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!

Since the launch of ThreeFold Grid 3.0, TFT has been available on three blockchains – Stellar, Binance Smart Chain and the Substrate-based ThreeFold Blockchain (aka TF Chain).

There are already active bridges that connect Stellar to Binance Smart Chain and TF Chain, improving the accessibility and availability of TFT, while also connecting the ThreeFold ecosystem to external blockchain networks.

Learn more about TF Chain in our blog post here.

What are bridges and why are they important?

The concept of bridges in crypto is similar to a bridge in the physical world. Bridges in the real world simply connect two different locations and communities so that the people can travel back and forth and resources can be exchanged freely.

Similarly, using bridges in blockchain allows users to easily transfer tokens and other crypto assets between two or more networks – regardless of the different protocols, tooling, and governance models these networks have. Simply put, a bridge ensures a secure interoperability between different blockchains.

ThreeFold uses blockchain bridges to connect external blockchain networks to the ThreeFold ecosystem. The bridging mechanisms we’ve implemented allow TFT to be transferred securely between different blockchains. Currently, we’ve established two 2-way bridges:

• Stellar <> Binance Smart Chain
• Stellar <> TF Chain

But what is the difference between the 3 chains?

Stellar is an open-source network for storing and moving digital assets, and still remains the main blockchain for the minting of TFT and distribution of farming rewards. Until the launch of TF Chain with Grid 3.0, only TFT living on Stellar were accepted for the reservation of Internet capacity on the ThreeFold Grid. 

Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is a standalone, parallel Binance chain that is a leading DeFi ecosystem next to Ethereum. On BSC, TFT is implemented as a cross-chain asset, allowing anyone to connect to the bridge using Metamask or Trust Wallet – the most popular Web 3 wallets in the world.

TF Chain was built on the Substrate framework with the purpose of decentralizing user-farmer relationships on the ThreeFold Grid. It has its own native form of TFT, which can be bridged back and forth from Stellar-based TFT. This model will be implemented for other chains in the future, for interoperability and cross-chain features between blockchain and DeFi ecosystems and the ThreeFold Grid.

What’s new with TF Chain?

TF Chain represents a leap forward for simplicity in payments for capacity reservations and a move towards greater decentralization of the systems that support the ThreeFold Grid. With the launch of ThreeFold Grid 3.0, TF Chain became the official record of ThreeFold farms and nodes, and brought peer-to-peer billing based on smart contracts for workload deployments on the ThreeFold Grid. 

For now, minting will remain on Stellar but reservations of nodes and capacity on ThreeFold Grid 3.0 are already executed via TF Chain. Bridges were established between Stellar and TF Chain to facilitate payments, e.g. if you pay for a workload deployment in Stellar TFT, this payment needs to be bridged to TF  Chain’s native TFT to fund the smart contract.

The two-way bridge between Stellar & BSC 

Until recently, the bridge between Stellar and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) was one-way only: from BSC to Stellar. Even though it was possible to transfer TFT from Stellar to BSC via  command line, this was only an option for tech-savvy people. Now, you can also deposit TFT from Stellar to BSC using the bridge with a proper UI, as you can see in the image below.

When depositing from TFT Stellar, please be sure that both addresses and memo are as indicated in the instructions or the TFT you transfer will be lost forever. To facilitate the process, a QR code is generated and can be scanned using the ThreeFold Connect app, automatically filling in the right address and memo on your behalf.

As Binance Smart Chain is a more expensive chain, a fee of 50 TFT will be automatically charged for the bridge from Stellar to BSC. Find the full step-by-step guide for the Stellar-BSC bridge here. 

What’s next? 

As the ThreeFold ecosystem continues to grow, we’re looking into building more bridges (e.g. Cosmos, Ethereum) to improve the accessibility of TFT and simplify the onboarding of blockchain and DeFi projects on the ThreeFold Grid. TF Chain will play an important role in the further development of the People’s Internet, so give our blog post on TF Chain a read here. 

Try out the Stellar-BSC bridge here and visit our forum to share your experiences.

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.