelligence deployed not to empower individuals, but to surveil, manipulate, and extract.

Centralization has given these companies the ability to mass-produce aligned, intelligent agents at scale. This transforms how propaganda, surveillance, and even individual behavior manipulation can be conducted.

🔗Extreme Scenarios Are Plausible

• In authoritarian states, AI systems can monitor, evaluate, and punish dissent in real-time across all digital communication.
• In liberal democracies, well-funded actors could use adversarial inputs tailored to individuals’ cognitive patterns to shift beliefs subtly over time.
• In global markets, AI-powered monopolies won’t just win by being cheaper – they’ll win by being smarter, wiping out small businesses, local expertise, and cultural independence.

AI doesn’t just need new infrastructure. It needs the right kind of infrastructure.

We don’t need just faster chips. We need a different paradigm:

• Decentralized by Design: So no single actor controls the substrate of intelligence.
• Sovereign at Every Level: So individuals and communities own their models, data, and compute.
• Green and Sustainable: So we don’t trade intelligence for ecological collapse.
• Composable and Open: So innovation doesn’t rely on permission from gatekeepers.

This is exactly what ThreeFold delivers.

🔗ThreeFold’s Decentralized Approach

The ThreeFold Grid is a peer-to-peer compute and storage network spanning over 50 countries. Unlike cloud platforms built in centralized data centers, the Grid is powered by individual nodes run by small-scale infrastructure providers contributing capacity in exchange for tokens.

Here’s why it’s uniquely suited for AI:

🔗Decentralized Compute at the Edge

AI inference workloads, especially those requiring low latency, are increasingly moving to the edge. The ThreeFold Grid is inherently edge-native. It allows inference to happen where data is generated, reducing both latency and exposure.

🔗Sovereign AI Hosting with AIBox

ThreeFold’s AIBox lets users own and operate personal AI hardware, offering up to 80% cost savings versus cloud GPUs while providing total control over data and models. Each AIBox is dedicated to a single user, ensuring secure and consistent access to GPU resources.

Users can run fine-tuned models locally and earn by monetizing excess capacity.

🔗Privacy-First, Always-On Intelligence with 3AI

The 3AI assistant runs natively on the 3Phone, processing all data locally. No cloud, no spying. It learns your habits, manages your tasks, and connects securely to decentralized apps powered entirely by the ThreeFold Grid.

🔗Run AI Workloads Today with 3Nodes and Full VM Rentals

AIBox and 3AI are incredibly exciting innovations. They are not in production yet but they are a critical part of our next stage. However, you don’t need to wait to interact with ThreeFold.

ThreeFold’s existing 3Nodes and Dashboard already allow users to run full virtual machines with GPU acceleration, ideal for training or inference workloads.

You can:

• Rent a dedicated VM with AMD or NVIDIA GPUs and run any AI workload compatible with Linux
• Spin up environments for model training, inference, or fine-tuning with full data control (OpenWeb UI deployment is coming to the Dashboard as part of TF Grid 3.17)
• Take advantage of up to 50% discounts when renting a full dedicated 3Node for long-term use

🔗The Ideal Platform For Augmented Collective Intelligence

Augmented Collective Intelligence (ACI) is the next evolution of the internet. In this phase we are not just connecting people, but amplifying our collective capacity to think, decide, and act. When people can run their own models, control their data, and contribute to shared knowledge, we get smarter together.

ThreeFold’s infrastructure is uniquely positioned to bring ACI to life. By providing a peer-to-peer cloud that anyone can contribute to and benefit from, it enables communities, researchers, creators, and sovereign nations to build intelligent systems together.

🔗Verifiability and Transparency

ThreeFold integrates blockchain primitives for auditable deployments and transparent governance. This makes it ideal for regulatory compliance without sacrificing openness or privacy.

🔗Built for AI, Not Repurposed for It

Unlike legacy infrastructure patched to support AI, ThreeFold was built from the ground up to enable distributed, compute-intensive workloads. Its composable architecture, GPU-ready fabric, and local-first design make it the ideal substrate for the AI era.

🔗Rebalancing the Scales: AI for the Many, Not the Few

In unfree societies, centralized AI systems are already being deployed for surveillance, censorship, and coercive control. Even in free nations, the combination of targeted data, powerful models, and cheap compute could enable sophisticated value-manipulation campaigns, individualized propaganda, or automated suppression of dissent.

We’ve already lived through the consequences of losing control over our data. An entire generation’s digital behavior was harvested, manipulated, and monetized. If we don’t act now, we risk losing something even more critical, our cognitive agency.

We lost the war on data. Let’s not lose the war on intelligence.

ThreeFold offers a defense. By enabling local AI processing, sovereign data ownership, and verifiable execution, it removes the infrastructure-level levers that centralized actors rely on for control. It redistributes power by making intelligent systems available to everyone, as a right.

🔗The Path Forward

The future of AI cannot be built on rented clouds, closed models, and opaque institutions. It must be co-owned, co-governed, and globally distributed. We don’t need another centralized alternative to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

We need something that Web3 promised ages ago, but failed to deliver so far.

We need a decentralized infra that’s live and open for everyone.

We need ThreeFold. AI needs ThreeFold.

🔗The Problem: Centralized Internet, Fragile Foundations

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure collectively control over 65% of the global cloud market. This centralization funnels critical infrastructure into the hands of a few corporations, creating systemic fragility and profound asymmetries in power.

A single outage at one of these providers can cripple major portions of the web (even Web3), as seen in the April 2025 AWS crash which shut down major exchanges like Binance and KuCoin.

Even more concerning is the extractive model underlying this control: users become data sources, not stakeholders, feeding surveillance capitalism that commodifies identity, attention, and behavior at scale.

The core issue, however, is cultural.

The current internet architecture is not neutral. Most countries do not own their infrastructure. Over 80 percent of internet content today is generated by machines and routed through infrastructure controlled by a small number of corporations in a few dominant regions.

A video call between two people in East Africa might still be routed through a server in Europe or the United States. That is the scale of the imbalance. The world is already losing control of its data. Losing control of its intelligence would be the next step in the wrong direction.

Kristof De Spiegeleer, ThreeFold co-founder, calls this a betrayal of the internet’s roots.

“It was peer-to-peer. It was about giving. It had magic. Somewhere that started shifting when the web became commercial. Now, we are the product. We lost its original intent.”

The truly sad part is that Web3 was supposed to be the solution. It was supposed to fix the problems inherent in the centralized infrastructure. However, many in the Web3 industry took the easy way out. Instead of challenging the centralization of infrastructure, they recreated financialization on top of it. Power was not redistributed; it was just repackaged.

🔗The ThreeFold Solution: The Infrastructure Web3 Forgot to Build

ThreeFold flips the script. It proposes a peer-to-peer, autonomous, and privacy-first network built on the idea that internet infrastructure should be as decentralized as the ideals it was founded on. At the heart of ThreeFold’s vision lies the ThreeFold Grid, a decentralized, energy-efficient network of compute, storage, and bandwidth contributed by people and communities around the world.

Unlike traditional cloud models, where resources are provisioned by centralized data centers, the TF Grid is built from the ground up by individuals who plug in hardware and earn tokens for providing capacity. Spanning over 50 countries and thousands of nodes, the Grid demonstrates that a globally distributed alternative to hyperscaler dominance is not only possible, but already taking shape.

The ThreeFold Grid runs on Zero-OS, a stateless and tamper-proof operating system that eliminates root access, significantly reducing the attack surface. Workloads are deployed in isolated, self-healing containers called ZMachines, ensuring high performance without compromising privacy or sovereignty.

Here’s how ThreeFold stands apart:

• No root access: Even ThreeFold can’t access users’ data or systems.
• No surveillance: Your activity isn’t harvested for ads or analytics.
• No intermediaries: You host and run services independently, without reliance on Big Tech.
• No rent-seeking: You pay for resources, not for gatekeeping.

🔗Infrastructure as a Public Good

ThreeFold’s model reclaims the internet as a public utility, akin to electricity or clean water. This isn’t decentralization for decentralization’s sake. This is sovereign computing. Now, communities, developers, and organizations can build, share, and interact without surrendering control.

Instead of being extracted for profit, compute and storage become commons that anyone can contribute to and benefit from. Anyone, anywhere, can run a node in the grid (provided they clear our KYC process, a move made earlier this year to protect ThreeFold node operators). Each of these nodes operates independently, yet seamlessly integrates into a unified network.

Also, being considered a “public good” comes with its own set of sustainability and environmental responsibilities. Centralized data centers are energy guzzlers, since they require a huge amount of electricity and other resources to function efficiently. This high energy demand leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions and contributes to climate change. Plus, let’s not forget the e-waste and its contribution to localized pollution through cooling systems and inefficient water usage.

The Threefold Grid, by its very design, uses the highest possible levels of energy efficiency. After all, a decentralized network that doesn’t depend on a centralized power source can fulfill its energy requirements far more optimally with minimal wastage.

🔗The Path Forward

Despite its promise, Web3 has largely inherited the same centralized assumptions it aimed to replace. Rather than challenging the infrastructure layer, most projects replicated existing systems with new financial incentives. Protocols were built, but the physical foundation remained untouched.

What is needed now is a deeper rebuild. One that starts at the root. Compute and storage must be redefined as communal, not speculative. AI must run locally, not on leased hardware in California. Communities must be able to build and host their own trees of knowledge, anchored in their own culture, not someone else’s data center.

Web3 must move beyond the superficial and return to intent. It is time to replace abstraction with ownership, speculation with participation, and complexity with clarity.

The internet must be reclaimed. That work has already begun. What once seemed improbable is now inevitable. Web3 must grow up and build what it skipped. The future will not be leased. It will be co-owned.

ThreeFold invites everyone to imagine, and participate in, a world where internet access is co-created, not bought. Owned, not rented. In reclaiming the internet as a public good, ThreeFold offers a roadmap to a freer, more resilient digital future. One where we own the infrastructure, the data, and the destiny of our digital lives.

🔗From a Global Perspective

ThreeFold envisions a new internet, an alternative to the internet of today. To make this a reality, the ThreeFold Grid needs to reach a million (or millions of) nodes. A world with a million nodes …

• Ensures that connectivity is no longer monopolized by a few large corporations. The Internet is more resilient to large-scale outages, cyber-attacks, and natural disasters.
• Empowers people and organizations with control over their data. We are less vulnerable to data breaches and misuse of our data.
• Lays the groundwork for decentralized AI, where algorithms are built on ethical, diverse data sets and innovation is open
• Democratizes access to computational resources. Lower costs and scalable infrastructure fosters a global environment of innovation and drives economic growth and opportunity.
• Means efficient and optimized energy usage, reducing the need for power-hungry data centers, and supporting global efforts to minimize negative impact on our planet.
• Bridges the digital divide by introducing reliable Internet access to developing and remote regions, empowering them with access to crucial knowledge and information.
• Promotes global collaboration, creating a rich environment for cultural exchange and collective problem-solving at scale to tackle the world’s greatest challenges.
• Preserves cultural heritage, enabling communities from around the world to store their stories, information, and knowledge on infrastructure owned by them.

A world with a million nodes would reshape industries, facilitate global collaboration, and lay the foundation for a more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable digital future.

Let us explore, through the power of story, how this can come alive.

🔗Tanzania

Salma, a young entrepreneur coming from an agricultural background in Arusha, runs a small but growing tech company developing mobile apps for local farmers. Her apps collect data from IoT sensors in the fields, helping farmers monitor soil moisture and temperature, optimize water usage, and predict crop yields. Powered by decentralized AI models trained on local data, the insights become increasingly accurate and tailored to the region’s unique conditions.

The apps run smoothly on locally-deployed decentralized infrastructure – the data processing happens seamlessly on the nearest nodes, ensuring low latency and quick insights for farmers. Further, farmers can be assured of 100% data ownership and sovereignty.

The farmers form a local cooperative to share data and knowledge. The decentralized cloud ensures that the data remains secure and private, allowing collective insights to be shared in a trusted way. A peer-to-peer marketplace enables farmers to sell their crops directly to purchasers, meaning they can now receive fair value for their work.

🔗United States

Emma and Will live in a rural community in central Oklahoma, where tornadoes are a regular occurrence during certain times of the year. Emma is an elementary school teacher and Will works construction. Through a federal assistance program, the community has recently integrated its own decentralized cloud network.

Emma uses the network to access online resources and collaborate with educators globally. The local clinic offers telehealth services, so the community can access secure and private healthcare without the need to travel long distances.

Residents use a secure app for community discussions, support networks, local governance decisions, and safety alerts. Sensors across the community monitor weather conditions, while AI models trained on local weather patterns improve the accuracy of predictions, helping residents prepare and respond faster. Data is processed locally on the network, providing early warnings of severe weather events. Alerts are sent directly to residents’ devices. When disaster does strike, part of the decentralized network is able to stay online, supporting rapid communication and coordination and facilitating access to critical information.

🔗India

Amit, a software developer based in Bangalore, is working on a new AI-driven application. His development environment is hosted on the decentralized cloud, giving him immense computational power at his fingertips. Training his AI models is faster and more efficient, utilizing powerful GPUs located close to him, increasing performance and lowering costs.

No longer dependent on centralized cloud, Amit appreciates he can now handle large-scale computations without high costs and the environmental impact associated with traditional data centers.

Amit not only accelerates his AI model training but also develops a mindset of innovation without boundaries. Empowered by seamless scalability and reduced operational costs, Amit channels his energy into refining algorithms that promise to redefine healthcare diagnostics. This newfound agility allows him to iterate rapidly, collaborate globally, and pioneer solutions that bridge the gap between technology and societal impact.

🔗Brazil

In São Paulo, Rosina leads a team of environmental scientists focused on preserving the Amazon rainforest. Their research involves extensive data collection from remote sensors scattered across vast and often inaccessible regions of the rainforest. The data, including temperature, humidity, and biodiversity indicators, is crucial for monitoring climate change impacts and guiding conservation efforts.

Decentralized nodes located strategically across the rainforest process sensor data in real-time. Data collected from the rainforest remains secure and under local ownership. Local indigenous communities, equipped with smartphones, actively participate in data collection and monitoring (and use the decentralized network for the preservation of local culture). The insights derived from the program drive the training of decentralized AI algorithms, contributing to global climate research and advocacy efforts.

🔗A World with a Million Nodes is Possible

This vision of a world with a million nodes connected to the ThreeFold Grid shows how technology can bridge gaps, enhance security, and foster innovation on a global scale. Each node plays a crucial role in building a resilient, inclusive, and efficient digital infrastructure for everyone, everywhere.

From AI development to sustainable farming, digital education to climate science and disaster response, decentralized infrastructure is transforming how people connect and create.

For years, the ThreeFold team and community have been quietly building the foundation. The technology is proven. The network is live. And the world needs what we have been building.

The grid today is a clear collective demonstration that all of this is possible. Scaling to a million nodes is an ambitious goal – but it’s also an invitation. An invitation to co-create a digital world where power is distributed, opportunity is shared, and progress belongs to everyone.

This is more than infrastructure. It’s a movement. One node at a time, we’re building the Internet – and the intelligence – that the world truly needs.

🔗The Problems with Today’s Internet

The Internet was designed decades ago, long before the explosion of data, AI, and global connectivity. Today’s networks route nearly all traffic through a handful of major data centers, creating single points of failure, bottlenecks, and privacy concerns. Internet Service Providers (ISPs), cloud giants, and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) act as gatekeepers, adding unnecessary costs, control, and surveillance.

Patching the system has only led to more complexity. VPNs, CDNs, and edge computing try to fix inefficiencies but don’t address the root problem of centralization. Legacy protocols like IPv4 force reliance on outdated solutions like Network Address Translation (NAT), a method that allows multiple devices to share a single public IP address, contributing to centralization issues. Meanwhile, the rapid growth of IoT devices and AI-driven applications pushes the limits of this aging architecture. The result? A fragile, monopolized internet that prioritizes corporate profits over user empowerment.

🔗Mycelium: A New Approach to Connectivity

Mycelium is a decentralized networking technology that enables direct, peer-to-peer communication without relying on centralized servers. Instead of routing data through major data centers, Mycelium establishes a distributed network that enhances functionality while remaining compatible with existing applications.

How Mycelium works:

• Decentralized Connectivity: Mycelium routes data efficiently using a mesh-like structure, dynamically adjusting based on user location and available peers. This ensures seamless communication without the need for intermediaries.
• End-to-End Encryption: All connections are secured, preventing man-in-the-middle attacks and ensuring complete privacy.
• Proof of Authenticity (PoA): Identity verification strengthens trust between users and prevents malicious actors from infiltrating the network.
• Optimized Routing: Smart algorithms minimize latency and optimize traffic flow, delivering faster, more efficient connectivity.

🔗A Glimpse into the Future with Mycelium

Imagine waking up in a world where your internet connection isn’t routed through corporate-owned data centers but flows securely between you and those you trust. Your home office connects seamlessly to an encrypted global network. You start your day by accessing files from your personal cloud, which is hosted on your own device, encrypted, and accessible only to you. A quick, secure video call with your team follows, running entirely over Mycelium’s peer-to-peer network, free from surveillance or interference.

Small businesses host their websites and manage their infrastructure without relying on third-party cloud providers. Developers push code to private repositories, ensuring only authorized collaborators have access. Families stream media directly from their home servers, avoiding subscription fees and content restrictions. Even online gaming has been revolutionized. Players host multiplayer sessions on encrypted private servers, eliminating lag and reliance on corporate hosts.

Meanwhile, IoT devices in smart homes and remote workplaces function on secure private networks, safeguarding sensitive data from corporate surveillance. A doctor in a rural village can connect securely with a specialist overseas, sharing critical patient data without privacy concerns. Journalists and activists can communicate without censorship, free from government or corporate monitoring.

🔗The Need for a New Internet

The current internet infrastructure is failing us. Over 70% of global internet traffic depends on expensive transglobal networks, leading to high costs and latency. A simple Zoom call between Uganda and Tanzania may be routed through U.S.-based servers, significantly degrading the experience. With AI-driven systems, agentic computing, and rising cybersecurity threats, centralized control is no longer sustainable.

ThreeFold is pioneering a new internet that is truly decentralized, infinitely scalable, and geo-aware. Built from the ground up on a bare Linux kernel, ThreeFold’s internet stack enables modular, self-healing infrastructure, putting control back in the hands of users. Unlike traditional cloud providers, ThreeFold dynamically shards data with advanced erasure codes, providing security against even quantum computing threats. Its real-time routing algorithms eliminate bottlenecks by optimizing packet travel based on congestion, node availability, and latency.

With 3.5 billion people still offline and AI agents set to scale into the billions, the need for a decentralized internet has never been more urgent. The future isn’t about patching a failing system – it’s about building a better one. Through advancements like Mycelium, ThreeFold is leading the charge, reshaping the internet into what it was meant to be: open, secure, and controlled by people – not corporations.

Learn more about Mycelium via the website and documentation.