🔗AI Sovereignty vs Data Feudalism

Why do we use the term “feudalism” in this context? Back in the day, landlords owned acres of land and serfs worked it in exchange for access and protection. We have a similar scenario going on now with data. Big Tech are the data lords” and we are the serfs. Their servers are the new estates of the digital world, housing the information, compute, and algorithms that shape how billions of people interact online. The AI agents will be running on these exact servers.

Each interaction, prompt, and data trace flows through their infrastructure. That means your data, your ideas, and even the patterns of how you think are all stored, processed, and monetized in someone else’s data center.

You never truly “own” the agent. You’re simply renting access to it through an API. The model weights, inference hardware, and even your usage logs remain locked behind corporate firewalls.

The question is no longer whether AI agents will act on your behalf, but who it ultimately serves. If intelligence remains centralized, it will reinforce old hierarchies of control.

So, what is the solution here? How do we introduce data privacy and sovereignty in our AI Agents?

🔗Decentralized Infrastructure Changes that Equation

When you run AI agents on a distributed grid like ThreeFold, you own the means of computation. Your data, memory, and logic stay under your control. You decide where your agent runs, how it stores information, and who can access it.

In fact, ThreeFold’s ultimate vision for the internet’s evolution is the “Sovereign Agentic Cloud,” a distributed internet built for privacy, autonomy, and collaboration. A key component of this new internet is the “Agent Layer,” the cognitive and operational core of the whole ecosystem.. In this layer, every person will have one or more Personal Agents that act as digital counterparts, managing communication, workflows, and decisions while keeping personal and organizational data fully under control.

Each Personal Agent can coordinate with Worker Agents that handle specific tasks like research, coding, analysis, or transactions. They run inside secure, encrypted environments built on semantic search, private active memory, and zero-knowledge storage.

Plus, the Agent Layer will be built on the concept of Augmented Collective Intelligence (ACI). In this model, each agent learns locally, contributes globally, and respects the sovereignty of its user. There is no surveillance, no hidden monetization, and no black-box decision-making. The agents evolve with the group and reflect their values and protect their privacy.

🔗A New Internet Built on Sovereignty

The AI Agent era doesn’t have to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can build an internet where intelligence serves people, not platforms. Where privacy is built into the foundation, not added as an afterthought. The Sovereign Agentic Cloud offers a path toward that reality. An ecosystem where users own their data, control their agents, and interact in a truly private and autonomous digital world.

For more information, check out our docs.

🔗The Root Problem: Centralization Happens at the Hardware Layer

As we have mentioned above, most decentralized cloud solutions still depend on Linux machines, humans, dockets, and data centers. Even when the orchestration logic is decentralized, the servers themselves rarely are.

In fact, many node operators for these networks simply rent virtual private server (VPS) instances from AWS, Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean, or other centralized cloud providers and run their “decentralized” workloads there. This may spread workloads across many providers, but it does not solve the core issue.

It’s quite simple. If the underlying hardware is centralized, the cloud is centralized.

Let’s see how Mycelium fixes this problem.

🔗The Mycelium Approach

Mycelium’s design begins at the physical layer. Every node in the Mycelium network is a machine that boots directly into Zero-OS, a lightweight, autonomous operating system built by ThreeFold specifically for running distributed compute. As such:

• There is no traditional Linux environment underneath.
• There are no hypervisors, VMs, or container engines to maintain.
• There is nothing for the operator to configure or update.

🔗Self-Running Compute

Zero-OS does not require the manual administration that other systems require. It handles networking, updates, self-healing, and resource allocation automatically, removing the entire class of DevOps complexity from the equation.

On the other hand, running a node on other decentralized clouds requires the skill set of a sysadmin: maintaining Linux, managing Docker or Kubernetes, configuring networking, and monitoring uptime.

To run a ThreeFold, you just need to:

• Plug it in
• Connect it to a router.

…and that’s it.

The node joins the network and maintains itself. Many of our node operators have reported that in the last four years, they have never once needed to reboot their node manually.

In the extremely rare case of an update hanging, briefly interrupting power (aka “switch off then then switch it on”) is enough to reset it. That is the full extent of node maintenance for the overwhelming majority of deployments.

🔗Deploy Compute Anywhere

Our main vision with Mycelium is to create a solution so simple and straightforward that anybody can deploy and run it. Since the nodes require no professional expertise, Mycelium can reach geographies, demographics, and physical environments no other decentralized cloud can touch.

The skill floor is roughly equivalent to “can plug in a computer.”

🔗Nodes Can Be More Responsible

Some nodes can also run as gateways, accepting inbound public connections and routing them into the network. This requires only basic networking setup and offers higher earnings, but it does not change how the node operates. Zero-OS still runs autonomously. The gateway role simply enables an additional function.

This requires a bit of networking setup, such as port forwarding, static IP configuration, etc. Even so, the skill level required is minimal compared to administering a Kubernetes cluster or maintaining container infrastructure.

🔗Easy Physical Scalability

Clusters of nodes can be deployed at physical scale, If a piece of hardware fails, the system keeps running with reduced capacity, and a low-skill technician can replace parts infrequently. In many cases, redundancy means even that isn’t necessary.

This makes Mycelium the only decentralized cloud model that is operationally viable outside of professionally staffed data centers.

🔗Mycelium’s X-Factor

Mycelium isn’t competing with container networks. We are offering an entirely different solution. A compute fabric that can run itself, anywhere in the world.

This is decentralization where it actually matters, at the root of the stack, inside the physical machines that power the cloud.

By taking this approach, we are democratizing access to critical infrastructure. Compute shouldn’t belong only to people with technical expertise, data centers, or privileged geographies. It should be available to anyone who can plug in a device.

If we can make global compute as simple as connecting a cable, then we will succeed in our mission of shifting digital power from centralized providers back to individuals and communities everywhere.

If you want to experience this shift yourself, join the Mycelium Network today. Install Mycelium, power up a node, and start running your own infrastructure.

One of the simplest ways to reclaim control is to use a privacy-focused smartphone like OwnPhone, which keeps your data on your device instead of sending it to corporate clouds. Paired with Nextcloud, an open-source personal cloud where you manage your own files and communications, everything stays securely stored on the ThreeFold Grid. Together, they make true digital ownership practical and accessible from your device to your cloud to the network itself.

🔗Step 1: Owning Your Hardware

The OwnPhone is a privacy phone built for those who want technology that works for them, not against them. No forced accounts, no background profiling, no analytics engines quietly feeding corporate models. The operating system is open-source, lightweight, Google-free, and designed around personal autonomy.

You choose what apps run, what permissions they receive, and where your data flows. Files can remain only on your device, or sync directly to your private cloud, without passing through Big Tech infrastructure. Nothing is extracted or observed without consent.

Plus. Ownership does not stop at the phone. You can own your laptop, you can own your own node, you can choose the software you trust, and you can participate in the internet as a contributor rather than a product.

OwnPhone treats ownership as a right, not a privilege.

🔗Step 2: Run your private cloud on your own device

Nextcloud delivers all the everyday features people rely on from services like Google Drive, iCloud, or OneDrive file storage, syncing, backups, document editing, video calls, calendars, contacts, and team collaboration, but without giving up privacy or control. It’s already trusted by tens of millions of users and thousands of organizations worldwide, including governments, universities, hospitals, and companies of all sizes. The experience feels familiar, but the architecture is fundamentally different: you stay in control of your data, not the platform.

That same idea lies at the heart of Project Mycelium. The Mycelium Network forms the foundation, a decentralized IPv6 overlay that mirrors the adaptability and reach of biological mycelium. Through YourData Network, Nextcloud runs on the decentralized ThreeFold Grid instead of a corporate-owned data center. You choose the amount of storage you need: 200 GB, 400 GB, 1 TB, or more. Deployment and maintenance are taken care of fStep 3: How it comes togetheror you, while you keep full administrative control.

It is a sovereign software layer operating on a decentralized internet. You control access, visibility, and permissions, and if you wish, you can even run your own node to host your cloud directly on your hardware.

🔗Step 3: How it comes together

OwnPhone provides sovereign hardware. Nextcloud provides sovereign software. ThreeFold provides a sovereign network. Together, they form an end-to-end ownership stack where no single layer depends on corporate control.

Nextcloud is preinstalled on OwnPhone and is also available through app stores such as Google Play, App Store, F-Droid, and Aurora. Most users simply receive a ready-to-use private Nextcloud cloud space deployed through ThreeFold partners with no technical setup required.

Daily interaction is intuitive. You log in to Nextcloud on your OwnPhone or computer, and your photos, files, contacts, and calendars sync privately and securely to your ThreeFold-powered cloud environment.

The phone is also equipped with Mycelium, a decentralized, end-to-end-encrypted IPv6 overlay network. In the future, communication, storage, and services will flow directly between devices and nodes across the decentralized internet.

🔗Why Does This Matter? Benefits & Impacts

• Digital ownership is foundational to autonomy in the modern world, not a minor feature.
• Owning your hardware and using sovereign software on a decentralized internet enables a true private cloud without tracking, profiling, or corporate oversight.
• This model embodies the principles of a decentralized internet: user agency, transparency, energy efficiency, and human freedom.
• It is more sustainable than hyperscale data centers, which consume massive amounts of energy and concentrate power in a few global entities.
• A distributed infrastructure increases resilience, strengthens digital sovereignty, and uses resources more efficiently.
• From individuals and families to remote teams and communities, this ecosystem enables private, secure digital collaboration without compromise.
• It extends beyond any single device, allowing phones, laptops, nodes, and cloud tools to operate as one unified, user-owned digital environment.

🔗How to Get Started

• Step 1: Acquire an OwnPhone. (And optionally, a node if you want to run your own infrastructure.)
• Step 2: Deploy Nextcloud yourself on the ThreeFold Grid.
• Step 3: Setup: Within one working day you’ll get your login details for your own Nextcloud environment
• Step 4: Configure your device to connect to your Nextcloud instance, then start storing, syncing, sharing, and collaborating across devices (phone, laptop, tablet) just like with a mainstream cloud, but now on a decentralized infrastructure.
• Step 5: Manage access, backups, encryption, and user rights. Enjoy full control over data ownership and privacy.

🔗Conclusion

Centralized systems built for extraction and monitoring are not the only way. OwnPhone + Nextcloud on the decentralized ThreeFold Grid offers a powerful digital sovereignty solution that’s already live and in use.

Reclaim autonomy.

Own your digital life completely, without compromise.

🔗A Chance to Reclaim the Original Spirit of the Internet

ThreeFold (and upcoming Project Mycelium, version 4 of the grid) taps into the idea that the Internet should be something we participate in, not just consume. Instead of relying on centralized cloud providers, the network is powered by individuals running small, efficient nodes that plug into a global, decentralized network. That means:

1. The power to run your own infrastructure (again)
   No single company controls the grid. Just like the early days, anyone can plug in capacity and participate, returning ownership to the edges.

2. The joy of tinkering – at modern scale
   Set up a node, plug in capacity, experiment, build, break, fix, repeat. The hands-on creativity of the early Internet meets today’s possibilities.

3. A community-powered digital commons
   Each node strengthens the whole grid. Every contributor helps build a healthier, more neutral Internet, one owned by the people who run it.

4. A privacy-first alternative to Big Cloud
   Decentralized, energy-efficient, and secure. Your data stays yours, your infrastructure stays in your hands.

🔗The Future Looks a Lot Like the Past (In a Good Way)

ThreeFold isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about reviving what the early Internet got right: openness, decentralization, curiosity – and updating those values for a world now powered by AI, automation, and increasingly data-intensive workloads.

It gives builders, tinkerers, privacy purists, and anyone uncomfortable with the way the Internet is going a path to reclaim agency in a world that desperately needs alternatives.

The original vision is still alive. Now, we have the tools to realize it on a global scale.

With version 4 coming soon, we invite you to take a look at the opportunity to participate in the next phase of our project and ask questions either in our main chat or our forum.

🔗Yin-Yang Economy In Practice

In our modern economy, we have a dominance of Yang. So while modern civilization is highly competitive and productive, it’s financially fragile, socially fragmented, and ecologically depleted. A balanced economy needs the Yin circuit to maintain cohesion and resilience.

When both circulate together, economic systems become self-correcting, capable of creating prosperity without undermining the very social and environmental foundations on which that prosperity depends.

All this sounds really good, but what about in practice? Let’s see how it works in Bali. The island is known for its artisans, farmers, and craftsmen, each contributing to a vibrant creative ecosystem.

On one side lies the Yang economy. We have tourism, export trade, and monetized craftsmanship, all powered by cash flow, pricing, and market exchange.

Running parallel to it is the Yin economy, sustained through the “banjar” system. The local village cooperative that governs community labor, temple upkeep, festivals, and mutual aid. Neighbors exchange time, skills, and support through “gotong royong” (collective work), maintaining both social harmony and shared prosperity. The result is an economy that sustains both body and spirit.

We have another example in Japan’s Fureai Kippu (caring relationship tickets) system. Introduced in the 1990s, it allows individuals to earn credits by helping elderly or disabled members of their community.

The help includes shopping, cooking, cleaning, or simply providing companionship. These credits can later be redeemed for similar services when the giver grows older, or even transferred to a family member in another part of Japan. By design, it reinforces trust, empathy, and reciprocity, the core traits of a Yin system.

Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) follow a similar principle across many parts of the world. LETS allows neighbors to trade skills and services using locally created credits instead of national money.

A graphic designer might earn 20 credits for a logo design, then spend those credits on carpentry, tutoring, or home repairs offered by other members. Each transaction strengthens relationships and keeps value circulating within the community rather than flowing out to centralized markets.

These systems don’t replace national currencies, they complete them by filling social and ecological gaps that money alone cannot reach.

🔗Applying The Same Principles In Project Mycelium

Let’s see how SPORE and AUR work together to reflect Lietaer’s philosophy.

🔗SPORE: The Force of Growth

In nature, spores are small, resilient units that carry the potential for life. They drift through the air and across the earth until they find the right conditions to grow. When they do, they become mycelium, which are vast underground networks that connect, communicate, and share resources across ecosystems. It’s a living system built on balance, movement, and renewal.

That same idea lies at the heart of Project Mycelium. The Mycelium Network forms the foundation, a decentralized IPv6 overlay that mirrors the adaptability and reach of biological mycelium.

On top of it sits Mycelium Cloud, a platform that allows anyone to run scalable Kubernetes clusters with strength and flexibility.

The Virtual Data Center (VDC) layer adds another dimension by making it simple to run applications on Mycelium Cloud clusters. It removes much of the complexity behind Kubernetes, giving users an intuitive interface to deploy and manage workloads without needing deep technical knowledge. For those who prefer full control, the underlying Kubernetes layer is still available for direct configuration and resource management.

At the top of the stack is the Mycelium AI Agent Framework. These agents sense, decide, and act within the network, optimizing resources and automating complex tasks. Together these layers create a digital ecosystem that grows, adapts, and self-organizes just like its biological counterpart.

This entire stack is powered by SPORE, representing the Yang energy of expansion and reward. It fuels the competitive, entrepreneurial side of the ecosystem. Hosters, farmers, builders are all incentivized to grow the network and earn value through contribution.

🔗Core Characteristics:

• Type: Tradable, utility token. Supply capped at 10 billion.
• Purpose: Compensation and incentive
• Mechanism: 80% of every rental payment flows to hosters in SPORE. 10% is burned, creating long-term scarcity, and the other 10% flows into the Project Mycelium development fund.

SPORE channels ambition and innovation. The controlled minting and burn model ensures that growth remains disciplined, not inflationary.

🔗AUR: The Force of Stability

AUR is the stabilizing currency of the Mycelium ecosystem. The Yin counterpart to SPORE’s growth-oriented energy. In most decentralized systems, service pricing fluctuates with token volatility, creating uncertainty for both users and hosters. Mycelium solves this through AUR.

AUR’s design emphasizes reciprocity, trust, and sufficiency over speculation. It is non-tradable, meaning it cannot be hoarded, pumped, or gamed on external exchanges.

Every AUR in circulation exists to facilitate real economic activity. Users paying hosters, hosters providing services, and the network sustaining itself. Its value is anchored to gold (1 AUR = 0.001 g), ensuring that transactions remain fair and predictable across time.

🔗Core Functionality

• Reciprocity: AUR circulates within a closed ecosystem. It moves between users, hosters, and the protocol, never leaving the community.
• Sufficiency: Supply expands only as needed for real demand, avoiding the scarcity-driven competition of Yang currencies.
• Trust & Continuity: Gold-backing and internal use preserve value without exposure to speculative volatility.
• Community Flow: Because AUR can’t be hoarded or traded externally, it continually recycles through the system, mirroring the mutual-credit flow that Bernard Lietaer identified as the heart of cooperative economies.
• Predictable Economics: Users know exactly how much they pay. For example, “1 compute slice = 9,375 AUR.” That value remains constant in gold terms regardless of token market swings.

🔗The Balance

Most of today’s systems lean too far toward the Yang side. That’s why markets swing wildly and communities fracture. Mycelium was built to correct that imbalance.

The dual-token model is how we bring balance into a system that’s often one-sided. AUR allows Mycelium to decouple network utility from market volatility. Users and developers can plan, price, and deploy services with confidence, while hosters earn in SPORE. This separation of functions between AUR (stability) and SPORE (growth) keeps the ecosystem in equilibrium.

By giving equal weight to cooperation and competition, we’re building something that can scale without breaking the people who make it work.

For more information on our tokenomics, read this.

🔗The Cracks in the Cloud

The irony of modern computing is that we’ve built the most advanced infrastructure in human history, yet it’s still held together by a handful of companies. When one of them sneezes, the entire web stumbles.

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp, has been one of the loudest critics of this model. In 2023, his team made headlines by leaving both AWS and Google Cloud, migrating all their apps, Basecamp, HEY, and others. onto their own hardware. According to him, they are projected to save $10M in over five years.

“The cloud was supposed to be cheaper, faster, and easier,” DHH wrote. “But the savings never materialized, and the team never shrunk.”

There was also another reason behind this move. For DHH, the decision wasn’t just financial. He argues that the modern internet has strayed far from its original design, a distributed network meant to survive even if one node went down. Instead, we’ve rebuilt it around a handful of hyperscale data centers like AWS’s US-East-1, turning the web into a system where a single outage can take out a third of global traffic.

Ultimately, his critique is simple. The cloud was sold as faster, easier, and cheaper, yet in practice it’s become more complex, more expensive, and dangerously centralized. AWS, once seen as a democratizer, now runs at nearly 40% margins, proof that the economies of scale no longer benefit users, only the providers.

And…he is right. For the most part. Centralization does indeed breed dependence. However, his approach is easier said than done.

Not every company can afford to buy, house, and maintain its own servers across multiple continents. Wasn’t that the whole point of the cloud in the first place? For most organizations, the choice still feels binary: go cloud or go home.

🔗Enter ThreeFold’s Solution

At ThreeFold, we believe the internet should belong to everyone, not a handful of corporations. At the center of this vision is the ThreeFold Grid, a decentralized infrastructure layer designed to make the internet more autonomous, efficient, and resilient. Each node on the Grid provides compute, storage, and network capacity through a peer-to-peer architecture. These nodes, operated by independent farmers, form the backbone of the network.

Anyone can access this capacity directly, no intermediaries, no corporate gatekeepers. The result is a self-healing data, network, and cloud layer that keeps running even when parts of it fail.

On top of this infrastructure runs the ThreeFold Cloud, a 100% Kubernetes-compatible decentralized cloud built on the global Grid. It allows developers to deploy applications anywhere in the world using familiar workflows, without renting space from Amazon or Google.

🔗The Three Paths Ahead

So, as a company today, you really have three paths in front of you:

• Centralized Cloud: You rent capacity from service providers, and when they go down, so do you.
• Run Your Own Servers: What DHH’s Basecamp chose. You buy and maintain physical hardware.
• Decentralized Cloud: Shared, decentralized infrastructure that combines the resilience of self-hosting with the accessibility of the cloud. (In this article we specifically focus on ThreeFold.)

As we see it, the answer isn’t to abandon the cloud, but to decentralize it, to distribute its power, its risks, and its rewards.

The choice to consume or provide capacity doesn’t have to be binary either. ThreeFold Grid users who want to install their own nodes can do so at any time, both to optimize their own use cases and earn additional revenue from spare capacity.

The ThreeFold Grid shows that a different kind of internet is not only possible, it’s already working. The future doesn’t belong to data centers. It belongs to people.

The next step is simple. Become part of it.

Take in the latest on the next phase of ThreeFold here.