How ThreeFold can help any Blockchain protocol, and any dApp achieve more IT decentralization

[Benjelloun.Oussama]

The IT decentralization topic is a common one that is being addressed by the Blockchain and crypto community, and by top blockchain protocols, such as Ethereum, Polkadot, BinanceSmart Chain, as they’re all facing the same challenge: How can they escape the monopolies of centralized cloud providers for their own workloads, as well as for the dApps built on top of them.

An example to illustrate this challenge, that has been brought to light within the ETH community, is the fact that 60% of Ethereum nodes run on centralized cloud providers and 25% of them run on AWS, and Uniswap (top Ethereum DEX) also runs heavily on a centralized cloud provider.

The topic is being addressed by not being solved on a large scale, but ThreeFold can play a large part in solving it.

here are some of the use cases:

1) For Node operators: Any full node or Validator node can run on ThreeFold’s P2P cloud, making that particular Blockchain even more community-owned, and more decentralized from an IT/cloud level, As any node operator can choose to run those 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. ( unless you want to do it locally)

2 For dApp developers: Web3/ Blockchain developers can use ThreeFold’s P2P cloud - P2P compute and P2P Storage - to build and power their applications in decentralized cloud infrastructure, making both blockchain-native and cloud-native. Speaking of cloud-native, a good advantage here is that you have the power to leverage Kubernetes, Docker containers, S3 storage, and other cloud-native tools ( Part of the ThreeFold product suite) to power and optimize your data processing capabilities, as well as the overall functionality of your dApp, but the sweet spot, is that it is deployed on a decentralized IT infrastructure, close to where your users would be located.

In a nutshell, any Blockchain protocol and dApp, whether operating DeFi, NFTs, DEXs, Social, etc… will have to leverage at some point, 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, which is great, but as a developer, you will have to think twice also, besides where your/your users’ data are being stored, but also about how ( and where) your app is computed and powered.

What other Blockchain-related use-cases would you like to see run on the ThreeFold P2P cloud?

[Geert]

To me, identity is absolutely a use-case where the tooling on the ThreeFold grid can solve a lot of issues in the blockchain scene.
Anonymity is a big issue in the space right now. Malicious people have found this and use BTC now as a way to ask for ransoms. The risk of being caught with a newly created address is minimal. Moreover, addresses aren’t very user-friendly: they’re a long string of meaningless characters, and there is no way to identify the holder of the address with only this string.
A Digital Twin can solve this: a digital identity that remains under one’s control but that can also be linked to the wallets he’s holding. And with personal documents proving that the Digital Twin belongs to the one who claims he is. If needed certified/signed by an ‘authority’, under form of a hash on an immutable ledger. And with the personal documents residing under exclusive control of the owner, and only shared with the persons that this owner consents with. No other has access to the personal data, not even the owner of the hard drive where this document is stored on (as the data is split over different hard drives).

Blockchain has brought trust by design. Privacy and security however are not a blockchain’s best feature. ThreeFold and its Digital Twin brings this ‘missing layer’ on the shelf, with very easy integration.