Some of the ThreeFold team recently attended the Tanzania Annual ICT Conference where ThreeFold co-founder Kristof De Spiegeleer participated in two separate panels.

He took the opportunity to underline the importance of a sovereign Internet and the incredible potential of an open source and decentralized ecosystem to build Tanzania's digital economy.

Take a look at some clips from the talk here.

Lee is working on a very exciting new project called Mycelium, our own Ipv6 overlay network. Thanks to him for taking the time to create this short write-up on what it is and why it is needed.

As part of the grid, ThreeFold is also implementing a planetary network. This peer 2 peer network implementation aims to allow efficient, end-to-end encrypted communication with other participants on the network. Currently, we are using Yggdrasil as the core technology for this network. This is an open source implementation, and we have been using this since of grid v2.

Over time, some problems have been noticed. We have since spent time looking into these issues, and performed an analysis of the root cause(s).

🔗Yggdrasil’s Limitations

To start, it should be noted that Yggdrasil is an experimental routing protocol (based on DHT’s), which is currently still in an alpha stage. We very much admire the fact that they have been able to create a standalone network with worldwide participants from scratch. Over time, the network has grown, in part due to the grid, but also because a lot of individual participants joined and started running a node.

After investigating, we reached the conclusion that the current architecture has some scalability issues. While we have no doubt that these will eventually be solved, the importance of the planetary network in the grid is unfortunately too big to be able to wait for this. Additionally, Yggdrasil uses a technique called crypto key routing, and uses a tree structure for its routing info. This means data follows the “shortest path” in the tree, rather than the physical shortest path, which might deviate from this. As such, we have decided to implement our own Ipv6 overlay network, Mycelium.

🔗Implementing Mycelium

As previously pointed out, the main goal of our network is to be efficient, and end-to-end encrypted. Every node in the network is identified by a key pair. The address of a node is derived from this key pair, and data traffic between 2 nodes is encrypted using a secret derived from the key pair of both these nodes. As a result, every 2 nodes in the system use a different secret for encryption, and we can verify that the address used by a node is indeed owned by it (i.e. it has the corresponding private key). We have based our initial implementation (loosely) on the babel routing protocol.

Therefore, sending data to a remote node will follow the shortest path in terms of latency (i.e. the fastest route). The network adjusts itself in case nodes disappear or join, and multiple paths to a given destination are possible.

We are also considering implementing more advanced use cases in the future, though this remains to be seen at this stage. We are gearing up for some larger scale testing on the grid in the near future (after all, we do have multiple thousand nodes at our disposal to verify scalability), and will adjust as needed once these are done.

*If you'd like to dive deeper, take a look at the Mycelium manual here.

This past weekend, ThreeFold was honored with a visit from Zanzibar's President Dr. Hussein Mwinyi at the African Regenerative Cities Summit.

There, he formally and publicly expressed the government's commitment to the establishment of a digital free zone, a locally-owned Internet infrastructure, an incubator to support young local innovators – all in collaboration with ThreeFold – and their commitment to the ICT sector as a whole.

Read Zanzibar Seeks to Become a Digital FreeZone (via The Citizen) and Mwinyi Commits to Improvement of Digital Spaces (via Daily News Tanzania) for further details.

🔗How would Decentralisation of the Internet help India?

"This article was originally published by Ashish Bansal, a former member of ThreeFold Foundation."

Ashish Bansal has been a member of the ThreeFold support team since October 2021. He was born in India. Ashish believes that we all deserve a better internet which is free, decentralized and equal for all.

The Internet has become one of the most important aspects of human life. Our everyday lives are impacted by social media and other online platforms on a very minute level. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and others have become the most convenient way to stay in touch with friends and family. WhiteHart, Udemy and others have made quality education accessible to all. Swiggy, Zomato and others have made our favourite cuisine accessible at home. Amazon, Flipkart and others have grown the shopping experience for Indians with a variety of choices. Netflix, Hotstar, Youtube and others have made entertainment on demand easy for us.

Over the past decade, we have all gotten addicted to the comforts that the internet has brought to us, and it wouldn't be wrong for us to say that we cannot imagine our lives without the internet.

While Indian internet usage ranks second in the world today behind China, with 43% of its total population online, this also means that there is still a lot of untapped potential in India.

🔗Issues with current Internet

Although the internet has helped us in making our lives comfortable, there are several issues with the current Internet services we use. Some of them are mentioned below:

🔗Cyber security

The cyber security infrastructure in India today is not well equipped to tackle increasing cyber-crimes. You may not have the resolution to your complaints filed with Cyber Cell Portals on time. Hence there is an increasing number of fraudsters and hackers in India.

🔗Data ownership

Personal details shared by you on the internet are used by big companies to influence your decision-making process strategically.

🔗Higher cost to customers

Since internet infrastructure is owned and controlled by a few big companies, there is an irregular price increase which makes the internet unaffordable to many parts of rural India.

🔗Decentralised Internet is the solution

Decentralisation of the internet refers to the arrangement of the internet or its components such that no single entity or organization has control or authority over the network. It holds the potential to revolutionize the way every nation accesses and utilizes the world wide web. India, one of the biggest players in the digital world, can greatly benefit from Internet decentralization. It would open up many new opportunities for both the country and its citizens.

To start, decentralization of the internet would give India more control over its digital landscape. Instead of relying on a single, centralized entity to power its network, India could decentralize its internet and make the administration of the network much more efficient. With this additional control and efficiency, India could develop a more secure and reliable infrastructure, while also controlling the delivery of services. This could lead to faster, more reliable connection speeds, along with increased safety and security.

Additionally, decentralization of the internet would allow India to establish itself as a technological leader. By decentralizing the internet, India could shift its focus from the existing internet infrastructure to developing innovative technology and applications. This could include the development of decentralized artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and much more. Potential applications of these technologies could drastically improve the education, healthcare, and transportation sectors of India.

Finally, decentralization of the internet could help with digital media access and distribution. This could open up new opportunities for providing access to digital media in rural areas, allowing for more effective access to education and entertainment. Furthermore, it could also provide access to more reliable payment services, as well as better consumer protection policies.

In conclusion, decentralization of the internet holds the potential to greatly benefit India and its citizens. It would give India control over its internet infrastructure, opening the door for development of innovative technologies and applications. Additionally, it could provide more effective access to digital media, along with more reliable payment services and consumer protection policies. In order for India to take full advantage of the potential of decentralization of the internet, it must take decisive steps towards implementing the necessary reforms and investments to ensure its success.

🔗How TF9 can contribute

TF9 technology runs on the concept of a grid formed by farmers who are independent people, unlike big corporations, that connect their nodes anywhere network and electricity is present to create a global distributed internet infrastructure. This resolves the problem of monopoly and price of big internet companies.

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, TF9 has come up with an Internet infrastructure that is capable of far-edge computing. TF9 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 TF9 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. TF9 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, TF9 is the foundation for a thriving interconnected future that is secure, borderless and at the edge.

Today, the global Internet and IT infrastructure requires enormous amounts of energy, responsible for about 10% of annual global energy consumption. This makes the IT industry amongst the most pollutive industries in the world (along with the often-discussed airline industry, for comparison).

We believe IT can be sustainable. Actually, it should be! That's why energy efficiency has always been a key focus of ours. With climate change and sustainability as some of the most pressing issues of our times, new green solutions need to be our priority. It has been key to ThreeFold since the very beginning of its story to enable a technological infrastructure that can reduce the Internet’s carbon footprint drastically.

🔗Simplicity is the key to unlock a better future

Over time, integration suites, middleware solutions, and enterprise service busses have been invented and implemented to cover integration challenges within the current internet. This has further complicated IT architectures, resulting in a loss of actual end user workload performance.

ThreeFold reworked the whole approach to IT architectures and eliminated the layers of complexity. The result is a cloud stack that presents minimal overhead and that requires less hardware – reducing heat generation and eventually cooling requirements. By reducing the need for power, the net result is an energy-efficient Internet grid.

🔗Improving resilience and efficiency through Self-Healing IT

Keeping systems up and running is a major requirement in modern day IT. Leading vendors earn most of their margin by selling maintenance contracts, performance guarantees, and professional services. Their business models bring no incentive to make things simple and efficient for consumers.

Creating a self-healing environment requires only minimal manual intervention to replace broken hardware components. Broken hardware components are inevitable, and the Zero-OS distributed node architecture deals with such failures by turning off broken components and provisioning unused capacity. By removing the need to ship broken parts back and forth, and linking to the corresponding installation knowledge (engineers), a lower carbon footprint can be achieved.

🔗“No painkiller” approach. We tackle the root issue

If a specific piece of software or hardware is not delivering the required performance or reliability, we should analyze the core design/algorithm and its usage of soft/hard components to determine the root causes of persistent issues to be solved.

Currently, most storage vendors follow the path of least resistance when trying to improve on performance. Their solution for meeting performance targets is to use faster components (CPU, memory, network card, proprietary acceleration) rather than looking at the core algorithms that drive the utilization of those components. Swapping components for faster ones perpetuates a cycle of cutting corners and focuses reliance on innovation from hardware component providers rather than solving the more fundamental and underlying issues. That's a "painkiller" approach.

Zero-OS was designed to solve root problem issues by design. While still using high-performance hardware components on the ThreeFold Grid, the algorithm of Zero-OS maximizes utilization possibilities. This enables greater performance and sustainability. Some key examples how this is achieved:

🔗Eliminating unnecessary elements from standard architectures

Virtualization adds a layer of software between the actual end-user workload and physical hardware. It also allows for multiple workloads to run on the same hardware by using excess capacity. There is definitely merit in building a virtualization solution. Building an effective virtualization solution that does not require abundant context switching is key and this is why Zero-OS has been developed. Zero-OS uses a minimal Linux kernel that allows for a number of user spaces to co-exist. In these user spaces, containerized versions of software can be run, eliminating the need for hypervisors, virtual OS to fuel the virtual machines, and guest operating systems. This also minimizes the required overhead for the host OS.

🔗Minimizing network connections usage

Supercomputing delivered many new technologies. But, not all of them are usable solutions for everyday workloads. One technology invented to make supercomputers performant is the use of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). RDMA allowed physical CPU boards (containing both CPUs and memory) to access other CPU boards in memory stored data over a dedicated channel. This eliminated the need to transport data between CPU nodes over network connections (or other mainstream means to exchange data). The result was a considerable reduction in overhead created when allowing distributed end user workloads to operate over multiple physical cores. The leading server and storage solutions brands have never considered nor implemented such mechanisms. This resulted in an increased need for faster networks - increasing complexity, costs, efforts and resources needed to operate solutions.

RDMA is only used in certified farms and requires involvement of TFTech.

🔗Minimizing disk usage

The storage solution uses slow and big (the bigger the better) HDD disks which drive in rack density. As they spin slower they consume less power and need less cooling. But then, how can you deal with read/write intensive workloads? The storage algorithm uses a SSD cache to acknowledge Inputs/Outputs coming from the applications, fills the erasure coded data blocks in large (up to 64MB) storage containers and writes the big chunks of data on the big and slow HHDs. If you are familiar with HDD disks, you know they like to be streamed on instead of having a lot of small bits written in a scratchy way.

Continuous innovation in all of these areas are leading to an efficient technology stack.