🔗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.

However, we have seen this movie before. Last month, we saw websites going down due to a global AWS outage.

This really begs the question. How resilient is the world wide web, if it is constantly dependent on centralized service providers?

Let’s understand what exactly happened.

🔗The Update That Broke The Internet

Cloudflare’s global outage wasn’t caused by DNS issues, an attack, or any systemic failure across the internet.

Believe it or not, it just came down to a single configuration file used for bot mitigation. The file in question is automatically generated from live threat-intelligence feeds. It’s meant to update continuously to block bots, abusive traffic, and malicious patterns. At some point before the outage, its size expanded far beyond what the underlying software was built to tolerate.

Under normal circumstances the system reloads this file without incident. However, this time, the oversized file hit a latent bug inside Cloudflare’s bot-management engine, causing it to crash repeatedly.

Now, since this component sits in the request path for most Cloudflare products, its failure caused widespread 500 errors across the network.

Once that service collapsed, the effects rippled through Cloudflare’s global infrastructure. Websites depending on Cloudflare’s CDN, WAF, and bot filtering began failing almost simultaneously. Users saw generic “500 errors,” and even Cloudflare’s own dashboard and API became inaccessible.

Major platforms like ChatGPT, X, Shopify, Uber, Spotify, Indeed, Claude, Perplexity, Canva, NJ Transit’s digital systems, and countless others were unreachable for hours simply because they are all fronted by Cloudflare’s global network.

Eventually, a fix was rolled out by late morning Eastern Time. Engineers patched the underlying issue, reverted the problematic configuration, and gradually restored dependent systems.

🔗What Is the Solution?

To his credit, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht admitted that the company “failed” its customers. However, an apology isn’t enough when a system that is currently responsible for the global trillion dollar economy and other critical services is seemingly so fragile that it can’t handle a single company’s update.

Cloudflare “fixed” the issue. But did they actually heal the wound or put a flimsy little band aid? History tells us that it is likely the latter.

We saw the same pattern with AWS’s regional DNS failure, Microsoft’s global Azure collapse, and CrowdStrike’s faulty update that halted hospitals and grounded planes. Quick patches are applied, but the core fragility remains untouched.

This isn’t a Cloudflare problem.

It’s an internet architecture problem.

And that’s where alternatives must be taken seriously.

Fixing configuration files is not the solution. Rebuilding the foundation is.

🔗The ThreeFold Alternative: A Different Kind of Internet

Instead of patching over the centralization crisis, ThreeFold rebuilds the foundation entirely.

Instead of a few hyperscale providers powering the world, ThreeFold utilizes thousands of independent capacity providers to contribute compute, storage, and bandwidth to a unified, autonomous grid. Its Sovereign Agentic Cloud is designed around decentralization, autonomy, and distribution. The exact qualities today’s internet has lost.

ThreeFold works across three layers:

• The Cloud: A decentralized, Kubernetes-compatible cloud running on independent capacity providers instead of hyperscale data centers.
• The Network: A peer-to-peer mesh with built-in VPN, DNS, CDN, and gateways, creating a self-healing connectivity fabric.
• The Agents: Autonomous, user-owned digital agents running on decentralized compute, not Big Tech servers.

Together, these create an internet that grows more resilient as it expands.

🔗Why This Actually Fixes the Problem

ThreeFold’s solution represents a return to that original vision of the internet. A decentralized, sovereign, human-aligned internet that isn’t vulnerable to the failure of one company, one region, or one configuration file. As ThreeFold co-founder Florian Fournier puts it:

“The internet was meant to be a network of peers, open, resilient, and free. Over time, it became a network of platforms.”

ThreeFold’s work is aimed at rebuilding the web from the ground up. This is not a band aid. Our solution dares to restructure what is broken. And In a world where a single file update can cripple platforms worth billions, it’s clear that this is the direction the internet should have taken all along.

Do you want to join our mission? Start here and stay tuned.

🔗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.

🔗The Cloud

The Cloud forms the foundation, a 100% Kubernetes-compatible compute and storage layer that operates as a global, distributed cloud.

Built on top of the ThreeFold Grid, it draws from independent capacity providers around the world. Each contributes compute, storage, and network resources, forming a resilient, peer-to-peer infrastructure that’s already live today.

This layer makes decentralized Kubernetes real and accessible. Developers can spin up clusters directly across the grid using familiar declarative workflows, autoscaling, monitoring, and logging tools – all without reliance on centralized cloud vendors.

The result is a production-grade environment that offers the usability of conventional clouds combined with the sovereignty, security, and resilience of decentralization. Developers gain the freedom to deploy applications anywhere, anytime, without gatekeepers.

While ThreeFold’s community-driven open-source cloud has been live for years with builders already commercializing its resources, this new Kubernetes-based solution marks a major evolution: simplified, commercial-ready, and purpose-built to host the next generation of autonomous agents. It’s the necessary foundation for the sovereign agentic cloud.

Stay tuned this month for the release of the Kubernetes Cloud.

🔗The Network

The next step extends this foundation into a living, intelligent network layer.

This step introduces a full suite of decentralized network services – including VPN, DNS, CDN, and LLM gateways – all designed to make the underlying grid fully reachable, programmable, and autonomous.

These gateways transform ordinary grid nodes into public-facing endpoints, solving one of the hardest problems in decentralized hosting: achieving global accessibility while providing greater independence from scarce IPv4 addresses and centralized ISPs.

Traffic moves dynamically across the mesh. Every connection is encrypted end-to-end. And instead of relying on fixed routes or central ISPs, the network forms a peer-to-peer overlay that automatically discovers and maintains the most efficient path between nodes.

When a node or connection goes down, the network self-heals, rerouting traffic in real time to maintain uptime. This allows workloads running anywhere on the grid, even on devices without public IPs, to communicate securely and act as if they were hosted in a single, unified data center.

What sets this network apart is not just its autonomy, but its evolutionary behavior. As the grid grows, it adapts, reconfiguring routes, optimizing performance, and expanding reach.

Parts of the network are already operational, with ongoing developments making it ever more powerful, efficient, and resource-rich.

🔗The Agents

The final phase brings the architecture to life: the Agent Layer, the cognitive and operational tier of the Sovereign Agentic Cloud.

Within this layer, every person can have one or more Personal Agents – intelligent digital counterparts that manage tasks, workflows, and communication while maintaining full sovereignty over data and identity.

These personal agents can coordinate networks of “Worker Agents,” each capable of handling specialized functions such as research, coding, analysis, or transactions.

Supporting them is a secure foundation of semantic search, private active memory, and long-term, zero-knowledge storage, allowing agents to learn, reason, and operate within encrypted, self-contained sandboxes.

🔗Agent Layer Evolution: From AGI to ACI

While much of the world is racing toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) – massive centralized systems aiming to replicate human cognition – we’re charting a different course.

Today’s AI giants control nearly all of the compute, data, and infrastructure required to train and deploy large models. This concentration of power brings enormous risks such as surveillance-driven data collection, bias embedded at scale, and energy consumption rivaling entire nations.

ThreeFold’s approach is rooted in Augmented Collective Intelligence (ACI). Not a machine trying to mimic humans, but a system that grows through shared human experience while protecting each individual’s privacy.

There’s no hidden monetization model, no surveillance layer, no opaque black box where your information disappears. Each agent learns locally, contributes globally, and respects the sovereignty of its user. It’s a model of intelligence that grows organically, not hierarchically.

🔗Building The Vision

That is the vision of what we call the Sovereign Agentic Cloud: a fully decentralized ecosystem where the Cloud provides resilient compute and storage, the Network connects nodes into an intelligent, self-healing mesh, and the Agent layer brings autonomous, personal intelligence to life. Together these layers form a self-sovereign foundation for the next generation of digital life.

Development toward this vision is well underway, with the Cloud and Network systems already live and evolving, and agents coming in Q1 2026. Stay tuned via our news channel and chat as the rollout unfolds.

🔗The Grid: The Foundation

At its core is the ThreeFold Grid, a global network of independently operated nodes. These nodes are run by “farmers,” aka individuals and organizations that contribute resources and are rewarded for making reliable resources available. Unlike hyperscalers, there is no central owner controlling pricing, access, or usage. Anyone can contribute hardware, anyone can consume capacity.

From a technical perspective, the grid offers the primitives developers need to run modern workloads: Linux VMs, private networking, IPv4/IPv6 routing, and the ability to deploy and manage infrastructure.

A key challenge in decentralized hosting has always been network access, especially scarce and expensive IPv4 addresses. The grid solves this with smart gateway models, such as the Web gateway that turn ThreeFold nodes with public IPv4 addresses into reverse proxies, making any workload accessible from the internet, even if it runs on a node without a public IP.

Farmers can offer gateway services using their own IPv4 addresses, so users can deploy anywhere on the grid without complex networking. This way, small operators can deploy apps without buying lots of expensive IPs.

Gateways can also bridge Mycelium with the traditional web. Mycelium is a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted network built on the ThreeFold base layer. Developers building directly on Mycelium can often skip IPv4 gateways entirely.

🔗The Builders: Turning Infrastructure into Products

Above the raw grid sits a growing layer of builders and companies who package its primitives into usable, commercial-grade products.

As concrete examples, we have YourData Network, a seller of hardware and software, and Shiloh Code, experts in privacy and managed services, that both leverage the grid in their own ways. We also have interesting experiments like this Ukrainian underground radio which can safely run using the Mycelium network without worrying about centralized censorship.

Independent developers are also using the grid to offer hosting and app gateways. A recent project showed that a single person could set up a reliable front door for many apps in just a few evenings – something that would normally require a lot more time and expensive infrastructure. This gateway experiment helps work around the current limits of decentralized hosting, such as IPv4 scarcity and the fact that many nodes run in residential settings without direct inbound access.

Each of these efforts turns the raw ThreeFold Grid into accessible, commercial-grade services, without the specific need of a central rollout.

This builder layer is critical and serves a clear purpose: by abstracting away the complexity of the grid, it makes it possible for end-users to access apps and services running on the grid through easy to use builders’ products.

🔗The Users: Plugging Into Decentralization

At the top of the stack are the end users, people and small teams who want to use products without running servers themselves. Thanks to the builder layer, there are already products and services offered on the internet that run on the grid, making it possible to benefit from a decentralized backbone without managing the infrastructure.

They do not need to know how the network works. They simply use products like a hosted drive, a secure gateway or a custom web service that runs on a decentralized backbone. For them it feels as easy as a normal cloud, but without lock-in, tracking or sudden price changes.

🔗Why This Matters Now

This is no longer just a vision. It’s a functioning ecosystem where people are building and deploying. The technology is ready for production. Compute, storage and networking primitives are live, open source and easy to automate with modern tools.

If you’re a developer or small company wanting to launch a product in a secure, decentralized environment, this is it. Here is what you should do:

• Explore the ThreeFold Grid
• Read through our manual
• Join the forum

The future of the internet isn’t coming – it’s already running. ThreeFold is ready for adoption.

That’s exactly what our team is building with KubeCloud, a platform that brings Kubernetes to the decentralized ThreeFold Grid with simplicity, sovereignty, and scale.

🔗So, What Exactly Does Kubernetes Do?

At its core, Kubernetes helps teams run applications smoothly, no matter where they live, on laptops, in data centers, or in the cloud. It takes the heavy lifting out of day-to-day operations by automating what would otherwise be slow, error-prone, and manual:

• Tames complexity: The main benefit is simplification. Kubernetes can simplify the chaos of microservices, making large, distributed systems manageable for multi-team organizations.
• Boosts reliability: Built-in recovery, replication, and load balancing keep applications running with minimal downtime.
• Delivers consistency: Standardizes deployment and operations across clouds, virtual machines, and bare metal. This makes sure that apps run the same everywhere.
• Automated deployment: Roll out applications consistently across physical servers, virtual machines, and clouds without having to configure each by hand.
• Elastic scaling: Add or remove capacity when demand spikes or shrinks, keeping performance steady while optimizing resources.
• Self-healing resilience: Identifies system issues and resolves them automatically.
• Service discovery & load balancing: Gives each connected app a fixed name and address so they can always find each other, while also spreading traffic out so nothing gets overloaded.
• Storage orchestration: Works with many types of storage systems so apps can safely save their data and get it back whenever they need it.

In short, Kubernetes takes the chaos out of running modern applications. That’s why it’s become the global standard.

🔗Why the World Adopted K8s

K8s didn’t become the de facto standard by accident. Kubernetes adoption was fueled by two converging technology shifts: the rise of containers and the rise of the cloud.

🔗The Rise of Containers

Containers changed how software was built and shipped. These are lightweight “boxes” that package an app with everything it needs to run. They’re faster and more portable than traditional software setups. But once teams started running hundreds or thousands of containers, they needed a smart system to organize them. Kubernetes became that system.

🔗The Rise of Cloud

Cloud computing redefined infrastructure. These platforms allow everyone to rent computing power instantly. However, every cloud worked a little differently. What was needed was a universal system that worked across providers. Kubernetes stepped up by becoming a unifying layer for hybrid and multi-cloud strategies.

This combination made Kubernetes the go-to tool for modern infrastructure.

🔗Limitations of the Centralized Kubernetes Model

There is no doubt whatsoever about the practicality of traditional Kubernetes. As explained above, it has become the standard for running containerized applications. The issue, however, is that most clusters today live inside centralized cloud providers. This introduces several problems

• Vendor lock-in: Dependence on a single provider limits flexibility and leverage.
• Rising costs: Data-intensive workloads become expensive to run at scale.
• Reduced sovereignty: Organizations have little control over where and how data is stored or processed.

For developers, this means reduced flexibility. For enterprises, it means risk, especially when compliance, data privacy, or infrastructure resilience are on the line.

A decentralized approach to Kubernetes can potentially address these gaps by distributing workloads across independent, globally available nodes, while still preserving the ease and power of cloud-native operations. In this decentralized environment, developers can enjoy the same features, without having to surrender control to hyperscale platforms.

For AI and next-generation applications that demand both performance and sovereignty, decentralization is essential.

This is where KubeCloud comes in.

🔗KubeCloud: Decentralized Kubernetes on Steroids

KubeCloud is designed to make decentralized Kubernetes both real and accessible. Instead of relying on centralized cloud providers, it provides clusters directly on the ThreeFold Grid (TFGrid). The TFGrid is a decentralized, peer-to-peer cloud made up of independent capacity providers distributed worldwide. The Grid offers compute, storage, and networking resources contributed by individuals and organizations.

🔗What Powers KubeCloud

Under the hood, KubeCloud integrates Mycelium. Mycelium forms an adaptive, encrypted mesh across TFGrid nodes, routing traffic securely and efficiently. Unlike traditional networking, which often depends on centralized ISPs and data centers, Mycelium self-heals and reroutes around failures, creating resilient connections between workloads no matter where they run.

KubeCloud also supports multi-master clusters for high availability. Control plane nodes are distributed, and if one fails, the others automatically elect a new leader to keep the cluster running smoothly.

Key capabilities include:

• Zero-downtime upgrades: Apply updates without interrupting running workloads.
• Built-in failover: Automatically recovers from node or service failures.
• Elastic scaling: Expand or shrink services on demand to match workload needs.

For observability, users can track cluster health through integrated Prometheus and Grafana dashboards. Exposing applications to the public internet is equally streamlined. A simplified web gateway replaces the usual complexity of ingress controllers with built-in domain and prefix-based routing.

🔗What It Means for Users

So, how does KubeCloud help users? Let’s take a look.

🔗For Developers and DevOps

• Familiar workflows which includes declarative deployments, autoscaling, monitoring, logging, and collaboration workflows.
• Runs in a decentralized environment, not a centralized vendor cloud
• Users retain full control of compute, storage, and networking

🔗For Enterprises

• Production-grade Kubernetes, without lock-in. Run clusters confidently, free from dependence on a single vendor.
• Made for data-heavy teams. Tap into next-gen hardware on the ThreeFold Grid, built for AI and high-performance workloads.

🔗In Closing

Kubernetes has reshaped how the world builds and runs software. By automating deployment, scaling, and recovery. Yet, as powerful as Kubernetes is, most of its deployments still run on centralized clouds, bringing challenges of lock-in, cost, and sovereignty. That is why the next leap is decentralization.

KubeCloud combines the familiarity of Kubernetes with the resilience and sovereignty of decentralized infra. It takes the power of the TFGrid and Mycelium and packages it into a platform that anyone can adopt with minimal onboarding friction.

Kubernetes changed the world once. By leveraging decentralization and ThreeFold, KubeCloud may do so again.

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