ThreeFold

An Internet That Remembers Its Origins

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

Sam Taggart

November 21, 2025

Cloudflare... Wtf Happened?

A single Cloudflare update knocked out 20% of the internet on November 18th, serving as another reminder of how fragile our centralized web infrastructure really is. So what went wrong?

This genuinely felt like groundhog day.

On Tuesday, 18th November, a fifth of the world’s websites went down as Cloudflare went down. And yes, a lot of, so called, “decentralized” services also went down as a result.

However, we have seen this movie before. Last month, we saw websites going down due to a global AWS outage.

This really begs the question. How resilient is the world wide web, if it is constantly dependent on centralized service providers?

Let’s understand what exactly happened.

🔗The Update That Broke The Internet

Cloudflare’s global outage wasn’t caused by DNS issues, an attack, or any systemic failure across the internet.

Believe it or not, it just came down to a single configuration file used for bot mitigation. The file in question is automatically generated from live threat-intelligence feeds. It’s meant to update continuously to block bots, abusive traffic, and malicious patterns. At some point before the outage, its size expanded far beyond what the underlying software was built to tolerate.

Under normal circumstances the system reloads this file without incident. However, this time, the oversized file hit a latent bug inside Cloudflare’s bot-management engine, causing it to crash repeatedly.

Now, since this component sits in the request path for most Cloudflare products, its failure caused widespread 500 errors across the network.

Once that service collapsed, the effects rippled through Cloudflare’s global infrastructure. Websites depending on Cloudflare’s CDN, WAF, and bot filtering began failing almost simultaneously. Users saw generic “500 errors,” and even Cloudflare’s own dashboard and API became inaccessible.

Major platforms like ChatGPT, X, Shopify, Uber, Spotify, Indeed, Claude, Perplexity, Canva, NJ Transit’s digital systems, and countless others were unreachable for hours simply because they are all fronted by Cloudflare’s global network.

Eventually, a fix was rolled out by late morning Eastern Time. Engineers patched the underlying issue, reverted the problematic configuration, and gradually restored dependent systems.

🔗What Is the Solution?

To his credit, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht admitted that the company “failed” its customers. However, an apology isn’t enough when a system that is currently responsible for the global trillion dollar economy and other critical services is seemingly so fragile that it can’t handle a single company’s update.

Cloudflare “fixed” the issue. But did they actually heal the wound or put a flimsy little band aid? History tells us that it is likely the latter.

We saw the same pattern with AWS’s regional DNS failure, Microsoft’s global Azure collapse, and CrowdStrike’s faulty update that halted hospitals and grounded planes. Quick patches are applied, but the core fragility remains untouched.

This isn’t a Cloudflare problem.

It’s an internet architecture problem.

And that’s where alternatives must be taken seriously.

Fixing configuration files is not the solution. Rebuilding the foundation is.

🔗The ThreeFold Alternative: A Different Kind of Internet

Instead of patching over the centralization crisis, ThreeFold rebuilds the foundation entirely.

Instead of a few hyperscale providers powering the world, ThreeFold utilizes thousands of independent capacity providers to contribute compute, storage, and bandwidth to a unified, autonomous grid. Its Sovereign Agentic Cloud is designed around decentralization, autonomy, and distribution. The exact qualities today’s internet has lost.

ThreeFold works across three layers:

The Cloud: A decentralized, Kubernetes-compatible cloud running on independent capacity providers instead of hyperscale data centers.
The Network: A peer-to-peer mesh with built-in VPN, DNS, CDN, and gateways, creating a self-healing connectivity fabric.
The Agents: Autonomous, user-owned digital agents running on decentralized compute, not Big Tech servers.

Together, these create an internet that grows more resilient as it expands.

🔗Why This Actually Fixes the Problem

ThreeFold’s solution represents a return to that original vision of the internet. A decentralized, sovereign, human-aligned internet that isn’t vulnerable to the failure of one company, one region, or one configuration file. As ThreeFold co-founder Florian Fournier puts it:

“The internet was meant to be a network of peers, open, resilient, and free. Over time, it became a network of platforms.”

ThreeFold’s work is aimed at rebuilding the web from the ground up. This is not a band aid. Our solution dares to restructure what is broken. And In a world where a single file update can cripple platforms worth billions, it’s clear that this is the direction the internet should have taken all along.

Do you want to join our mission? Start here and stay tuned.

Raj Mitra

November 19, 2025

Rebalancing the Digital Economy: The Yin–Yang Vision of Project Mycelium

Project Mycelium is reshaping its tokenomics around a Yin–Yang inspired model, pairing AUR’s stability with SPORE’s growth. This balanced design sets the stage for a more sustainable and predictable digital ecosystem.

We recently revised some of our tokenomics and project mechanics to better reflect our mission and vision. In a nutshell, Project Mycelium (version 4 of the grid) will be utilizing a dual-token system, inspired by Bernard Lietaer’s Yin–Yang currency concept, which builds on Taoist balance and applies it to monetary systems.

The Yang side represents the competitive, profit-driven market economy powered by assets that are scarce and designed to generate financial and physical capital. It is responsible for fuelling growth, innovation, and trade but also concentrates wealth and erodes social and ecological foundations.

The Yin side, by contrast, consists of cooperative, community-oriented systems enabled by mutual-credit or complementary currencies. These currencies strengthen trust, relationships, and sustainability by regenerating social and natural capital.

In Project Mycelium, the Yin token is “AUR” and the Yang token is “SPORE.”

🔗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.

Raj Mitra

November 14, 2025

When the Cloud Stopped Working, and What Comes Next

ThreeFold’s decentralized infrastructure offers a stronger, more reliable path for the future of the internet, a reality highlighted by the recent AWS outage.

Last month, the world was reminded of an uncomfortable truth: even the cloud can fail.

For hours, millions of people couldn’t stream, shop, or even switch on their smart lights. The cause? A massive outage in Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) US-East-1 region, the digital heartbeat of thousands of apps, from Netflix to banking systems.

What began as a small DNS failure spiraled into a full-scale breakdown: databases couldn’t be found, load balancers misfired, and apps flooded the network with endless reconnection attempts. By the time AWS engineers restored service, much of the internet had already felt the impact.

It wasn’t the first time, and it most certainly won’t be the last.

Zero OS has been specifically designed to ensure that:

🔗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.)

	Centralized Cloud	Run Your Own Servers	ThreeFold
Infrastructure	None. Fully managed by provider	Full physical and operational control	Shared and self-managed through a peer-to-peer grid
Cost Structure	Starts low, rises with usage	High upfront, lower long-term	Pay-per-use with option to contribute capacity
Scalability	Near-instant global scaling	Limited by owned capacity	Global scaling through distributed nodes
Complexity	Easy to start, complex to manage at scale	Requires in-house expertise	Moderate setup, familiar Kubernetes workflows
Resilience	Single points of failure in provider regions	High	Self-healing through distributed design
Vendor Dependence	High	None	Minimal. Community-governed

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.

Raj Mitra

November 7, 2025

The Three Step Rollout to a Sovereign Agentic Cloud

ThreeFold is enabling a Sovereign Agentic Cloud through three architectural layers: Cloud, Network, and Agents – a new generation of cloud and AI infrastructure.

Raj Mitra

October 17, 2025

How ThreeFold's Decentralized Cloud Empowers Builders – and End Users

ThreeFold isn’t just a vision for the future. It’s a functioning, decentralized infrastructure already in production.

A network of decentralized nodes around the world contribute compute, storage, and network capacity to the ThreeFold Grid, powering live workloads for developers and independent projects. This isn’t a vision for the future. It’s a functioning, decentralized infrastructure already in production.

While the ThreeFold team pushes forward on our own flagship commercial initiatives, builders are already commercializing the grid’s resources with consumer and enterprise products on top. Together, it’s forming an ecosystem where the infrastructure, builders, and users all reinforce one another.

🔗The Grid: The Foundation

At its core is the ThreeFold Grid, a global network of independently operated nodes. These nodes are run by “farmers,” aka individuals and organizations that contribute resources and are rewarded for making reliable resources available. Unlike hyperscalers, there is no central owner controlling pricing, access, or usage. Anyone can contribute hardware, anyone can consume capacity.

From a technical perspective, the grid offers the primitives developers need to run modern workloads: Linux VMs, private networking, IPv4/IPv6 routing, and the ability to deploy and manage infrastructure.

A key challenge in decentralized hosting has always been network access, especially scarce and expensive IPv4 addresses. The grid solves this with smart gateway models, such as the Web gateway that turn ThreeFold nodes with public IPv4 addresses into reverse proxies, making any workload accessible from the internet, even if it runs on a node without a public IP.

Farmers can offer gateway services using their own IPv4 addresses, so users can deploy anywhere on the grid without complex networking. This way, small operators can deploy apps without buying lots of expensive IPs.

Gateways can also bridge Mycelium with the traditional web. Mycelium is a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted network built on the ThreeFold base layer. Developers building directly on Mycelium can often skip IPv4 gateways entirely.

🔗The Builders: Turning Infrastructure into Products

Above the raw grid sits a growing layer of builders and companies who package its primitives into usable, commercial-grade products.

As concrete examples, we have YourData Network, a seller of hardware and software, and Shiloh Code, experts in privacy and managed services, that both leverage the grid in their own ways. We also have interesting experiments like this Ukrainian underground radio which can safely run using the Mycelium network without worrying about centralized censorship.

Independent developers are also using the grid to offer hosting and app gateways. A recent project showed that a single person could set up a reliable front door for many apps in just a few evenings – something that would normally require a lot more time and expensive infrastructure. This gateway experiment helps work around the current limits of decentralized hosting, such as IPv4 scarcity and the fact that many nodes run in residential settings without direct inbound access.

Each of these efforts turns the raw ThreeFold Grid into accessible, commercial-grade services, without the specific need of a central rollout.

This builder layer is critical and serves a clear purpose: by abstracting away the complexity of the grid, it makes it possible for end-users to access apps and services running on the grid through easy to use builders’ products.

🔗The Users: Plugging Into Decentralization

At the top of the stack are the end users, people and small teams who want to use products without running servers themselves. Thanks to the builder layer, there are already products and services offered on the internet that run on the grid, making it possible to benefit from a decentralized backbone without managing the infrastructure.

They do not need to know how the network works. They simply use products like a hosted drive, a secure gateway or a custom web service that runs on a decentralized backbone. For them it feels as easy as a normal cloud, but without lock-in, tracking or sudden price changes.

🔗Why This Matters Now

This is no longer just a vision. It’s a functioning ecosystem where people are building and deploying. The technology is ready for production. Compute, storage and networking primitives are live, open source and easy to automate with modern tools.

If you’re a developer or small company wanting to launch a product in a secure, decentralized environment, this is it. Here is what you should do:

Explore the ThreeFold Grid
Read through our manual
Join the forum

The future of the internet isn’t coming – it’s already running. ThreeFold is ready for adoption.

Raj Mitra

October 8, 2025

The Quantum Age Is Coming: Will Your Data Survive?

The quantum era is approaching fast, threatening encryption, blockchains, and security. ThreeFold’s Quantum Safe Storage delivers sovereign, resilient, and unbreakable protection for data in a post-quantum world.

The world is standing at the edge of a technological revolution. Quantum computing, once confined to theoretical discussions in labs, has begun breaking into reality. With advancements like Google Willow and the race towards more powerful machines, quantum computers are an approaching storm, and most of us are not even close to being ready.

🔗The Quantum Threat to Security

For decades, the bedrock of digital trust has been cryptography. Public-key encryption (RSA, ECC), digital signatures, and hashing algorithms are what secure our bank accounts, blockchain transactions, confidential files, and online identities.

But here’s the problem: quantum computers are tailor-made to break these very defenses. Shor’s algorithm allows quantum systems to factor large numbers and break asymmetric encryption at a speed classical computers could never match. Once a quantum machine with sufficient qubits (the basic unit of information used to encode data in quantum computing) and error correction is operational, today’s standard cryptography becomes obsolete.

This danger unfolds in multiple ways:

Harvest-now, decrypt-later: Encrypted data stolen today can be stored and easily decrypted by quantum machines in the future.
Compromised blockchains: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies are secured by vulnerable cryptography. A sufficiently advanced quantum computer could forge transactions or drain wallets.
Broken trust in communications: VPNs, HTTPS, and secure messaging would be exposed, jeopardizing global internet security.
Critical infrastructure risk: Power grids, defense systems, and financial networks could all be destabilized by quantum attacks.

In short, quantum computing threatens the very assumption of “safety” on which the digital world has been built.

For businesses, governments, and individuals alike, this presents both unparalleled opportunity and unprecedented danger.

🔗Why Existing Systems Can’t Adapt Quickly

Crypto networks, cloud providers, and enterprises face a brutal truth. It is absolutely critical for them to get quantum-safe.

For blockchains, transitioning means changing the very essence of their algorithms, requiring contentious hard forks that could split communities and collapse valuations.

For cloud storage providers, petabytes of vulnerable data are already locked in centralized infrastructures, making retrofitting costly and slow.

For governments and enterprises, complacency is the biggest risk, assuming quantum is “decades away” when in reality, technological breakthroughs are accelerating faster than anyone expected.

What’s needed isn’t retrofitting. It’s rethinking.

🔗Enter ThreeFold’s Quantum Safe Storage (QSS)

Zero-OS provides several core storage primitives like disks, volumes, and 0-DB. Quantum Safe Storage is constructed on top of these primitives, adding the encryption, encoding, and dispersion mechanisms that deliver a storage layer that is unbreakable, sovereign, and efficient.

QSS is the productized form of Zero-OS storage, designed specifically for the quantum age. QSS packages its core advantages into a clear value proposition:

Quantum-Resistant Security: Mathematically encoded fragments and post-quantum cryptography protect against future quantum attacks.
Immutable & Append-Only: Data can’t be altered or erased, ensuring integrity forever.
Self-Healing: Automatic detection and reconstruction of lost or corrupted fragments.
Sovereign & Compliant: Data placement can be controlled geographically for governance and compliance.
Efficient: Achieves redundancy with only ~20% overhead, compared to 400%+ for replication systems.

🔗The QSS Storage Stack

The storage stack is made up of three core layers:

ZDBFS (Zero-DB FS): A filesystem abstraction layer that makes the system accessible to applications, developers, and end-users.
ZSTOR (Zero-Stor): The encoding, encryption, and distribution engine that applies error-correcting codes and disperses fragments.
ZDB (Zero-DB): The append-only, immutable storage daemon that directly interfaces with physical drives.

🔗#1 ZDBFS (Zero-DB FS)

At the surface, Zero-OS offers the ZBDFS. In this layer, users and applications can interact with each other. To the user, ZBDFS feels like a familiar mounted filesystem. Beneath the surface, every action taken is translated into operations that the deeper architecture understands.

When applications interact with ZDBFS, it passes those instructions down to ZSTOR, which performs the real work of encoding, encryption, and dispersal. On retrieval, ZBDFS orchestrates the reverse process, seamlessly reconstructing files from distributed fragments.

The filesystem itself is robust at scale:

It can hold petabytes of data
Manage up to two million files per instance
Transfer at speeds of 100 MB/s
It is optimized for larger objects.

Metadata is redundantly maintained with configurable consistency, typically within a fifteen-minute window, ensuring durability without compromise.

🔗#2 Zero-Stor (ZSTOR)

In ZSTOR, raw input becomes mathematically encoded resilience. When data enters ZSTOR it goes through the following stages:

The data is compressed to conserve space, then encrypted with user-defined keys
Forward error correction transforms it into fragments redundant yet efficient equations that can survive node failures without loss.
These fragments are distributed across multiple Zero-DB backends, with metadata carefully managed to map locations, redundancy, and integrity.

ZSTOR also watches over data. A built-in monitoring layer continuously checks the health of every connected device, automatically rebuilding missing fragments if one goes dark. ZSTOR can even synchronize across clusters in real time, ensuring redundancy and failover across geographies.

🔗#3 Zero-DB (ZDB)

Unlike conventional storage engines, ZDB is designed for simplicity. It is append-only by default. New data is added sequentially, references update to the latest version, and old data remains as history. Mutation or deletion requires a compaction process, which is possible but not part of normal operation.

ZDB is a general-purpose data store. It can hold entire unencrypted objects or the fragmented shards used by ZBDFS, and the engine itself remains indifferent to the content.

🔗Scalability in QSS

QSS is built to scale outward, not upward. Each use case runs on its own dedicated instance of ZBDFS and ZSTOR, which connect to a constellation of ZDBs spread across the grid. A typical configuration uses around twenty or more, but the exact number is configurable by the user.

These components can be distributed across geographies, giving the system reach without sacrificing integrity.

There is no ceiling here. The architecture can support an unlimited number of ZBDFS and ZSTOR instances, each operating independently yet harmoniously. Since data is always processed and consumed at the place of its creation, latency is minimized and sovereignty preserved.

The result is a storage fabric that grows horizontally, node by node, instead of demanding ever more powerful centralized machines.

🔗The Maths Behind QSS

Replication is the crutch of conventional storage. QSS leaves it behind. A file, once ingested, is broken into sixteen fragments. From those fragments, twenty equations are born. Any sixteen of those equations can rebuild the whole. Four nodes may vanish from the network, and the data remains untouched, its integrity intact.

Where traditional systems bloat themselves with 400% overhead just to promise redundancy, QSS achieves it with only 20%.

Example Implementation

Imagine a piece of data split into three fragments with values:

a = 1
b = 2
c = 3

Instead of storing these fragments directly, the system encodes them as equations:

a + b + c = 6
c − b − a = 0
b − c + a = 0
2b + a − c = 2
5c − b − a = 12
…and more.

At first glance this looks like overkill: why so many equations for just three unknowns?

Here’s the math behind it:

In a system with three variables (a, b, c), only three linearly independent equations are needed to uniquely recover them.

Any set of more than three equations will be linearly dependent—they don’t add new information but can be expressed as combinations of the others.

From a storage perspective, that means only three equations are strictly necessary.

So why generate extra equations? For resilience. If some equations are lost or corrupted, the system can still pick any valid set of three independent ones and reconstruct the original fragments. This redundancy ensures the data remains recoverable even under failure.

In production, the model scales. A typical configuration splits each object into sixteen fragments, then produces twenty equations, each stored on a separate device. To rebuild the data, only sixteen of the twenty are required. The system can lose four entire nodes and still recover the file without corruption.

This mathematical method achieves redundancy with just 20% overhead, compared to the 400% overhead demanded by traditional replication systems.

🔗Deploy Quantum Safe Storage

The Quantum Daemon is designed to manage all aspects of QSS that don’t fit neatly into the roles of the core components. Its goal is to simplify deployment, operation, and recovery of QSS into a single binary with a single config file.

🔗Responsibilities

The daemon takes care of:

Backend deployment: Initial deployment of backend zdbs and replacement of failed backends during operation.
Service management: Installation of all required binaries and creation of system services (supports both systemd and zinit).
Event handling: Processing hook events from zdb (replacing legacy shell scripts).
Data integrity: Running checks and retries for failed uploads.
Config management: Providing a single central config file for end users (QSS component configs and CLI args are generated automatically).
Recovery: Automated restoration of QSS onto a new machine in case of frontend failure.
Simplified operation: One binary and one config file can bring up the whole system.

🔗Usage

A subset of functionality is already implemented, with heavy changes expected as the project evolves. Today, QSS can already be deployed with quantumd using either local or remote backends.

Local backends are useful for testing, and can be spun up quickly with a single command.
Remote backends are used for real deployments, requiring a TFChain account and configuration details.
Daemon mode handles retries, hooks, and caching in the background once set up.

For step-by-step installation and deployment instructions, see the official deployment guide.

🔗Comparing QSS With Traditional Storage Solutions

Here is a comparison between QSS and traditional storage to show how it outperforms conventional systems.

	QSS	Traditional Storage Solutions
Scalability	Horizontally scalable architecture with no theoretical size limitations	Variable scalability
Compatibility	High compatibility through the abstraction layer	Varies by implementation
Performance	Optimized for reliability	Variable performance characteristics
Redundancy Efficiency	With a 16–20 node setup, QSS achieves 4-node failure tolerance with only ~20% overhead. The overhead changes depending on the cluster size. This flexibility means QSS can be tuned to balance redundancy and efficiency for different deployment needs.	Typically 400-500% overhead (4-5 complete copies) for equivalent redundancy
Compute Integration	Integrated with Infrastructure-as-Code tooling	Diverse integration approaches with varying complexity
Geographic Control	User-controlled data placement with geographic autonomy	Limited geographic control due to centralized routing
Security Architecture	Implements mathematical encoding and encryption	Conventional encryption models
Post-Quantum Readiness	Implements post-quantum cryptographic algorithms	Not designed with quantum resistance

🔗In Closing

ZDBFS, ZSTOR, and ZDB form a storage stack that balances performance, sovereignty, and quantum resistance. Whether deployed for simple file storage, global applications, or blockchain-grade data integrity, QSS empowers organizations, developers, and individuals alike to move beyond the vulnerabilities of conventional storage and embrace a future where security, resilience, and sovereignty go hand in hand.

Raj Mitra

September 16, 2025

Kubernetes in Context: Why the World Runs on K8s – and Why it Needs to Decentralized

Kubernetes has reshaped how the world builds and runs software but faces key challenges because of centralization. ThreeFold has a solution.

Kubernetes (aka K8S) has become the backbone of modern software. Teams use it to deploy, scale, and operate apps and platforms across clouds, data centers, and the edge, from banking to streaming to AI.

However, despite its huge utility, most of Kubernetes still relies on centralized cloud providers, introducing issues like rising costs, vendor lock-in, and loss of control over data. The future demands a decentralized version.

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.

Raj Mitra

September 10, 2025

From Vision to Reality: DePIN Comes Alive in East Africa

A powerful week of community, collaboration, and real-world impact as decentralized infrastructure takes root in East Africa.

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

Mombasa Opening

🔗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

Mombasa School Visit

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.

Mombasa School Visit

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.

Networking Dinner

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.

Mombasa Summit Day

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 Keynote

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

Time for 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.

Charter to Zanzibar

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.

Kristof Keynote

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

Ecosystem Panel

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.

Kristof and Eng. Shukuru

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

Tryphon

🔗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.

Demo Day

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.

Light DAO

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.

DCMA

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

🔗Part III: Arusha

Arusha Time!

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.

Maasai
School Visit

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.

Sam Taggart

July 11, 2025

FEATURED POST

An Internet That Remembers Its Origins

November 21, 2025 - Sam Taggart

ThreeFold stories and project info

An Internet That Remembers Its Origins

🔗A Chance to Reclaim the Original Spirit of the Internet

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

Cloudflare... Wtf Happened?

🔗The Update That Broke The Internet

🔗What Is the Solution?

🔗The ThreeFold Alternative: A Different Kind of Internet

🔗Why This Actually Fixes the Problem

Rebalancing the Digital Economy: The Yin–Yang Vision of Project Mycelium

🔗Yin-Yang Economy In Practice

🔗Applying The Same Principles In Project Mycelium

🔗SPORE: The Force of Growth

🔗Core Characteristics:

🔗AUR: The Force of Stability

🔗Core Functionality

🔗The Balance

When the Cloud Stopped Working, and What Comes Next

🔗The Cracks in the Cloud

🔗Enter ThreeFold’s Solution

🔗The Three Paths Ahead

The Three Step Rollout to a Sovereign Agentic Cloud

🔗The Cloud

🔗The Network

🔗The Agents

🔗Agent Layer Evolution: From AGI to ACI

🔗Building The Vision

How ThreeFold's Decentralized Cloud Empowers Builders – and End Users

🔗The Grid: The Foundation

🔗The Builders: Turning Infrastructure into Products

🔗The Users: Plugging Into Decentralization

🔗Why This Matters Now

The Quantum Age Is Coming: Will Your Data Survive?

🔗The Quantum Threat to Security

🔗Why Existing Systems Can’t Adapt Quickly

🔗Enter ThreeFold’s Quantum Safe Storage (QSS)

🔗The QSS Storage Stack

🔗#1 ZDBFS (Zero-DB FS)

🔗#2 Zero-Stor (ZSTOR)

🔗#3 Zero-DB (ZDB)

🔗Scalability in QSS

🔗The Maths Behind QSS

🔗Deploy Quantum Safe Storage

🔗Responsibilities

🔗Usage

🔗Comparing QSS With Traditional Storage Solutions

🔗In Closing

Kubernetes in Context: Why the World Runs on K8s – and Why it Needs to Decentralized

🔗So, What Exactly Does Kubernetes Do?

🔗Why the World Adopted K8s

🔗The Rise of Containers

🔗The Rise of Cloud

🔗Limitations of the Centralized Kubernetes Model

🔗KubeCloud: Decentralized Kubernetes on Steroids

🔗What Powers KubeCloud

🔗What It Means for Users

🔗For Developers and DevOps

🔗For Enterprises

🔗In Closing

From Vision to Reality: DePIN Comes Alive in East Africa

🔗Part I: Mombasa

🔗Sunday June 29: Day Zero: Arrival & Alignment

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

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

🔗Wednesday July 02: Day Three: DePIN Summit Launches

🔗Part II: Zanzibar

🔗Thursday July 03: Day Zero: Crossing to Zanzibar

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

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

🔗Part III: Arusha

🔗Final Reflections

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