The third release of the ThreeFold Grid represents a major step in the decentralization of the People’s Internet with the Smart Contract for IT coming to life on the ThreeFold Blockchain (aka “TF Chain”). Built on the Substrate framework, TF Chain represents the layer-0 for all current and future technologies to provision decentralized Internet capacity. 

But what is Substrate to begin with? And what exactly does our TF Chain do?

What is TF Chain and what is Substrate?

TF Chain is the universal smart contract layer on the ThreeFold Grid. It’s an application-specific blockchain customized for the operation of a single application – provisioning decentralized compute, storage and network capacity. 

Substrate is a blockchain-building framework from Parity that allows developers to simply create future-proof solo blockchains or parachains for any use case. Parity was founded by Ethereum’s co-founder and first CTO Gavin Wood in 2015, and went on to develop Substrate to power a multichain, interoperable and decentralized Internet.

Why did we choose Substrate for our TF Chain?

Substrate brings clear benefits to TF Chain in relation to its frameworks for developers, its interoperability with other blockchain ecosystems and its huge community. More than 150 projects from NFTs to DeFi are already building on it.  

By providing a solid, mature and secure layer for custom blockchains, Substrate is built for adoption. The blockchain framework was built with the programming language Rust and is modular by design. Choosing Substrate allowed our developer team to leverage great blockchain constructs and efficiently build TF Chain instead of re-inventing the wheel. 

Its flexible, modular and composable architecture enables our team to focus on what matters the most – the unique demands of ThreeFold Grid. For example, we’ve built  a Grid module with specific functionalities for farms and nodes. Just like a chef can invent a new recipe and add it to a menu, Substrate allows our developers to build and add as many custom functionalities to TF Chain as we’d like, in a fully decentralized way. 

A major benefit that comes with TF Chain being built on Substrate is the native compatibility with the Polkadot ecosystem, opening up the opportunity for ThreeFold to become a parachain on the Polkadot network and seamlessly bridging to other Substrate-based chains in the future.

What’s the purpose of TF Chain?

For ThreeFold to be a truly decentralized peer-to-peer Internet infrastructure, people should be able to use Internet infrastructures from anywhere without any intermediaries like AWS. TF Chain serves exactly that purpose. 

It orchestrates the provisioning of compute, storage and network on the ThreeFold Grid via Zero-OS, removing all forms of intermediaries present in today’s centralized IT infrastructures. Put simply, TF Chain allows people to provide and use cloud resources in a 100% decentralized way. 

What does TF Chain do?

TF Chain is responsible for achieving consensus on all Internet capacity transactions on the ThreeFold Grid and to store them in a historical record. This prevents users from “double spending” their ThreeFold Tokens and ensures the correct execution of Internet capacity provisioning via smart contracts, while also protecting the network from potential attacks. 

An exciting feature that comes with TF Chain 3.0 is a totally new peer-to-peer billing framework for Internet capacity provisioning and workload deployment. This module allows for all functionalities of the ThreeFold Grid to be provisioned peer-to-peer between users and farmers. Therefore, the ThreeFold Token now also lives on the Polkadot network, allowing it to bridge back and forth from the Stellar network and potentially from other chains in the future.

While TF Chain builds on the Substrate framework, most of its functionalities are custom-built to fit the specific needs of the ThreeFold Grid – from Internet capacity provisioning, workload deployments, and payment and billing processes, to digital twin creation and much more. By executing all these actions via smart contracts in an automated and decentralized way, the activity on the ThreeFold Grid is always secured by blockchain technology and available to other users for open collaboration. 

Farms can now be registered on our new TF Chain Portal!

The Future

While Internet capacity provisioning and workload deployments are already executed via TF Chain, the minting of TFT according to the Proof-of-Capacity algorithm remains on the Stellar blockchain for now.

Building our own application-specific blockchain represents a major step towards decentralizing the ThreeFold Grid and ecosystem – a massive thank you to our developer team for this great achievement! 🙏

Want to dive deeper? We invite you to:

• Learn more about how smart contracts work on TF Chain 3.0 here.
• Join the ThreeFold Grid 3.0 testnet conversations here.
• Check our roadmap here.

Tim Berners-Lee created the web server and browser in 1990. Back then, the web was of a free, rather decentralized nature in which no single entity was to control the access to it. With the client-server architecture of the web, however, centralization came about. Nowadays, the web as well as the Internet in general are highly centralized. There are only a few companies acting as gatekeepers to large parts of today’s Internet. The Internet as we know it is continuously struggling with issues related to its centralized nature – from censorship and attacks on net neutrality to manipulation attempts from companies with monopolistic power. These issues are systematic and major players like Amazon or Facebook are benefitting from the situation as it is. This business model is also highly reliant on centralized hyperscale data centers that also come with a whole set of issues, from their vulnerability and limited scalability to their extremely high energy consumption and more.

People have become the product of a business model where companies offer their services in exchange for personal data – in order to capitalize on and exploit the data, basically squeezing people out for their data like oranges for juice. In times where data exploitation is the norm, it makes sense that data is often referred to as digital oil or gold. Moreover, algorithms of social media platforms increasingly lead to content provoking controversy and addictive engagement as this type of content tends to increase the time people spend on the platforms – with shocking impacts like The Wall Street Journals’ investigation “The Facebook Files” and The New York Times’ audio series Rabbit Hole show.

All of these issues have strengthened the push towards decentralization, mainly associated with the blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. However, many of the projects in the decentralized space still rely on centralized providers or structures to some degree. The second most-popular blockchain in the world, Ethereum, for example, has 60% of its nodes run on centralized cloud providers with 25% of them running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Akash, a blockchain-based cloud computing platform, prevents unutilized capacity from centralized cloud computing services from going to waste. Leveraging this underutilized cloud capacity, however, also causes Akash to be highly dependent on centralized capacity. Dfinity’s platform for decentralized apps (dApps) is based on an ecosystem of independent data centers, which makes it rather centralized on an infrastructural level.

While the previously mentioned projects are all seeking to push decentralization, they all have one thing in common: they rely on centralized structures or providers at least to some degree and therefore, are not fully decentralized yet. So, what does true decentralization look like?

How ThreeFold is Changing the Game

It is our mission to transform the Internet and Cloud and to create borderless opportunities for humanity. Therefore, we‘re truly committed to decentralizing the infrastructure behind the Internet to scale current and future digital workloads. At Threefold, we’re building an entirely new infrastructure from the ground up, starting with a Grid of new, neutral capacity and our operating system Zero-OS. Our ThreeFold Grid, based on open-source technology, enables an autonomous, secure, and energy-efficient infrastructure that allows for unlimited scalability while remaining affordable. Our Grid is the largest and most advanced peer-to-peer infrastructure in the world, already available in more than 50 countries and keeps expanding fast. With our energy-efficient full stack cloud infrastructure, uniting compute, storage, and network, we are much more comprehensive than other projects.

At ThreeFold, we believe in giving power to the people by developing technologies that empower individuals, enable social participation, and foster collaboration. We’re enabling even people without technical skills to join the network with plug-and-play 3Nodes offered through our certified hardware partners. The ThreeFold Grid is therefore more inclusive and allows any individual to participate. Our peer-to-peer nature removes the need of centralized servers and any type of intermediary, allowing applications and data to live closer to where they’re being utilized.

In addition to that, we believe that no one but you should own your data. Our technology empowers every user to be data sovereign, giving them full control over their own data by using a variety of innovative technologies, such as autonomous IT, blockchain, and peer-to-peer networking. This way, our technology is turning traditional IT upside down, enabling a data-sovereign Internet that gives users control and ownership of their data in an entirely secure, peer-to-peer IT ecosystem.

All in all, we provide the low-level primitives for a decentralized world, enabling any project to run on a fully decentralized, energy-efficient, and self-healing infrastructure. As we truly believe in collaboration to effect change at a large scale to fully decentralize the Internet and Cloud, our partnership ecosystem keeps growing. Most recently, we announced a strategic partnership with ownCloud, an alternative to public clouds with more than 200 million users worldwide, that aims to advance the decentralization of the consumer cloud.

So, we’d like to invite you to join forces with us to further push the decentralization of the Internet together – whether by becoming a 3Node or building on our ThreeFold Grid, by buying our ThreeFold Token (TFT), our currency for a decentralized world, or by testing our P2P Cloud. Let’s revolutionize the Internet together!

An example to illustrate this challenge is the fact that up to 60% of Ethereum (the world’s second most-popular blockchain) nodes run on centralized cloud providers and 25% of them run on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

While the topic is being addressed, it isn’t being solved at scale. The good news is that ThreeFold can play a large part in solving it.

Why should blockchains make this move?

The blockchain movement, as mentioned, is very heavily tied to the movement around decentralization. Cryptocurrencies represent the move away from centralized banks as the authorities and gatekeepers around money – just as ThreeFold and similar projects represent the move away from centralized clouds as the authorities and gatekeepers around data. The thing is, if blockchains are to rely on centralized cloud for hosting, they aren’t truly embodying decentralization.

Understandably, many blockchains have chosen centralized cloud providers in the past because there wasn’t much of an alternative. But now, the Decentralized Cloud (DeCloud) movement has changed all of that.

Here is how some specific audiences can benefit:

For Node Operators

Any full node or validator node can run on ThreeFold’s Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Cloud, making that particular Blockchain even more community-owned, and more decentralized from an IT/cloud level. Any node operator can choose to run their 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.

For dApp Developers

Web3/Blockchain developers can use ThreeFold’s P2P Cloud - offering both compute and storage - to build and power their applications in a truly decentralized cloud infrastructure, both blockchain-native and cloud-native. A strong advantage here is that developers have the ability to leverage Kubernetes, Docker, S3, and other cloud-native tools (all compatible / integrated with the ThreeFold) to power and optimize their data processing capabilities, as well as the overall functionality of their dApps. But the sweet spot is that it is deployed on a decentralized IT infrastructure, close to where users would be located.

But why choose ThreeFold over other DeCloud projects?

There may be bigger names in the space, but ThreeFold’s technology and offerings are much more comprehensive than the rest. ThreeFold provides decentralized storage, compute, and network all under one roof (whereas most other projects offer only one of the three) and as mentioned, we have created an environment for developers which is highly-compatible to the developer tools and solutions they use today. Further, ThreeFold is building new infrastructure from the ground up (rather than relying on extra space in data centers) and the technology is truly peer-to-peer.

We already have a number of partners in the space who recognize these advantages.

Any blockchain protocol or dApp, whether operating DeFi, NFTs, DEXs, etc, will at some point need to leverage 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, and others – but as a developer, you will have to think twice, not just about where your/your users’ data is being stored, but also about how (and where) your app is computed and powered.

Participate now in our quest to fully decentralize the Internet by becoming a node on our grid or buying TFT.

• ThreeFold Forum
• ThreeFold Main Chat
• ThreeFold Farmers Chat
• ThreeFold Testing Chat
• ThreeFold Foundation GitHub
• ThreeFold Tech GitHub

Find out more about Blockheating here: https://blockheating.com/

Find out more about our partners here: https://threefold.io/partners

It’s important for others to understand who we are. Thus, we identify with and embody three key attributes as a collective, to show the world what the movement is all about:

ThreeFold is purposeful. We exist to help humanity thrive. Our mission is bold and motivates every step we take. We adapt to our evolving environment and passionately strive for excellence.

ThreeFold is empowering. We help people find themselves and do what they love. We provide support to people and projects that help build a better world, whether they have moonshot visions or down-to-earth ambitions. We aren’t the hero of our story – they are.

ThreeFold is approachable. ThreeFold keeps it real. We’re open and honest, avoiding upstage corporate language and phony marketing spins. We don’t see ourselves as a company, but more like humans helping other humans. So being genuine, friendly, and loving comes naturally.

In its essence, the movement is open and inviting. We’ve created a participatory Internet economy, where anybody around the world can plug in a 3Node and add capacity to the ThreeFold Grid. Together, we’re expanding a data sovereign and planet positive Internet infrastructure, owned by the people, across geographical and cultural borders.

We believe in collaboration, not competition. Our technology serves as a responsible underlying layer on top of which anybody can build and create. We have beautiful partners already on board – and an alliance of conscious people and organizations who share our vision – and we are constantly expanding our ecosystem across industries.

And while the ThreeFold Foundation is currently the driving force behind the ThreeFold Movement, we believe in decentralization. We have open channels like a forum, a two-way Telegram chat, Github (Foundation & Tech), and Twitter, where people can and do contribute, ask questions and provide feedback that goes into our everyday decision-making and actions.

As I said at the start, you’ve dreamt of a different world. And so have I. John Lennon once said, “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.” Thank you for dreaming with us. Together, this will happen!

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash.