Welcome to the second part of my journey through the decentralization space. After exploring Dfinity in my first post, we’re now looking into Akash and their solutions to find out what we have in common and where we differ.
About Akash
Founded in 2015, Akash is an open-source cloud platform providing a secure and sovereign cloud infrastructure, which they call “The Unstoppable Cloud”. Akash strives for an open, permissionless, and sovereign cloud, seeking to allow anyone to sell and buy cloud computing. Their cloud platform provides a simple way for deploying and scaling cloud applications.
How Akash compares to ThreeFold
- Akash and ThreeFold both offer DeCloud solutions compatible with industry-standard tools & protocols. With the integration of Terraform into the upcoming third release of the ThreeFold Grid, developers will be capable of hosting any existing or future Linux workload seamlessly
- Both projects have a marketplace that enable users to define the terms of their storage environment
- With Akash, developers would get access to what is probably the best decentralized computing cloud on the market, whereas ThreeFold offers a full stack cloud infrastructure that unites compute, storage, and network. ThreeFold is also the ideal substrate for DeCloud, as we provide low-level primitives for a decentralized world
- Akash Token (AKT) and ThreeFold Token (TFT), are utility tokens fuelling an open-source cloud. While the Akash Tokens (AKT) represent a unit of compute on the Akash Network, ThreeFold Tokens (TFT) represent a unit of compute, storage or network on the ThreeFold Grid
- Akash was also planning on providing their own server device, called Supermini, with plug-and-play functionalities similar to our 3Node. Our 3Node is a general purpose computer that acts as a low-level provider for IT capacity & is booted with our unique operating system Zero-OS
- However, Akash just announced that they’ll be postponing the launch of their Supermini indefinitely, meaning they won’t be offering anything comparable to our 3Node anytime soon
- ThreeFold has created the largest peer-to-peer Grid in the world & has the most comprehensive offering with components like the Planetary Network, Quantum Safe File System & more – energy-efficient & at a highly competitive pricing
- Akash isn’t challenging the status-quo in terms of data privacy, whereas at ThreeFold, we’re determined to empower users & to provide an entirely secure IT ecosystem – with solutions like our 3Bot & more
- We share the same goal of bringing secure, performant, data-sovereign cloud solutions to the people & share the mission to fully decentralize the cloud (even though Akash also relies on the unutilized capacity of centralized cloud providers)
We think Akash and ThreeFold are complementary in many ways and could join forces to further push the boundaries of cloud decentralization together. As we truly believe in collaboration, we invite all other projects in the space to join us in our quest to decentralize the entire Internet and cloud stack to restore the neutrality we once took for granted.
You can find a more detailed comparison of the two projects on our blog. Have you read about how Dfinity compares to ThreeFold yet? If not, take a look here.
As always, feel free to share your thoughts on how ThreeFold and Akash compare in the comments below 