We’ve reached a pivotal moment in the evolution of the Internet. And ThreeFold is ready to unlock a new Internet era – one filled with abundance and opportunity for all, one which is better for our planet. Our open-source technology, future-facing ecosystem and collaborative community have the potential to drive this new era forward.

For us, the Internet was always meant to be peer-to-peer, where anyone could own hardware, and connect and exchange directly with full security and in full privacy – without any entity in the middle. This is how the Internet began. But as demand grew, big tech began to monopolize its infrastructure and all the major platforms.

Since its inception, ThreeFold has been committed not only to delivering on the original promise of the Internet, but also to realizing our ultimate vision of a better future for all. For the past six years, we’ve been building up an incredible full-stack, open-source, decentralized Internet, all from the ground-up. We’ve come a long way and the result is, well, exceptional. There is nothing else out there like ThreeFold.

From creating our own blockchain-driven and highly secure operating system (which allows computers to become decentralized servers), to building an ultra-scalable Quantum Safe Storage System, a complete far edge cloud computing platform and a planetary peer-to-peer network all accessible via a unique Smart Contract for IT on the ThreeFold Blockchain, we’re proud to have the most complete edge infrastructure to power the next-generation Internet era.

And we’re taking concrete steps to further expand this infrastructure that offers a truly decentralized layer 0 for any blockchain or Internet application. Moreover, with the help of our community of Grid testers, we’re continuously advancing the underlying technology and working towards making it usable for as many people and use cases as possible.

Our vision and technology have matured into the Internet of Internets – a network of thousands of community-built and -owned Internets through which we strive to interconnect all of humanity. A new world is coming, and our technology has the potential to revolutionize digitization on a global scale, across sectors. And yet we remain a hidden gem.

So, what solutions does the ThreeFold Grid offer today already? And why exactly should you start to build on top of ThreeFold? Let’s explore some of the many possibilities available today.

The ThreeFold Grid – A cutting-edge, highly scalable peer-to-peer infrastructure

“ThreeFold is growing the ThreeFold Grid by enabling a community of thousands of farmers from around the world to participate and own a piece of the Internet.” – Adnan Fatayerji

The Grid is a peer-to-peer cloud computing network that’s highly compatible with current industry standards. In late December 2021, ThreeFold launched the third generation of the ThreeFold Grid on mainnet with a fully functional tech stack – a huge and crucial step towards a fully production-ready and decentralized infrastructure. The third generation not only brought a massive leap forward in the decentralization of the Grid but also made for a much simpler user experience for farmers and Grid users. People from all over the world are connecting thousands of 3Nodes to create the world’s largest decentralized Internet infrastructure, and new capacity is being connected every day. Find the latest Grid stats and utilization numbers in this regularly updated thread.

Over the past months, the team evolved the Grid through version 3.6.1 and upgraded it to mainnet in July after receiving 100% community approval. This release introduces more stability to the TF Grid and includes various upgrades and new features like the ThreeFold Connect App, the new unified dashboard for a simpler user experience, and more. Big progress was also made in terms of the DAO functionality that went live on TF Chain, with the first TF Chain (L1) DAO proposal was voted on and approved in August.

And with each new Grid release, we’re getting one step closer to solidifying the foundation of the Internet of Internets. Currently, the team is working towards completing Grid version 3.7.0 which includes some significant updates, improvements and new features like FreeFlow Twin, a new Node Pilot, new deployment features and a lot more. The team continues to do incredible work to further develop and advance the Grid as well as to support utilization and adoption by offering tools and applications that are user-friendly, secure, efficient and scalable. A massive thank you to our incredible tech team and the community of Grid testers!

Next up: our cloud solution

So, the ThreeFold Grid has been evolved, advanced and expanded quite a bit, hasn’t it? About time to take a closer look at our cloud solution and everything enabled by the technology and tooling built on top. As a heads up, part two of our series on ThreeFold’s game-changing Internet infrastructure is for the more tech-savvy crowd. If you don’t consider yourself “a tech person” you might prefer to jump to part three on weblets and end-user experiences right away.

Helpful Resources:

• Dive into the manual to get started
• Find out more about our technology
• Learn more about testing the ThreeFold Grid
• Join this growing movement & our testing community

As of edition 24, we’ll only share the Weekly via email and TF News, so make sure to subscribe via the respective buttons on the top-right corner of our website.

Community Updates:

• YouTube influencer Tactical Investing featured ThreeFold in a new video and shared the potential of ThreeFold farming with his community of 82.3K subscribers. Watch it here!

• You’re going on vacation but don’t know how to check on your 3Nodes? Read the community-sourced tips and tricks on how to secure and maintain your TF farm while you’re away.

• Did you already check out the new ThreeFold Video Gallery? It’s a collection of all video material available on ThreeFold – from deep dive sessions to DIY tutorials and more!

Technology Developments:

• TF Chain was updated to the latest version of Substrate on devnet. This will facilitate further development and allows us to get code reviews from the Parity team.

• We now have a new peer list available for the Planetary Network which you can use to access the end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer global overlay network.

• Start testing ThreeFold Grid V3.6.0 live on testnet. Check out the full release with actionable tips for testing here!

ThreeFold Grid:

• Take a look at this actionable guide for deploying workloads on the ThreeFold Grid, shared by all-star farmer Mik, and get started today!

• Migrate your 3Nodes to V3 asap by following the simple steps of the migration process.

• Global Titan shipping continues, so don’t forget to provide all information for your Titan order to ensure quick delivery.

See you next week, ThreeFolders! 🙌

If you’re a community member interested in sharing your story or being featured in ThreeFold content, please reach out!

You can find the previous editions on our blog. For older editions of ThreeFold Weekly (Vol 1-11), go to our forum.

With new devices being connected every day and emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), the metaverse and Web 3 gaining popularity, the demand for Internet capacity is booming. Already, these developments are shifting the Internet’s “center of gravity” from its core to the edges in order to keep up with the growing demand. In an increasingly interconnected world, centralized cloud architectures are proving to be bottlenecks hindering future growth.

Here are some interesting numbers to emphasize the explosive growth of connected devices and the impending data explosion:

• Back in 2018, 90% of global data creation took place within the two previous years.
• In 2022, 4.95 billion people are using the Internet and about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created on a daily basis.
• About 2 billion computers, 15 billion mobile devices and more than 22 billion IoT devices are active worldwide on a daily basis.
• By 2025, more than 1 billion people and 75 billion IoT devices are expected to join the Internet.

And yet, the expansion of Internet capacity still largely occurs in the same centralized and inefficient way. The client-server model of hyperscale data centers is unable to meet this rapidly growing demand due to high building and operational costs to fulfill bandwidth, performance and cybersecurity requirements. As data centers are primarily built in the US, China and Europe, emerging countries have to be connected via sea cables which makes the model’s limitations particularly severe for these countries. And even in countries where many data centers are located, they are built in regions where land and electricity are as cheap as possible. Consequently, the bulk of data centers is still far away from where the majority of users and connected devices reside, and where huge amounts of data are generated that require processing – resulting in a weak distribution of Internet capacity.

About 175 Zettabytes of data will be created by 2025, as our economy becomes increasingly digital and data driven. And this amount of data needs to be captured, stored and activated in a secure, efficient and high-performing way. So, the aforementioned technological use cases will not only accelerate the demand for Internet capacity but also require edge capabilities, such as low latencies, in order to run and scale successfully. In fact, the centralized data center model poses one of the biggest obstacles to the success and spread of the Internet of Things and related applications. This will have to change. Actually, industry experts expect 75% of data to be processed outside of the traditional data center or cloud model by 2025.

The rise of edge computing

Computing needs to be pushed from centralized data centers to the edge to support the massive data consumption coupled to the rise of connected devices and emerging technologies. For instance, as more and more home appliances and devices are getting interconnected through the IoT economy, the amount of real-time data generated within our homes on a daily basis is rapidly expanding. Edge computing tackles the shortcomings of the centralized model in terms of bandwidth, latency and autonomy. It enables applications and solutions to be hosted closer to where their data is being produced and consumed, thereby allowing for low latencies, rapid data processing and real-time decisions. 

The industry analyst company IDC estimates the global spending on edge computing to increase by 14.8% compared to 2021 – amounting to roughly $176 billion in 2022. By 2025, this number is predicted to reach about $274 billion.

The idea of edge computing’s ability to process data on-site is simple enough. Nevertheless, edge computing fails to deliver on its promise as it still remains somewhat centralized today. Granted, so-called edge data centers are closer to where the data is being consumed than hyperscale data centers. But while they do provide an improvement from traditional data centers, they are not able to provide far-edge capabilities, i.e. moving as close to the user and point of data creation as possible. They are simply smaller types of data centers that are still operated in a centralized manner, require the same infrastructure elements as centralized data centers, and usually rely on bigger, central data centers. Quite edgy isn’t it?

As the need for Internet capacity – specifically at the edge – is rapidly intensifying, a new approach to Internet infrastructure is clearly needed. The Web 3 movement created a spur of interest across industries due to its promise to decentralize the Internet and cloud as we know it. Future data will be generated at the edge of the network and Internet which certainly requires an architectural shift away from the current model.

Realizing an interconnected future

Ironically, decades after the spark of the open-source peer-to-peer Internet movement was steamrolled by large tech companies and governments eager to centralize the global Internet, we seem to enter an era of decentralization again. There’s no doubt that large tech companies did bring a lot of innovation to our global Internet and cloud stack. Technically though, peer-to-peer systems have always been the most scalable option. Moreover, open-source architectures have built a strong reputation for providing high levels of security and flexibility. 

In a peer-to-peer model, people and devices are able to exchange directly, without intermediaries or servers in the middle – leading to a more energy-efficient, scalable and flexible paradigm that can expand on-demand. And undoubtedly, open-source will play a key role in edge computing by simplifying and enhancing the building and deployment of software at the edge.

By leveraging open-source and peer-to-peer technologies, ThreeFold has come up with an Internet infrastructure that is capable of far-edge computing. ThreeFold offers a powerful set of compute primitives that provide the agility to create and deploy containers, Virtual Machines (VMs) and Kubernetes environments at the edge. Having integrated all leading industry-standard tools, ThreeFold’s solution allows for a seamless migration of any digital workload, making ThreeFold the ideal infrastructure for edge workloads. And all data produced by these workloads can be stored in a way that is ultra safe, highly reliable and unbreakable. Combined with end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer networking, applications can be hosted closer to where the data is being consumed – representing the ideal underlying layer for IoT networks, blockchain-based workloads and more to run and scale at the edge seamlessly, efficiently and privately.

The shift towards the edge is inevitable. ThreeFold is the first full-stack, decentralized, peer-to-peer Internet infrastructure in the world that combines compute in the form of highly-optimized containers, storage and network capacity in an all-in-one solution. With  more than 81 Petabytes of capacity distributed across thousands of 3Nodes and 76 countries as well as plans to sponsor the expansion of the Internet to developing regions, ThreeFold is the foundation for a thriving interconnected future that is secure, borderless and at the edge.

• Expand the new Internet by setting up a 3Node at your home or office.
• Help us connect the dots and accelerate our far-edge capabilities.
• Join our global movement today.

Once emitted, carbon can remain in our atmosphere for hundreds of years. To survive climate change, massive amounts of carbon emissions have to be offset – and fast. According to a UN report, 10 billion tons of carbon emissions will have to be removed on a yearly basis by 2050 to prevent the planet from moving past the 2 degree Celsius threshold. Allowing the climate to heat by just one more degree would have unprecedented consequences – including the sinking of islands and coastal areas, an accelerated rate of extinction (right now, estimations suggest that about 24 to 150 species go extinct every day) and much more. Our complacency towards climate change proves that we’re still in denial of the chain reaction and butterfly effects of our past and present actions.

Clearly, we’ve already crossed the threshold in the climate crisis where we had enough time for long debates on potential measures and policies. The time for those debates was in the 1960s, when a report by former US President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee first warned about the risks and dangers of excessive carbon emissions. “Climate change is the result of more than a century of unsustainable energy and land use, lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production,” said Jim Skea, one of the IPCC Working Group III Co-Chairs in a press release published earlier this month. According to a report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we can still achieve our climate goals if we significantly reduce emissions across all economic sectors. However, we urgently need to take action to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Now is the time to act. Now is the time for bold moves. As Skea put it: “Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible.”

The astonishing carbon footprint of the Internet

While people are legitimately obsessing about the emissions caused by air travel and whether to take that plane or not – bestowing us with concepts like ‘flight shaming’ – other industries’ significant impacts almost go unnoticed. One of them is the Internet.

Think about the chat messages and emails you send out every day. How many times do you ‘google’ things? How much time do you spend streaming music or videos? All of your online activities add to your carbon footprint. There are a couple grams of carbon emissions attached to the energy needed to power your devices and the wireless networks you connect to. On top of that comes the significant amount of energy required to support the infrastructure of today’s Internet, namely millions of data centers and the thousands of servers in each of them.

Even though the emissions caused by streaming one song or sending one email may seem insignificant, the accumulated use of the Internet by billions of people all over the world adds up. It actually leads to a collective carbon footprint amounting to a share of roughly 3.7% of global emissions caused by the Internet and its infrastructure – and these carbon emissions are estimated to double within the next three years. This 3.7% share of global emissions by the Internet almost makes the global aviation industry with its estimated 2.1% emissions look good.

The global pandemic – while decreasing emissions in aviation due to travel bans – has already accelerated Internet consumption and the resulting footprint due to increased streaming behaviour, remote work and more. With 1 billion people and 75 billion IoT devices expected to join the Internet economy by 2025, a more sustainable infrastructure than power-hungry data centers is urgently needed to meet the future growth of the Internet in an ethical and sustainable way.

Data Centers are power hungry

Big tech corporations like Amazon, for example, have massive carbon footprints with their corporate facilities, power-hungry data centers, complex operations and more. One larger data center alone consumes up to 120 MW – and there are about 7.2 million data centers worldwide, according to Statista. Moreover, a data center’s energy consumption accounts for about 40% of its operating costs. In 2020, Amazon emitted more than 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide up from about 51 million in 2019. Others like Google try to downplay their energy consumption by switching to renewable energy. While renewable energy is an improvement for sure, it does not change the fact that Google’s energy consumption could power entire countries.

Is that really a desirable way for us to use the still scarce supply of renewable energy? Shouldn’t we rather focus on the root problem and on becoming more energy efficient in the first place?

The first step should be to reduce the Internet’s energy consumption and overall carbon footprint. But even then: reducing that energy consumption and transitioning to clean energy will only get us so far – particularly when considering that there simply is not enough clean energy to achieve a complete transition. Those emissions that cannot be cut have to be compensated for. A holistic solution to today’s Internet’s inefficiencies and emissions is needed.

An energy-efficient and regenerative Internet

In December 2021, ThreeFold announced its commitment to achieve a carbon double win for its open-source peer-to-peer Internet infrastructure, the ThreeFold Grid. The ThreeFold Grid is able to scale anywhere electricity and network exist, using about 10 times less energy than any comparable alternative while being more affordable as well. By starting from scratch at the operating system level, ThreeFold was able to build an Internet infrastructure that is highly energy efficient. This infrastructure is already made up of thousands of 3Nodes that are spread across 75 countries and counting.

Together with Take Action Global (TAG), an expert on climate education and action, ThreeFold aims to make the ThreeFold Grid planet-positive by removing its carbon emissions from the atmosphere three times in the form of Voluntary Carbon Credits. While the pilot for this initiative was announced to start in January 2022, ThreeFold and TAG were so eager to take action against climate change, they kicked-off the pilot one month early in December 2021. It is the first step in ThreeFold’s plan to support the use of ‘nature-based climate solutions’ like tree planting to absorb twice more carbon than the ThreeFold Grid emits by 2022. 

A silver lining on the horizon

Every industry and organization has to pull their own weight. There is no way around it. Far-reaching actions and transformations are needed across industries to limit global warming to bearable levels. “The decisions we make now can secure a liveable future. We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming,” said Hoesung Lee, IPCC Chair, in an April 2022 press release. Together with TAG, ThreeFold leads the way by working on energy-efficient and sustainable solutions for the Internet. The new IPCC report gives us a reason to be optimistic about our future and have hope for the regeneration of our planet.

Really, all it takes right now is widespread support and adoption of more energy-efficient, sustainable alternatives across industries like ThreeFold for the Internet – something that is up to each and every one of us. Let us all take action for a fairer, more sustainable world.

• Join the global ThreeFold movement.
• Start farming today and support a greener Internet while regenerating the planet.

Similar to the enterprise blockchain hype that happened a few years ago, Web3 seems to be repeating the same story, with lots of chatter but lagging adoption. Millions have rushed to trade crypto and NFTs attached to Web3 – with a lot of this activity based on speculation and hype – but that doesn’t mean they will replace legacy platforms anytime soon. New approaches such as DeFi (decentralized finance) don’t have the same problem of the legacy firms, but they face the challenge of scaling and mass adoption. However, many so-called ‘Web3’ solutions are not as decentralized as they seem, and still have to show they are scalable, secure and accessible enough for the mass market. This all may change, but there are clear limitations that will need to be overcome.

Whether Web3 is a marketing slogan or a true technological trend, there is a lot of money and technology behind it. Financial institutions are embracing blockchain technology and we are seeing a rising adoption of digital assets across industries. While the idea of utilizing digital currencies to exchange different forms of value in an increasingly digital world certainly makes sense, it’s a bigger leap to say that blockchain alone can support a broad set of use cases, including replacing the current Internet infrastructure.

The Internet’s client-server infrastructure replicates data and workloads across many computers, and uses tons of computing resources and energy while limiting the scalability of our applications. However, the clear inefficiencies and gaps in security in today’s centralized infrastructures are being challenged by simpler means of building, storing and exchanging data.

Blockchain is a clear evolution to the centralized client-server model, but there are severe challenges sourced from the blockchain trilemma between decentralization, scalability and security. Peer-to-peer systems transcend those challenges as they don’t require any valid2ation or verification from a third party, and enable end-to-end connections that can scale limitlessly without the potential of being altered or corrupted by intermediaries. In peer-to-peer systems, all participants are equally privileged, presenting a fairer model. Peer-to-peer represents an incredibly simple and efficient paradigm for organizing our digital world, and has already proven to be the most efficient alternative to centralized information systems.

Simply put, there is no reason to replicate full sets of data and workloads across many computers, and use tons of computing resources and energy while limiting the scalability of our applications. While there is an increasing reliance on blockchain principles to organize our Internet systems, blockchain also makes things redundant, slow, complex and energy intensive. To be clear, blockchain isn’t the problem, as it is a great technology to store and exchange value in a decentralized way, but it is only one piece of the puzzle.

By inter-connecting the computing processing power and storage capacity of billions of computers worldwide in a peer-to-peer way, data transfers could happen end-to-end between people and machines without the need to be verified. Peer-to-peer is also the only way to achieve a truly self-sovereign Internet – creating a ‘trustful’ environment that allows users and developers to have real data ownership.

Peer-to-peer systems aren’t meant to replace blockchains – they represent a way to decentralize models that blockchain cannot, such as Internet infrastructures. Peer-to-peer systems and blockchains, side by side. The best of both worlds. Peer-to-peer as the most efficient and decentralized alternative for us to exchange data and Internet resources. And blockchain for establishing trust through an irrefutable record of transactions.

With the rise of emerging technologies, a new technological foundation is needed to protect our sovereignty and freedom. The rise of blockchains, while well intended, ultimately has made the technological space more complex than ever before, and still benefits a plutocratic few (relative to its promise). More than just technology, peer-to-peer opens a world of new possibilities for humanity to co-initiate new paradigms and experiences.

By applying blockchain and peer-to-peer technology to the cloud, ThreeFold solves the security and autonomy issues of the Internet and realizes the initial promise of the Internet as an open-source, peer-to-peer, planetary mesh network of nodes owned by the people.

After introducing the ThreeFold Grid in part one and diving deep into storage and compute, we’re back with part 4 to look at the networking aspects of the ThreeFold Grid.

Computer networking is a rather complex phenomenon with a thankfully intuitive outcome: you send messages from one place to another. We all understand that our digital devices become a lot less interesting when they are not connected to the Internet. However, networking is not just Internet, and when it comes to building a new Internet, it’s important to understand what that means.

The existing Internet can be defined as a global set of networks and protocols that enable us to do things like load web pages and use apps that rely on external data. It depends on lots of underlying infrastructure, including fiber optic cables running along the ocean floor, our home routers and their connection to an Internet service provider (ISP), lots of cell service towers, and an increasing number of satellites. All of that makes the Internet possible, and it’s still required for a new Internet to function.

ThreeFold uses and builds new protocols to create a network that is interoperable with the existing Internet. These include private overlay networks, the Planetary Network based on Yggdrasil, and various interfaces to the public Internet. Let’s see how they work.

🔗Private overlay networks

Every deployment on the ThreeFold Grid belongs to a network, which is one of the Grid primitives. These networks allow data to be transmitted between workloads in a private and secure manner. They are called overlay networks because they pass traffic over some underlying network. That could be within a single node or between nodes on infrastructure provided by a farmer. The Grid uses software called WireGuard for this purpose, a simple, fast, and secure option among its alternatives.

By means of encryption, the traffic on a private overlay network is unreadable to any other device on that network. Likewise, the workloads within the private network have no visibility of the underlying network. Individuals who deploy workloads can access their networks over a secure tunnel, assuming that one of the nodes in the network is reachable from the public Internet. This is suitable for workload administration and some private applications. For public services and peer-to-peer communication, the ThreeFold Grid provides other solutions.

🔗Planetary Network

The Planetary Network is an implementation of the Yggdrasil Network, which is a next generation approach to network routing. It is a peer-to-peer solution where all traffic is encrypted and takes the shortest path to its destination. These features make it highly compatible with the ethos and goals of the ThreeFold Grid: privacy, security, and efficiency. The design also allows nodes, workloads, and users to communicate freely without relying on centralized intermediaries.

Many ThreeFold Farmers connect their nodes to a home router which blocks all inbound traffic by default. This is a sensible feature that doesn’t interfere with most Internet usage (enthusiasts who want to host their own website or a gaming server might bypass this, for example). However, nodes on the Grid need to be reachable, especially in order to receive workload definitions from deployers.

The Planetary Network solves this by accepting inbound traffic through an outbound connection to a publicly accessible peer. You can think of this like making a call to an operator and then waiting for another call to be routed to you on that line. Even if your phone is set to block all incoming calls, someone can still reach you if they can reach the operator.

This also provides a way for workloads to communicate with one another and be reachable by users. Anyone can enable the Planetary Network on their own device to access sites and services in a very secure and private way. While the ThreeFold Grid is designed to be fully interoperable with the existing Internet, the Planetary Network provides an alternative which can sit side by side in a seamless way.

🔗Reliable Message Bus

Using the Planetary Network, nodes and Grid users can send messages over the Reliable Message Bus. Notably, it is used for the delivery of workload definitions as mentioned earlier. Zero-OS supports some other RMB messages as well, for doing things like checking available capacity on a node in real time. RMB is a general purpose protocol that can be used by developers in their applications. It queries the ThreeFold Blockchain as a kind of address book for the Planetary Network, enabling nodes and users to find each other in a decentralized way.

🔗Public IPs and Web Gateways

Finally, let’s see how the Grid can offer services over the public Internet using public IP addresses and web gateways. Everytime we type a domain name into our browser, like threefold.io, it is resolved to an IP address. The browser then forms a connection with that address to retrieve the site we’re looking for. Reviving a theme from earlier, that IP must be publicly reachable.

🔗Public IPs

We’re in the midst of a shift from the older IPv4 standard to the newer IPv6 standard. While IPv6 has plenty of addresses for every device on the planet and many more, it hasn’t been universally adopted yet, and IPv4 addresses are in short supply. You likely have one assigned to your router at home, and these days, even getting a second one from your ISP can be a difficult and expensive proposition.

The ThreeFold Grid allows farmers who own blocks of IPv4 addresses to rent them out to deployers. These addresses get attached to individual workloads which are then reachable over the public Internet. A deployer could then assign their own domain name to that IP and host a website there. This is a very flexible way to make Grid deployments publicly available, but it comes at a relatively high cost.

🔗Web Gateways

Web gateways are another way to make workloads on the ThreeFold Grid available over the public Internet. In this case, the farmer may provide a domain name that points to one of their nodes which is publicly reachable. Deployers are then able to reserve a subdomain, like explorer.threefold.io is a subdomain of threefold.io, that routes traffic to their workload. It is also possible for a deployer to point their own domain to the gateway node which then routes traffic to the appropriate workloads.

We glossed over a bit in the earlier description of domain name to IP address resolution. In fact, multiple domains can point to a single IP address and this is common practice among existing web hosts. Adding similar functionality to the Grid helps to ease the demand for IPv4 addresses and is a lower cost solution for deployers than renting a dedicated IP. The web gateway also serves to enhance security and reliability of Grid-hosted services.

The gateway provides a connection from the public Internet to the secure private overlay networks that all workloads use. However, this is not a standard network connection but instead a network socket, which provides security through separation. This is something like passing along the contents of mail pieces without their envelopes. Web gateways also enable redundancy, as multiple gateways can point to the same workload, and multiple workloads can serve the same set of gateways.

When we say the ThreeFold Grid scales limitlessly, this is one of the ways that’s true. Many nodes, many gateways, many applications, and many users can all fit into this model. Deployers can start with a single virtual machine and a single public IP like in the example I’ll use to wrap up this piece below, then ramp up to a globally distributed and highly redundant system as their requirements grow.

🔗Send, receive, complete

Now we’ve seen how the ThreeFold Grid handles networking. From private and secure communication between workloads, to next generation peer-to-peer communication and full compatibility with the existing Internet, these offerings are comprehensive. Not only that, but they can be pretty darn fun to play with too.

In my own recent experience, I deployed a virtual machine on the Grid with a public IP and hosted a simple website with a map of nodes on the Grid that I’d been working on. I was able to quickly share it with some colleagues and members of the community. It went from a project I was tinkering with on my own computer to a live site on the Internet in a matter of minutes, thanks especially to the networking features of the ThreeFold Grid.

For the final piece of this series, we’ll see how everything comes together to turn computer code into a meaningful digital experience. Stay tuned!