The ThreeFold Foundation’s primary goal is to achieve sustainable and organic growth of the ThreeFold Grid. By stimulating the development of the ThreeFold Grid in emerging and existing markets with innovative products and partnerships, we’re looking at creating a steady utilization growth and a healthy TFT economy.
In this post, we will cover technology releases and use cases that will pioneer the utilization of the ThreeFold Grid. We’ve already developed the most extensive peer-to-peer cloud infrastructure on the planet, and are now focusing on bringing these to the market with well established cloud and blockchain household names.
We’re also working with visionary projects that will act as vanguards in the VR/AR and IoT spaces, along with others, to showcase the scope and reliability of ThreeFold’s technology for any use case where servers are needed. These partnership use cases will be introduced in part two of our Grid Utilization series.
ThreeFold Grid Solutions
ZMachine
Our ZMachine is a lightweight VM solution that’s brand new and unique to the ThreeFold Grid. ZMachine enables both traditional VM deployments and also introduces a next generation container specification built on our existing ZFlist technology. ZFlist containers enabled by ZMachines are more secure and more flexible than the current industry standard Docker-based containers. With Kubernetes running on top of ThreeFold’s ZMachine technology, we have a highly compatible and unique solution.
Kubernetes
ThreeFold has long supported the most used open-source container orchestration tool in the world, Kubernetes, which integrates the industry standard Docker format, a container creation and management tool. By providing both VMs and Kubernetes, we’re able to offer the most comprehensive solution in the decentralized/blockchain space to deploy, scale, and manage cloud compute workloads.
Also, the addition of Terraform and Ansible into the ecosystem is under development. This will facilitate a complete workflow for reserving capacity and launching Kubernetes deployments, using toolkits that are already familiar to developers and IT admins.
Quantum-Safe Filesystem
ThreeFold has created a few unique storage offerings, providing distinct benefits over legacy cloud infrastructure. Every component has been designed for optimal efficiency and they all work together to offer an unprecedented level of security.
ThreeFold’s flagship storage solution is the upcoming Quantum Safe Filesystem (QSFS). It uses Zstor to backup data written to a Zdbfs. This provides a convenient and highly-compatible filesystem interface along with the exceptional security and redundancy benefits of Zstor. In addition to being more power-efficient, QSFS is also designed to be really efficient in terms of data and the amount of overhead required. We call it “quantum safe”, because even an attacker with a quantum computer would not be able to decode users’ data, even if they managed to hack into a single storage node.
ThreeFold has already developed a prototype file browser that’s fully compatible with QSFS and has many cool features like editing documents. It’s one piece of a full suite of solutions we’re excited to showcase and invite the community to test soon.
Blockchain Hosting Solution
We already have three decentralized node solutions running in our Edge Virtual Data Center Marketplace, through collaborations with our partners DigiByte, Presearch, and Polygon. VDC, however, is a general purpose solution that provides deployers with a Kubernetes cluster as well as with a set of ZDBs that can be used for quantum storage, which may be more resources than needed for a single blockchain node.
ThreeFold’s upcoming blockchain hosting product, on the other hand, is a proof-of-concept cloud hosting solution built on our ThreeFold Grid 3.0 technology. This way, deployers get just what they need within a ZMachine running on a node in a location of their choice, without the additional complexity of a VDC.
Therefore, the new ThreeFold blockchain hosting solution will offer the ideal underlying decentralized infrastructure on which nodes will be able to scale limitlessly. It will allow users to deploy a blockchain node within minutes and at a fraction of the cost of current market alternatives on top of ThreeFold’s tamper-proof infrastructure – without having to rely on centralized cloud providers. Using our solution, nodes can be deployed, shared, and monitored on a truly decentralized infrastructure.
P2P Solutions
A full suite of P2P solutions on top of the ThreeFold Grid is being developed by our partner Jimber. They’re open source and provide users with full control over their data. These P2P solutions cover a wide range of applications – from familiar office tools and an extremely secure isolated web browser to video chat and messaging (with the most important feature, GIFs, of course).
The main tool used for the end-to-end encryption of these solutions is the Planetary Network (based on the Yggdrasil network initiative) – an overlay network which lives on top of the existing Internet. There, computers exchange messages with each other which are fully end-to-end encrypted, meaning full privacy and security for users over existing communication infrastructure. In the future, it will also be possible to host many Digital Twins on one single node. If you’d like to learn more about our P2P solutions, check out this interview with Jonas Delrue from Jimber.
Billing
With the introduction of our new Parity Substrate-based ThreeFold blockchain, TF Chain, in the ThreeFold Grid 3.0 release, deployers will pay as they go in a simpler and more flexible billing system. The resource utilization of this billing system will be captured and calculated on an hourly basis, and stored on the TF Chain. The new model also adds staking-based discounts on top of our Grid’s already very competitive pricing. It’s a unique approach to the market which we believe will be attractive for ThreeFold Grid users and further drive utilization.
The second part of our Grid Utilization Series will present some of our partnerships – so stay tuned!