At the core of this design is Zero OS, an autonomous, minimalist operating system purpose-built to deliver compute, storage, and network primitives without relying on centralized infrastructure, traditional sysadmin practices, or hyperscaler capital.
Zero OS has been specifically designed to ensure that:
A high level of computer expertise is typically not required to set up a node.
There is virtually zero maintenance after initial setup. All updates happen automatically.
Recovery from power or network loss happens without human intervention.
Zero OS is a stateless, bare-metal runtime environment, employing a minimalist design built from scratch around the Linux kernel. It exposes a tightly scoped set of primitives for compute, storage, and networking.
Headless by Design: Runs entirely autonomously after boot. There’s no need for user intervention post-deployment.
Ephemeral & Immutable: The root filesystem is read-only, and all system behavior is stateless and declarative.
Ledger-Driven Provisioning: Nodes listen to a blockchain-based reservation system and respond by deploying the workloads described in those reservations.
It has no package manager, no local user accounts, no shell access, and no remote management via SSH. This drastically reduces the attack surface and operational complexity.
The OS acts as a waypoint, converting instructions stored on a distributed ledger into real-world compute deployments.
Instead of exposing bloated APIs or fully fledged orchestration platforms, Zero OS provides a narrow but composable set of system primitives:
Primitive
Functionality
VM
Stateless KVM-based virtual machines with declarative configuration
ZeroDB (ZDB)
A lightweight key-value store with optional encryption
Mycelium
Mesh-based overlay network with IPv6, E2E encryption, and NAT traversal
Network Setup
Create private networks, web gateways, public IP exposure
Filesystem
Encrypted, snapshot-based persistent volumes using ZFS
These primitives can be composed by developers or workload orchestrators (like ThreeFold Labs or TF Grid SDKs) into more complex services, such as Kubernetes clusters, storage grids, VPNs, or decentralized databases, all without a central coordinator.
Instead of relying on centralized control systems like AWS Control Tower or Google Cloud IAM, Zero OS nodes operate through a decentralized model driven by TFChain and peer-to-peer communication.
Each node is associated with a Twin ID, a unique digital identity stored on TFChain. When a user wants to deploy a workload (like a VM or database), they submit a reservation smart contract to TFChain. This contract includes a cryptographic signature from the user’s Twin and a hash of the workload deployment.
Here’s how it works:
The blockchain confirms billing authorization and verifies the hash of the deployment. This creates an auditable, tamper-proof record.
The full deployment instructions (including specs like CPU, memory, storage, and network) are transmitted off-chain via RMB (Remote Message Bus), end-to-end encrypted, from the user to the node.
The node monitors TFChain for reservations tied to its Twin ID, verifies the signature and hash, and then automatically provisions the workload. No human intervention needed.
This setup ensures:
Auditable Infrastructure: Every change is logged on-chain.
Trustless Automation: No need for sysadmins or manual approval.
Sovereign Ownership: Each workload is cryptographically linked to its creator.
Efficiency: By transmitting heavy deployment data off-chain via RMB, blockchain usage is minimized, reducing on-chain storage and compute load.
Just like Ethereum smart contracts execute code, ThreeFold nodes execute real-world workloads. Driven by a hybrid architecture that blends blockchain trust with encrypted peer-to-peer efficiency.
Zero OS runs across several different network environments, each designed for a specific stage in the development and deployment process. This setup helps the system evolve safely without risking the stability of the live grid.
Here’s how the networks work:
Network
Description
Production
This is the live network used in the real world. It’s stable, fully audited, and cannot be reset. Only proven, trusted features are allowed here.
Test
Used to test new features at scale. It’s close to production quality, but some releases might still contain bugs. Resets are possible though very rare.
QA
For early-stage features still being tested. It may lag behind active development and can be reset if needed.
Dev
A temporary network just for developers to experiment and debug new code. It can be reset at any time.
This tiered model makes sure that:
New features are tested step by step
Production remains stable and secure
Developers can safely build and improve the system without risk to users.
ThreeFold, through Zero OS and the TF Grid, decentralizes the cloud and rebuilds it from the ground up, with sovereignty, automation, and composability at its core.
Zero OS isn’t just an operating system. It’s a self-operating system.
And in a time when data, identity, and computational infrastructure are geopolitical battlegrounds, that changes everything.
A school in Uganda can run its own local cloud with no data ever leaving its premises.
A nation-state can build a national cloud grid without relying on a centralized provider.
A developer collective can launch resilient apps that survive even if core internet services go down.
This is infrastructure-native sovereignty. Not just ownership of software, but autonomy over the full lifecycle: deployment, operation, upgrade, and recovery.
With Zero OS and the ThreeFold Grid, you move from dependency to autonomy.
That’s what makes ThreeFold truly sovereign tech.
Not just infrastructure. Not just decentralization.
But total autonomy, by design.
The future is self-owned, self-operated, and borderless.
Whether you’re an individual, an enterprise, or a grassroots community, the tools to build your own cloud, on your own terms, are finally here.
We need to restore the internet to its original intent,” says Kristof De Spiegeleer, founder of ThreeFold, in a recent interview at ETHDenver. “It was much more peer-to-peer. People could express whatever they wanted. We were no longer products. That’s what we wanted to bring back.
Kristof’s perspective isn’t nostalgic. At ThreeFold, some of our team has been building internet infrastructure since the early days, when the web still felt like a community garden rather than a corporate mall. In more recent years, we have been radically reimagining the plumbing of the web. And we’re doing it from the ground up.
To understand what’s at stake, it helps to go back to the beginning.
The first ever website, info.cern.ch, was hosted on a NeXT computer in a physics lab in Switzerland. The web was conceived as a universal publishing system for scientists. It used open standards, interoperable protocols, and encouraged contribution. There were no paywalls. No targeted ads. No “walled gardens.”
All that changed in the 2000s. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others turned the web into a data-mining operation.
In exchange for “free” services, users unknowingly gave up control over their digital selves. What started as a peer-to-peer web became a hub-and-spoke model, where all roads led through Silicon Valley.
Today, more than 80% of online content is machine-generated. Most of the internet’s infrastructure is owned by a few centralized companies. Many countries don’t even control their own digital backbones.
This was not at all the vision that the early pioneers had.
Tim Berners-Lee:
“The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy.”
Marc Andreessen (Netscape co-founder):
“We thought we were building a publishing platform. Instead, we built the rails for an entirely new economy.”
Jaron Lanier (early VR pioneer and digital ethicist):
“The original idea of the Internet was that it would decentralize power… Now it’s become the opposite.”
This is where ThreeFold comes in as a decentralized, peer-owned infrastructure layer. Kristof explains it plainly: “We need storage, we need compute, we need GPUs, and we need to connect these things outside of the current web monopolies.”
ThreeFold makes it simple for anyone to contribute to this new internet by running a node. Whether you’re a developer, a farmer, or just someone with an unused computer, you can dedicate a machine to the ThreeFold Grid and become part of a growing decentralized network.
Attempts to “decentralize the web” are nothing new. But most failed because they tried to rebuild the application layer without fixing the foundation. ThreeFold flips that script. It starts with the physical hardware, real nodes owned by real people, and builds upward.
Its architecture is designed for resilience. It doesn’t rely on AWS or Google Cloud. It doesn’t store your data in one vulnerable place. It doesn’t treat you like a product.
And perhaps most importantly, it invites participation. Anyone can build a node, join the network, and help create something bigger than themselves.
What ThreeFold is essentially doing is reclamation.
We are reclaiming the peer-to-peer ethos of the early internet.
We are reclaiming the right to compute, connect, and create without gatekeepers.
We are reclaiming agency in a digital world that’s increasingly extractive.
As Kristof puts it: “No is simply not an option. This will be done.”
For those who still believe the internet can be more than a marketplace of user data, for those who remember what it was meant to be, ThreeFold might just be the future we were promised.
Modern AI development is deeply centralized. Today’s most advanced models are created, hosted, and controlled by a small group of corporations with vast computational resources and privileged access to proprietary data. This isn’t mere conjecture by the way. It is the most obvious outcome of how modern machine learning works:
The most capable AI models are those trained on vast datasets, using enormous compute, for extended durations. That means:
$100M+ training budgets
Clusters of the latest NVIDIA enterprise grade GPUs
Proprietary pre-training data pipelines
Only a handful of companies, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft, can compete. Startups, researchers, and sovereign nations without this infrastructure are locked out of cutting-edge development.
Artificial intelligences are orders of magnitude easier to control than humans:
Humans resist control through rights, unpredictability, and emotion.
AIs have no such friction. Their environments are programmable. Their cognition can be monitored and shaped directly.
Owning AI infrastructure doesn’t just mean “owning compute,” it means governing cognition. This is why the question of who builds and owns the infrastructure for AI is a question of societal structure and potential freedom.
Even well-meaning AI governance initiatives can entrench centralized players if access to model development, compute, or deployment is limited by regulatory red tape.
AI regulation can either reinforce centralization or counterbalance it. Policies that restrict open-source models, limit public access to compute, or impose vague safety mandates that only large firms can meet will drive further consolidation.
The centralization trajectory that we are currently on has dire implications.
Without a course correction, we risk entering a world where a small elite controls a growing share of intelligence deployed not to empower individuals, but to surveil, manipulate, and extract.
Centralization has given these companies the ability to mass-produce aligned, intelligent agents at scale. This transforms how propaganda, surveillance, and even individual behavior manipulation can be conducted.
In authoritarian states, AI systems can monitor, evaluate, and punish dissent in real-time across all digital communication.
In liberal democracies, well-funded actors could use adversarial inputs tailored to individuals’ cognitive patterns to shift beliefs subtly over time.
In global markets, AI-powered monopolies won’t just win by being cheaper – they’ll win by being smarter, wiping out small businesses, local expertise, and cultural independence.
AI doesn’t just need new infrastructure. It needs the right kind of infrastructure.
We don’t need just faster chips. We need a different paradigm:
Decentralized by Design: So no single actor controls the substrate of intelligence.
Sovereign at Every Level: So individuals and communities own their models, data, and compute.
Green and Sustainable: So we don’t trade intelligence for ecological collapse.
Composable and Open: So innovation doesn’t rely on permission from gatekeepers.
The ThreeFold Grid is a peer-to-peer compute and storage network spanning over 50 countries. Unlike cloud platforms built in centralized data centers, the Grid is powered by individual nodes run by small-scale infrastructure providers contributing capacity in exchange for tokens.
AI inference workloads, especially those requiring low latency, are increasingly moving to the edge. The ThreeFold Grid is inherently edge-native. It allows inference to happen where data is generated, reducing both latency and exposure.
ThreeFold’s AIBox lets users own and operate personal AI hardware, offering up to 80% cost savings versus cloud GPUs while providing total control over data and models. Each AIBox is dedicated to a single user, ensuring secure and consistent access to GPU resources.
Users can run fine-tuned models locally and earn by monetizing excess capacity.
The 3AI assistant runs natively on the 3Phone, processing all data locally. No cloud, no spying. It learns your habits, manages your tasks, and connects securely to decentralized apps powered entirely by the ThreeFold Grid.
🔗Run AI Workloads Today with 3Nodes and Full VM Rentals
AIBox and 3AI are incredibly exciting innovations. They are not in production yet but they are a critical part of our next stage. However, you don’t need to wait to interact with ThreeFold.
ThreeFold’s existing 3Nodes and Dashboard already allow users to run full virtual machines with GPU acceleration, ideal for training or inference workloads.
You can:
Rent a dedicated VM with AMD or NVIDIA GPUs and run any AI workload compatible with Linux
Spin up environments for model training, inference, or fine-tuning with full data control (OpenWeb UI deployment is coming to the Dashboard as part of TF Grid 3.17)
Take advantage of up to 50% discounts when renting a full dedicated 3Node for long-term use
🔗The Ideal Platform For Augmented Collective Intelligence
Augmented Collective Intelligence (ACI) is the next evolution of the internet. In this phase we are not just connecting people, but amplifying our collective capacity to think, decide, and act. When people can run their own models, control their data, and contribute to shared knowledge, we get smarter together.
ThreeFold’s infrastructure is uniquely positioned to bring ACI to life. By providing a peer-to-peer cloud that anyone can contribute to and benefit from, it enables communities, researchers, creators, and sovereign nations to build intelligent systems together.
ThreeFold integrates blockchain primitives for auditable deployments and transparent governance. This makes it ideal for regulatory compliance without sacrificing openness or privacy.
Unlike legacy infrastructure patched to support AI, ThreeFold was built from the ground up to enable distributed, compute-intensive workloads. Its composable architecture, GPU-ready fabric, and local-first design make it the ideal substrate for the AI era.
🔗Rebalancing the Scales: AI for the Many, Not the Few
In unfree societies, centralized AI systems are already being deployed for surveillance, censorship, and coercive control. Even in free nations, the combination of targeted data, powerful models, and cheap compute could enable sophisticated value-manipulation campaigns, individualized propaganda, or automated suppression of dissent.
We’ve already lived through the consequences of losing control over our data. An entire generation’s digital behavior was harvested, manipulated, and monetized. If we don’t act now, we risk losing something even more critical, our cognitive agency.
We lost the war on data. Let’s not lose the war on intelligence.
ThreeFold offers a defense. By enabling local AI processing, sovereign data ownership, and verifiable execution, it removes the infrastructure-level levers that centralized actors rely on for control. It redistributes power by making intelligent systems available to everyone, as a right.
The future of AI cannot be built on rented clouds, closed models, and opaque institutions. It must be co-owned, co-governed, and globally distributed. We don’t need another centralized alternative to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
We need something that Web3 promised ages ago, but failed to deliver so far.
We need a decentralized infra that’s live and open for everyone.
Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure collectively control over 65% of the global cloud market. This centralization funnels critical infrastructure into the hands of a few corporations, creating systemic fragility and profound asymmetries in power.
A single outage at one of these providers can cripple major portions of the web (even Web3), as seen in the April 2025 AWS crash which shut down major exchanges like Binance and KuCoin.
Even more concerning is the extractive model underlying this control: users become data sources, not stakeholders, feeding surveillance capitalism that commodifies identity, attention, and behavior at scale.
The core issue, however, is cultural.
The current internet architecture is not neutral. Most countries do not own their infrastructure. Over 80 percent of internet content today is generated by machines and routed through infrastructure controlled by a small number of corporations in a few dominant regions.
A video call between two people in East Africa might still be routed through a server in Europe or the United States. That is the scale of the imbalance. The world is already losing control of its data. Losing control of its intelligence would be the next step in the wrong direction.
Kristof De Spiegeleer, ThreeFold co-founder, calls this a betrayal of the internet’s roots.
“It was peer-to-peer. It was about giving. It had magic. Somewhere that started shifting when the web became commercial. Now, we are the product. We lost its original intent.”
The truly sad part is that Web3 was supposed to be the solution. It was supposed to fix the problems inherent in the centralized infrastructure. However, many in the Web3 industry took the easy way out. Instead of challenging the centralization of infrastructure, they recreated financialization on top of it. Power was not redistributed; it was just repackaged.
🔗The ThreeFold Solution: The Infrastructure Web3 Forgot to Build
ThreeFold flips the script. It proposes a peer-to-peer, autonomous, and privacy-first network built on the idea that internet infrastructure should be as decentralized as the ideals it was founded on. At the heart of ThreeFold’s vision lies the ThreeFold Grid, a decentralized, energy-efficient network of compute, storage, and bandwidth contributed by people and communities around the world.
Unlike traditional cloud models, where resources are provisioned by centralized data centers, the TF Grid is built from the ground up by individuals who plug in hardware and earn tokens for providing capacity. Spanning over 50 countries and thousands of nodes, the Grid demonstrates that a globally distributed alternative to hyperscaler dominance is not only possible, but already taking shape.
The ThreeFold Grid runs on Zero-OS, a stateless and tamper-proof operating system that eliminates root access, significantly reducing the attack surface. Workloads are deployed in isolated, self-healing containers called ZMachines, ensuring high performance without compromising privacy or sovereignty.
Here’s how ThreeFold stands apart:
No root access: Even ThreeFold can’t access users’ data or systems.
No surveillance: Your activity isn’t harvested for ads or analytics.
No intermediaries: You host and run services independently, without reliance on Big Tech.
No rent-seeking: You pay for resources, not for gatekeeping.
ThreeFold’s model reclaims the internet as a public utility, akin to electricity or clean water. This isn’t decentralization for decentralization’s sake. This is sovereign computing. Now, communities, developers, and organizations can build, share, and interact without surrendering control.
Instead of being extracted for profit, compute and storage become commons that anyone can contribute to and benefit from. Anyone, anywhere, can run a node in the grid (provided they clear our KYC process, a move made earlier this year to protect ThreeFold node operators). Each of these nodes operates independently, yet seamlessly integrates into a unified network.
Also, being considered a “public good” comes with its own set of sustainability and environmental responsibilities. Centralized data centers are energy guzzlers, since they require a huge amount of electricity and other resources to function efficiently. This high energy demand leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions and contributes to climate change. Plus, let’s not forget the e-waste and its contribution to localized pollution through cooling systems and inefficient water usage.
The Threefold Grid, by its very design, uses the highest possible levels of energy efficiency. After all, a decentralized network that doesn’t depend on a centralized power source can fulfill its energy requirements far more optimally with minimal wastage.
Despite its promise, Web3 has largely inherited the same centralized assumptions it aimed to replace. Rather than challenging the infrastructure layer, most projects replicated existing systems with new financial incentives. Protocols were built, but the physical foundation remained untouched.
What is needed now is a deeper rebuild. One that starts at the root. Compute and storage must be redefined as communal, not speculative. AI must run locally, not on leased hardware in California. Communities must be able to build and host their own trees of knowledge, anchored in their own culture, not someone else’s data center.
Web3 must move beyond the superficial and return to intent. It is time to replace abstraction with ownership, speculation with participation, and complexity with clarity.
The internet must be reclaimed. That work has already begun. What once seemed improbable is now inevitable. Web3 must grow up and build what it skipped. The future will not be leased. It will be co-owned.
ThreeFold invites everyone to imagine, and participate in, a world where internet access is co-created, not bought. Owned, not rented. In reclaiming the internet as a public good, ThreeFold offers a roadmap to a freer, more resilient digital future. One where we own the infrastructure, the data, and the destiny of our digital lives.
