🔗A Chance to Reclaim the Original Spirit of the Internet

ThreeFold (and upcoming Project Mycelium, version 4 of the grid) taps into the idea that the Internet should be something we participate in, not just consume. Instead of relying on centralized cloud providers, the network is powered by individuals running small, efficient nodes that plug into a global, decentralized network. That means:

1. The power to run your own infrastructure (again)
   No single company controls the grid. Just like the early days, anyone can plug in capacity and participate, returning ownership to the edges.

2. The joy of tinkering – at modern scale
   Set up a node, plug in capacity, experiment, build, break, fix, repeat. The hands-on creativity of the early Internet meets today’s possibilities.

3. A community-powered digital commons
   Each node strengthens the whole grid. Every contributor helps build a healthier, more neutral Internet, one owned by the people who run it.

4. A privacy-first alternative to Big Cloud
   Decentralized, energy-efficient, and secure. Your data stays yours, your infrastructure stays in your hands.

🔗The Future Looks a Lot Like the Past (In a Good Way)

ThreeFold isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about reviving what the early Internet got right: openness, decentralization, curiosity – and updating those values for a world now powered by AI, automation, and increasingly data-intensive workloads.

It gives builders, tinkerers, privacy purists, and anyone uncomfortable with the way the Internet is going a path to reclaim agency in a world that desperately needs alternatives.

The original vision is still alive. Now, we have the tools to realize it on a global scale.

With version 4 coming soon, we invite you to take a look at the opportunity to participate in the next phase of our project and ask questions either in our main chat or our forum.

🔗Yin-Yang Economy In Practice

In our modern economy, we have a dominance of Yang. So while modern civilization is highly competitive and productive, it’s financially fragile, socially fragmented, and ecologically depleted. A balanced economy needs the Yin circuit to maintain cohesion and resilience.

When both circulate together, economic systems become self-correcting, capable of creating prosperity without undermining the very social and environmental foundations on which that prosperity depends.

All this sounds really good, but what about in practice? Let’s see how it works in Bali. The island is known for its artisans, farmers, and craftsmen, each contributing to a vibrant creative ecosystem.

On one side lies the Yang economy. We have tourism, export trade, and monetized craftsmanship, all powered by cash flow, pricing, and market exchange.

Running parallel to it is the Yin economy, sustained through the “banjar” system. The local village cooperative that governs community labor, temple upkeep, festivals, and mutual aid. Neighbors exchange time, skills, and support through “gotong royong” (collective work), maintaining both social harmony and shared prosperity. The result is an economy that sustains both body and spirit.

We have another example in Japan’s Fureai Kippu (caring relationship tickets) system. Introduced in the 1990s, it allows individuals to earn credits by helping elderly or disabled members of their community.

The help includes shopping, cooking, cleaning, or simply providing companionship. These credits can later be redeemed for similar services when the giver grows older, or even transferred to a family member in another part of Japan. By design, it reinforces trust, empathy, and reciprocity, the core traits of a Yin system.

Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) follow a similar principle across many parts of the world. LETS allows neighbors to trade skills and services using locally created credits instead of national money.

A graphic designer might earn 20 credits for a logo design, then spend those credits on carpentry, tutoring, or home repairs offered by other members. Each transaction strengthens relationships and keeps value circulating within the community rather than flowing out to centralized markets.

These systems don’t replace national currencies, they complete them by filling social and ecological gaps that money alone cannot reach.

🔗Applying The Same Principles In Project Mycelium

Let’s see how SPORE and AUR work together to reflect Lietaer’s philosophy.

🔗SPORE: The Force of Growth

In nature, spores are small, resilient units that carry the potential for life. They drift through the air and across the earth until they find the right conditions to grow. When they do, they become mycelium, which are vast underground networks that connect, communicate, and share resources across ecosystems. It’s a living system built on balance, movement, and renewal.

That same idea lies at the heart of Project Mycelium. The Mycelium Network forms the foundation, a decentralized IPv6 overlay that mirrors the adaptability and reach of biological mycelium.

On top of it sits Mycelium Cloud, a platform that allows anyone to run scalable Kubernetes clusters with strength and flexibility.

The Virtual Data Center (VDC) layer adds another dimension by making it simple to run applications on Mycelium Cloud clusters. It removes much of the complexity behind Kubernetes, giving users an intuitive interface to deploy and manage workloads without needing deep technical knowledge. For those who prefer full control, the underlying Kubernetes layer is still available for direct configuration and resource management.

At the top of the stack is the Mycelium AI Agent Framework. These agents sense, decide, and act within the network, optimizing resources and automating complex tasks. Together these layers create a digital ecosystem that grows, adapts, and self-organizes just like its biological counterpart.

This entire stack is powered by SPORE, representing the Yang energy of expansion and reward. It fuels the competitive, entrepreneurial side of the ecosystem. Hosters, farmers, builders are all incentivized to grow the network and earn value through contribution.

🔗Core Characteristics:

• Type: Tradable, utility token. Supply capped at 10 billion.
• Purpose: Compensation and incentive
• Mechanism: 80% of every rental payment flows to hosters in SPORE. 10% is burned, creating long-term scarcity, and the other 10% flows into the Project Mycelium development fund.

SPORE channels ambition and innovation. The controlled minting and burn model ensures that growth remains disciplined, not inflationary.

🔗AUR: The Force of Stability

AUR is the stabilizing currency of the Mycelium ecosystem. The Yin counterpart to SPORE’s growth-oriented energy. In most decentralized systems, service pricing fluctuates with token volatility, creating uncertainty for both users and hosters. Mycelium solves this through AUR.

AUR’s design emphasizes reciprocity, trust, and sufficiency over speculation. It is non-tradable, meaning it cannot be hoarded, pumped, or gamed on external exchanges.

Every AUR in circulation exists to facilitate real economic activity. Users paying hosters, hosters providing services, and the network sustaining itself. Its value is anchored to gold (1 AUR = 0.001 g), ensuring that transactions remain fair and predictable across time.

🔗Core Functionality

• Reciprocity: AUR circulates within a closed ecosystem. It moves between users, hosters, and the protocol, never leaving the community.
• Sufficiency: Supply expands only as needed for real demand, avoiding the scarcity-driven competition of Yang currencies.
• Trust & Continuity: Gold-backing and internal use preserve value without exposure to speculative volatility.
• Community Flow: Because AUR can’t be hoarded or traded externally, it continually recycles through the system, mirroring the mutual-credit flow that Bernard Lietaer identified as the heart of cooperative economies.
• Predictable Economics: Users know exactly how much they pay. For example, “1 compute slice = 9,375 AUR.” That value remains constant in gold terms regardless of token market swings.

🔗The Balance

Most of today’s systems lean too far toward the Yang side. That’s why markets swing wildly and communities fracture. Mycelium was built to correct that imbalance.

The dual-token model is how we bring balance into a system that’s often one-sided. AUR allows Mycelium to decouple network utility from market volatility. Users and developers can plan, price, and deploy services with confidence, while hosters earn in SPORE. This separation of functions between AUR (stability) and SPORE (growth) keeps the ecosystem in equilibrium.

By giving equal weight to cooperation and competition, we’re building something that can scale without breaking the people who make it work.

For more information on our tokenomics, read this.

🔗The Cracks in the Cloud

The irony of modern computing is that we’ve built the most advanced infrastructure in human history, yet it’s still held together by a handful of companies. When one of them sneezes, the entire web stumbles.

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp, has been one of the loudest critics of this model. In 2023, his team made headlines by leaving both AWS and Google Cloud, migrating all their apps, Basecamp, HEY, and others. onto their own hardware. According to him, they are projected to save $10M in over five years.

“The cloud was supposed to be cheaper, faster, and easier,” DHH wrote. “But the savings never materialized, and the team never shrunk.”

There was also another reason behind this move. For DHH, the decision wasn’t just financial. He argues that the modern internet has strayed far from its original design, a distributed network meant to survive even if one node went down. Instead, we’ve rebuilt it around a handful of hyperscale data centers like AWS’s US-East-1, turning the web into a system where a single outage can take out a third of global traffic.

Ultimately, his critique is simple. The cloud was sold as faster, easier, and cheaper, yet in practice it’s become more complex, more expensive, and dangerously centralized. AWS, once seen as a democratizer, now runs at nearly 40% margins, proof that the economies of scale no longer benefit users, only the providers.

And…he is right. For the most part. Centralization does indeed breed dependence. However, his approach is easier said than done.

Not every company can afford to buy, house, and maintain its own servers across multiple continents. Wasn’t that the whole point of the cloud in the first place? For most organizations, the choice still feels binary: go cloud or go home.

🔗Enter ThreeFold’s Solution

At ThreeFold, we believe the internet should belong to everyone, not a handful of corporations. At the center of this vision is the ThreeFold Grid, a decentralized infrastructure layer designed to make the internet more autonomous, efficient, and resilient. Each node on the Grid provides compute, storage, and network capacity through a peer-to-peer architecture. These nodes, operated by independent farmers, form the backbone of the network.

Anyone can access this capacity directly, no intermediaries, no corporate gatekeepers. The result is a self-healing data, network, and cloud layer that keeps running even when parts of it fail.

On top of this infrastructure runs the ThreeFold Cloud, a 100% Kubernetes-compatible decentralized cloud built on the global Grid. It allows developers to deploy applications anywhere in the world using familiar workflows, without renting space from Amazon or Google.

🔗The Three Paths Ahead

So, as a company today, you really have three paths in front of you:

• Centralized Cloud: You rent capacity from service providers, and when they go down, so do you.
• Run Your Own Servers: What DHH’s Basecamp chose. You buy and maintain physical hardware.
• Decentralized Cloud: Shared, decentralized infrastructure that combines the resilience of self-hosting with the accessibility of the cloud. (In this article we specifically focus on ThreeFold.)

As we see it, the answer isn’t to abandon the cloud, but to decentralize it, to distribute its power, its risks, and its rewards.

The choice to consume or provide capacity doesn’t have to be binary either. ThreeFold Grid users who want to install their own nodes can do so at any time, both to optimize their own use cases and earn additional revenue from spare capacity.

The ThreeFold Grid shows that a different kind of internet is not only possible, it’s already working. The future doesn’t belong to data centers. It belongs to people.

The next step is simple. Become part of it.

Take in the latest on the next phase of ThreeFold here.

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

🔗So, What Exactly Does Kubernetes Do?

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

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

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

🔗Why the World Adopted K8s

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

🔗The Rise of Containers

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

🔗The Rise of Cloud

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

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

🔗Limitations of the Centralized Kubernetes Model

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

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

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

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

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

This is where KubeCloud comes in.

🔗KubeCloud: Decentralized Kubernetes on Steroids

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

🔗What Powers KubeCloud

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

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

Key capabilities include:

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

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

🔗What It Means for Users

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

🔗For Developers and DevOps

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

🔗For Enterprises

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

🔗In Closing

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

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

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

Join our Telegram and stay up to date with the latest developments on ThreeFold.

Recapping an incredible DePIN Summit 2025: Africa Edition. Thanks to EV3 for bringing DePIN Summit to East Africa, Share, Singularity Venture Hub, our own team, ZICTIA, all of the organizers, venues, various staff and execution teams, speakers, and participants for being a part of this. Thanks as well to Proof of Coverage for some of the photos included in this post. Others are my own (see if you can spot the quality difference!).

Over the course of a powerful week in East Africa, DePIN enthusiasts, builders, founders, investors, government stakeholders, and dreamers from around the globe gathered for DePIN Summit 2025, a one-of-a-kind gathering that brought decentralized physical infrastructure to life through conversation, community, and concrete impact.

The summit unfolded in two acts: Mombasa, Kenya and Zanzibar, Tanzania, with some joining for a closing journey to Arusha and sticking around Zanzibar to further solidify discussions and work towards tangible outcomes.

🔗Part I: Mombasa

🔗Sunday June 29: Day Zero: Arrival & Alignment

As the sun set over the Kenyan coast, founders, speakers, and project leads touched down in Mombasa. The Share team, on-the-ground co-organizers of the first leg of the summit, hosted an informal gathering at their HQ, setting the tone for what would be a high-trust, high-purpose summit experience.

🔗Monday June 30: Day One: Learning from the Ground Up

We visited two Bridge International Academies where students and teachers are already engaging with digital learning through tablets, despite having a shaky power supply and not having an internet connection on-site. Currently, staff use a single smartphone to upload daily progress.

Share will soon equip the school with unlimited WiFi access, using its innovative technology to support and elevate the quality of student learning. It’s a powerful initiative, and one that rightly earned them praise for turning bold vision into real-world impact.

We’re thinking the obvious – and we’re exploring with the Share team how we can support in bringing ThreeFold nodes to Mombasa to ensure these schools will not have just have their connectivity, but that their own capacity as well.

During our visit, some students showed off local song and dance while others even prepared and performed spoken word poetry on the theme of the Internet. Later, that evening, a community dinner allowed conversations to deepen among builders, speakers, and local partners.

Do you spot our tall friends in the background? An epic photobomb and overall experience at Nguuni Nature Sanctuary.

🔗Tuesday July 01: Day Two: Build on the Beach & Dine on a Dhow

As a pre-summit kickoff, Beach & Build offered a relaxed afternoon on the Mombasa shoreline, designed for connection, collaboration, and casual networking, setting the tone for the week ahead.

Later in the evening, we enjoyed “DePIN on Deck,” aboard a traditional Swahili coast dhow boat. With stunning coastal views, fresh seafood, and vibrant conversations, guests enjoyed a relaxed, intimate setting to connect and unwind.

🔗Wednesday July 02: Day Three: DePIN Summit Launches

The first official summit day featured a full agenda of talks, demos, and showcases. Hosted at the headquarters of Swahilipot Hub, a foundation focused on nurturing youth talent through tech, arts, and entrepreneurship, the summit opened with EV3 and Share explaining why and why now for the summit to be held in Africa and introducing Share as a project.

The audience included mostly students and local and international entrepreneurs and founders. ThreeFold co-founder Florian Fournier delivered a keynote on the future of decentralized internet in East Africa.

Florian spoke about the ThreeFold story and showed off one of the original ThreeFold nodes (perched on top of the podium).

The other projects that gave keynotes included DeCharge, Arkreen, Titan, Element Pay, Onocoy, WeatherXM, RealityNet, Pickspot, Qualoo, Natix, and more.

🔗Part II: Zanzibar

🔗Thursday July 03: Day Zero: Crossing to Zanzibar

Some speakers and attendees took a chartered flight from Mombasa to Zanzibar, bringing the summit spirit over the Indian Ocean to Spice Island.

We were joined by new attendees and warmly welcomed with a sunset session to set intentions for the second leg of the summit.

🔗Friday July 04: Day One: Public Infrastructure Meets Policy

The first official day of the Zanzibar summit was held at the Madinat Al Bahr. The event brought together global builders and Zanzibar’s local ecosystem, including Eng. Shukuru Awadh Suleiman, Director General of Zanzibar Communication Corporation (ZICTIA), our partner on the ground on the island.

ThreeFold co-founder Kristof De Spiegeleer started with a presentation on ThreeFold and what it enables in East Africa and beyond.

There were also presentations from WeatherXM, Arkreen, Natix, Reality, Qualoo, Peaq (ThreeFold partner), DeCharge, Share, Swahili Pot, and Africa Amini Life. Along with that, we had:

• Investment Panel: Investing in DePIN, featuring Dylan, Rapolas, and Volt
• Ecosystem Panel: Flora (Sahara Ventures) and Msechu (Serengeti Angels) outlined challenges and opportunities across the region, hosted by Sal of EV3

Towards the end of the day, Kristof was joined on stage by Eng. Shukuru Awadh Suleiman of ZICTIA to discuss the collaboration between ThreeFold and the government of Zanzibar.

Following a long but inspiring day, the guests enjoyed Swahili BBQ with live music and with local artist Tryphon Evarist.

🔗Saturday July 05: Day Two: Demo Day & Closing Ceremony

At the historic Mbweni Ruins, DePIN builders showcased their hardware, software, and product experiences. Florian led a visit to the land of Dunia Cyber City and Zanzibar Free Zone.

WeatherXM deployed some of their hardware in Kenya and we’re working on getting a station live here in Zanzibar!

Builders from around the world presented real-world solutions for emerging markets.

Later, the community gathered with Light DAO for a thought session with Kristof and Florian, followed by a closing celebration with local music and performances to honor both global innovators and the communities they serve.

Students from the Dhow Countries Music Academy in Stone Town, Zanzibar performed and brought summit attendees on stage to participate.

🔗Part III: Arusha

Following the summit, a group of 35 attendees traveled to Arusha for a post-summit visit to experience authentic Tanzania. The trip included a safari and time with the Maasai tribe at one of their lodges, as well as a visit to a local school where students received tablets on their first day back. Both the lodge stay and the school visit are part of the Africa Amini Life project, with a portion of the lodge proceeds helping to fund the school, medical clinics, and other key local institutions.

ThreeFold and Africa Amini Alliance are working to collaborate to bring further digital inclusion to even the most remote communities in Tanzania.

Then, nearly twenty of us returned to Zanzibar to reunite with other summit attendees and ground the ideas and discussions from the summit into tangible next steps.

🔗Final Reflections

What an unforgettable experience. We were honored to co-host this landmark event along with EV3 and Share, and deeply proud to have showcased a diverse range of groundbreaking DePIN projects while spotlighting Africa as a powerful hub for emerging technology and innovation.

From Mombasa to Zanzibar to Arusha, we saw the DePIN vision become real.

We didn’t just talk about decentralized infrastructure.

We lived it.

Onward! Together we build.

More to share and more to come as concrete outcomes develop.

Greetings from Mombasa, Kenya! DePIN Summit Africa is getting underway this week, with Share hosting the first leg in Mombasa and ThreeFold hosting the Zanzibar side of things.

The summit brings together founders, actors, and investors in the space of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) with local stakeholders to explore the future of infrastructure and infrastructure ownership.

We will be sharing as we go, stay tuned in here and on X.