Web3 is used to describe the potential next phase of the Internet, a "decentralized" Internet running on "blockchain" technology. Web3 applications rely on smart contracts, and data is used as the input and output of these smart contracts to realize the automation and execution of predetermined operations. Accurate and reliable data is critical to the proper functioning and integrity of smart contracts and DApps.
Although the underlying blockchain technology provides a secure and trustless underlying technical framework, due to some limitations in the network running on the blockchain, Web3 still needs to borrow some basic services to achieve functional expansion, especially data-related Cloud services and oracles.
Cloud services solve the problem of expensive and inefficient blockchain data storage and computing costs. At the same time, they can provide infrastructure and tools to facilitate communication and data exchange between different blockchain networks, and enhance interoperability and collaboration capabilities.
The oracle machine acts as a bridge between the blockchain network and external data sources or systems, providing real-time data streams and enabling smart contracts on the blockchain to interact with real-world events and information. For those who need to access off-chain data ( This is critical for Web3 applications such as price information, weather conditions or other external API data).
Cloud services and oracles address blockchain challenges in scalability, storage, computation, connectivity, and interoperability. They help bridge the gap between the decentralized nature of blockchains and the practical needs of real-world applications, and drive the development of more robust and versatile decentralized systems.
However, due to development constraints, most dAPPs still mainly rely on traditional centralized infrastructure services, such as cloud service giants such as Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud. However, with the development of the Internet, centralized cloud services and oracles are gradually Some disadvantages have been exposed, such as single point of failure, trust and data reliability, data privacy and security, scalability and cost.
Decentralized cloud platforms and oracle machine solutions have emerged as the times require. Through distributed resources, they mitigate the risks brought about by centralization, provide better data privacy, and greatly improve reliability and security.
This article aims to introduce these Web3 decentralized projects in detail, focusing on the two directions of decentralized cloud and oracle machine. The unique characteristics and technological innovations of the Web3 decentralized underlying infrastructure.
Web3 Cloud Computing Market: iExec
iExec is a decentralized cloud computing platform that allows users to discover, buy, sell and trade computing resources, including computing power, data sets and algorithms, and realize safe and efficient exchange of computing resources through smart contracts, automate transaction processes, and Provides decentralized and verifiable transaction records.
The market-oriented model benefits both resource providers and resource consumers. Providers can realize income by selling or renting idle computing resources on the platform. Consumers, on the other hand, have on-demand access to high-quality and reliable computing resources without requiring large infrastructure investments.
In addition to trading cloud computing resources, iExec also provides other products to help protect ownership and privacy, mainly including oracle factory, iExec SDK and confidential computing.
Oracle Factory simplifies the creation process of oracle machines, provides a user-friendly interface and a set of tool templates, allowing users to easily create and deploy decentralized oracle machines on the iExec network.
Users can customize and configure their own oracles according to their specific data needs. They can define data sources, APIs, and endpoints to retrieve data from external systems or services. The iExec oracle factory is responsible for the deployment and management of the oracle infrastructure, ensuring scalability, security and reliability.
iExec SDK is a software development kit provided by iExec to help developers develop decentralized applications (DApps) on the iExec platform. The SDK provides developers with the resources needed to interact with the iExec network and utilize its capabilities, including a command line interface (CLI), software libraries and APIs, and comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and samples. By utilizing the iExec SDK, developers can take advantage of The power of the iExec network builds decentralized applications while building secure and scalable cloud computing resources.
iExec confidential computing protects sensitive data and computing from unauthorized access, tampering and exposure by utilizing multiple technologies including secure isolation environment and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). It ensures data confidentiality, prevents unauthorized access, and enables trustless collaboration, making it valuable for privacy-conscious applications and industries.
Web3 computing network: Phala
Phala's vision is to become the world's largest P2P computing network, a standard Web3-based decentralized computing cloud. Compared with centralized solutions such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, Phala is a decentralized privacy-preserving computing platform designed to provide Web3 programs with high performance and high security that are not inferior to centralized cloud infrastructure Sexual and affordable cloud computing services.
The core product of Phala Network is Phat Contract, which is a "smart contract" based on TEE technology. At the same time, it greatly expands the functions of traditional smart contracts. Perform calculations without exposing sensitive data, protecting personal privacy and business secrets.
In addition, Phat Contract also eliminates the need for centralized cloud solutions by enabling network access, database support, and fast and powerful computing power.
Specifically, Phat Contract supports HTTP, so smart contracts can use Phat Contract to achieve seamless integration with any Web2 API. Such innovations will make data connection, data exchange and processing based on compliance and security protection feasible; while supporting multiple chains, developers can easily connect Phat Contract to the EVM or Substrate blockchain without a bridge, expanding the scope of smart contracts. ability.
Since Phat Contract is executed off-chain, the response speed depends on the performance of the computing node device itself. Similar to traditional Web2 services, in Phat Contract, read and write responses at the millisecond level can be achieved, and intensive off-chain calculations can be performed in real time; at the same time Off-chain calculations do not consume Gas fees, greatly reducing the entire contract execution cost.
Enterprises can perform serverless computing on Phala by programming and deploying Phat Contract. "Serverless" means that enterprises no longer need to care about the underlying hardware settings. Phala's decentralized network of more than 20,000 secure enclave workers distributed around the world provides a secure, robust, and trustless infrastructure.
In short, Phala provides an innovative privacy-preserving computing platform, uses the TEE-blockchain fusion architecture to ensure data privacy, and provides safe and trusted smart contract execution through Phat Contract. This will promote the privacy protection and security development of Web3 applications and provide users with a more secure and reliable computing environment.
The world's first decentralized cloud computing: Akash
As the first decentralized cloud computing platform, Akash's advantage lies in its decentralized nature, which enables computing resources to be distributed and stored on nodes around the world, providing higher reliability and stability. At the same time, smart contracts and a decentralized auction market mechanism are used to connect computing resource providers and users, focusing more on solving the accessibility and cost-efficiency issues of cloud computing.
On the Akash Deployment Marketplace, developers can publish their applications and specify the required computing resources, configuration and budget. Then, the computing resource provider can bid and provide corresponding computing resources according to the demand and the quotation provided. Ultimately, developers can choose the bidder that best suits their needs, rent computing resources, and deploy their applications.
Akash's market mechanism makes the price of computing resources more transparent and competitive, providing a more cost-effective solution for developers, who can deploy their computing resources at lower cost, higher flexibility and better performance application. The cost of deploying containers on Akash is about 10 times lower than any of the traditional big three cloud service provider giants.
Akash provides a decentralized cloud computing platform in an open and transparent manner. As an open source project, Akash's source code and related tools are publicly available, and anyone can view, use and contribute to the project. The open-source nature brings to Akash advantages such as greater transparency, auditability, community participation, customizability, reliability, and stability, making Akash a powerful and flexible solution.
Meanwhile, Akash Network adopts the Tendermint consensus protocol, which is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm. This consensus mechanism ensures that validators agree on the state of the network, even in the presence of malicious actors or network outages, greatly enhancing the security and reliability of the network. Tendermint consensus has fast finality, which makes the network suitable for real-time applications.
The Akash mainnet empowers developers to get rid of the limitations of traditional cloud infrastructure, allowing developers to deploy applications faster, more efficiently and at a lower cost, accelerating the growth and scale of the blockchain ecosystem.
Customizable privacy: Secret
Secret Network is a decentralized privacy computing platform based on blockchain technology. It aims to provide users with a secure and verifiable computing environment that protects data privacy.
As its name suggests, its key feature is data privacy. It uses programmable privacy-preserving smart contracts and encryption technology to ensure that calculations and transactions performed on the network can be privacy-protected. Technologies and mechanisms such as Secure Enclaves, encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), and decentralized governance are relatively common, and more importantly, they use programmable privacy-protecting smart contracts.
Developers can define privacy rules in contracts and specify which data should remain encrypted during computation. This programmability enables developers to build privacy-focused applications and services on the network. Through Secret Network, users can perform smart contract execution, data calculation and private data sharing under the premise of protecting data privacy.
By combining these elements, Secret Network creates an environment where sensitive data can be safely stored, processed and shared while preserving privacy and confidentiality. Its functions and advantages make it a powerful privacy computing solution for various application scenarios with sensitive data and privacy requirements.
Internet Computer: Dfinity
Dfinity is a decentralized computing platform designed to provide a secure and scalable infrastructure for building and deploying applications. It aims to provide developers with a seamless development experience and supports a wide range of applications, including decentralized finance. , social media, gaming, and more.
By leveraging advanced technology, Dfinity aims to provide a decentralized alternative that offers increased security, censorship resistance, and data privacy compared to traditional centralized platforms. Dfinity's goal is to create an internet computer that is open and governed by a decentralized network, envisioning a future where power and control of the internet is dispersed among participants.
Dfinity employs some key technologies to achieve its goals. The most important of these is the Threshold Relay (threshold relay) consensus mechanism, which ensures fast generation of blocks, greatly improves the throughput of transactions, and at the same time ensures the randomness of decision makers.
This mechanism uses a distributed key generation and signature scheme, allowing nodes in the network to reach consensus in a decentralized manner. Threshold Relay divides the network into multiple randomly selected node groups, each group jointly generates blocks through a key sharing protocol, and verifies and executes transactions through a threshold signature algorithm.
In addition, Dfinity also adopts the concept of smart contracts on the chain, allowing developers to write and deploy code with automatic execution capabilities. It introduces Motoko, a new programming language designed to simplify the smart contract development process and provide powerful tools and libraries to support developers in building complex distributed applications.
Dfinity also provides a runtime environment called Internet Computer, which allows developers to build and run applications on the platform. Internet Computer provides computing resources and storage services that enable developers to deploy applications directly to the network without relying on traditional server infrastructure.
Through the combination of these technologies, Dfinity realizes a computing platform with high security, scalability and decentralization characteristics, providing developers with the ability to build and deploy various types of applications.
Decentralized Cloud Computing: Cudos
Cudos is a Layer 1 blockchain with delegated proof-of-stake. Its vision is to enable on-chain accessible decentralized computing. Its network design separates consensus from execution to ensure secure, decentralized, and permissionless access at scale. high-performance computing.
The main goal of the Cudos platform is to solve the current problems faced by the field of cloud computing, such as scalability, performance and cost. By distributing computing tasks to multiple nodes in the network and managing them through smart contracts and decentralized protocols, Cudos can achieve highly scalable computing capabilities.
It uses the Tendermint Core engine to manage consensus and adopts a Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus model. The BFT model can tolerate less than one-third of Byzantine validators reaching consensus. As the gold standard of Proof-of-Stake consensus, BFT consensus is the most widely used consensus engine in the industry. Compared with Proof-of-Work blockchains such as Bitcoin, the PoS algorithm reduces the carbon footprint of Cosmos by more than 99%.
Additionally, Cudos offers advantages in terms of security and privacy protection. By using the decentralized nature of the blockchain and encryption algorithms, Cudos ensures that users' data and computing tasks are protected from unauthorized access and tampering.
Cudos platform has a wide range of applications, including artificial intelligence, scientific research, distributed applications, game development and other fields. It provides developers and users with a flexible, efficient and secure cloud computing infrastructure that promotes innovation and collaboration.
epilogue
In the world of Web3, decentralization has become a key concept and practice. The Phala Network, iExec, Akash, Secret Network and other projects we mentioned above have all made outstanding contributions in their own fields, promoting the process of decentralization and solving real-world problems.
These projects work together to break the limitations of the traditional centralized system, provide users with greater data privacy and security, realize smart contracts and applications that cannot be tampered with, and provide scalable and decentralized infrastructure.
The concept of decentralization of Web3 has brought us more choices and control rights, and endowed individuals with greater autonomy and privacy protection. It creates a more fair, transparent, credible and sustainable digital economic ecosystem for users and developers around the world.
With the continuous development and innovation of technology, we can expect more decentralized projects and solutions to emerge, further promoting the development and popularization of Web3. Working together, we can build a more inclusive and open Internet where people can freely participate, create and share value.