When the Web’s creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and technology leaders gathered for the first Decentralized Web Summit in 2018, each had a unique definition for the decentralized Web. The founder of WebTorrent, Feross Aboukhadijeh, called it “a system of interconnected, independent, privately owned computers that work together to provide private, secure, censorship-resistant access to information and services.” Cory Doctorow, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, ”It is a Web designed to resist attempts to centralize its architecture, services, or protocols [so] that no individual, state, or corporation can substantially control its use.”
Where is the Internet today?
What was once a massive global movement sparked by the idealism of free culture, today’s Internet now hosts a wave of unintended consequences. The infrastructure is centralized, it’s hackable and it’s owned by large corporations, including Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Alibaba and others. As we shop and browse on the Web, there are private networks looking over us and algorithms that mine our daily habits and interests and commoditize our lives. The current Internet infrastructure also consumes about 10% of the world’s electricity and it can no longer scale effectively to meet emerging demands of billions of people in underserved areas of the world who are being left behind.
Concurrent with the Decentralized Summit, a team of technologists at ThreeFold were hard at work designing an open source, decentralized Internet Grid that could bring the Web to underserved populations around the world and solve the problems of privacy, security and access. They sought to realize the initial promise of the Internet by empowering a more equal, autonomous, and sustainable world while incentivizing growth in developing regions. The ThreeFold Grid is now live and circling the globe.
“We need to go back to a different type of Internet where we can all participate. For example, rather than taking electricity from a nuclear plant in your country, you can put a solar panel on your roof and generate electricity for yourself and your neighbors. We’ve done the same thing, not for electricity, but for what we call “Internet capacity,” which is the compute and storage network capacity. Now any computer can download software and instantly become a part of the ThreeFold Grid. Now, we have become the Internet, we are the Internet, and we give the Internet to the people around us.”
ThreeFold co-founder Kristof de Spiegeleer
ThreeFold is an open source, peer-to-peer, decentralized, secure and energy efficient Internet infrastructure that is located in 74 nations. The ThreeFold Grid consists of thousands of ‘nodes” – dedicated devices that provide the edge computing and storage needed to run applications and services, including decentralized applications (Dapps), blockchain and the Cloud. ThreeFold calls them “3Nodes.”
Anyone can expand the capacity of this decentralized Internet by hosting a 3Node wherever electricity and network are present. New hosts (farmers) are joining every day, linking their 3Node to the Grid, and expanding the Internet in their own neighborhoods. Farmers can deploy a 3Node in any home or office and earn cryptocurrency rewards in return.
The ThreeFold Titan is a popular 3Node used on the Grid and it’s available for purchase globally. It’s quiet, sleek and energy efficient. Plug a Titan into your router and an electric outlet, and you’ll be activated automatically on the ThreeFold Grid in under 10 minutes. Developers with their own hardware can also build a node using specifications provided by ThreeFold. If you have an old computer with an AMD or Intel processor lying around, there’s a good chance that it can be repurposed (versus discarded) and used on the Grid.
In agriculture, farmers cultivate land and earn revenue from their harvests. With ThreeFold, farmers help increase the world’s decentralized Internet capacity and are rewarded with ThreeFold Tokens (TFT, a cryptocurrency) every month for achieving a certain uptime. It’s like installing solar panels on your roof and selling electricity back to the local electric Grid. This new, decentralized Internet works the same way.
The Paradise Hills Property Development in Dubai recently announced that an entire neighborhood of 170 homes are being outfitted with ThreeFold Titans as a way of rewarding homeowners with a new monthly revenue stream, and possibly enabling owners to pay off the cost of their homes.
The Internet is one of the greatest inventions of our time. ThreeFold is making it even better with a decentralized Internet powered by Blockchain and owned by the people. With the Internet expected to triple in size by 2025 to meet the data requirements of emerging technologies such as Blockchain, Web3 and IoT, farmers can now share in the benefit of creating new capacity in the decentralized Web.
You can stake your claim in the decentralized Web at ThreeFold.io and join a global community of farmers and developers who are hosting and building the Internet of tomorrow.
