ThreeFold's Green Technology Strategy For A Sustainable Future
Source: ThreeFold Twitter

Threefold recently announced a rollout of diverse product offerings, one year after the company launched the first true peer-to-peer Internet. 

A Greener Future

Threefold’s innovative technology eliminates the need for centralized control and energy-consuming data centers, utilizing 90 percent less international fiber network capacity and energy. For context, today’s internet consumes around 10 percent of global energy production– with emerging technologies such as Blockchain, Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Artificial intelligence, and 5G, this energy consumption is only expected to exponentially increase.

Threefold takes a different approach to tackle these issues. While traditional solutions aim to focus on the use of renewable energy to power data centers, Threefold understands that this is not a viable solution. Threefold looks to significantly offset general energy consumption on top of saving massive amounts of energy compared to data centers, by partnering with Take Action Global. This initiative allows the ThreeFold grid (Farmers) to convert the grid’s TFT native tokens into carbon credits, mitigating remaining energy needs. ThreeFold is confident in its ability to effectively regenerate our planet. Kristof de Spiegelerr, Co-Founder of ThreeFold states:

“We have the potential to offset energy usage 100 percent by the end of 2021, and our goal is to take 2 times more carbon out of the air than we put in. Zero-OS, the platform’s operating system, was built from scratch on a Linux kernel that allows multiple user spaces to co-exist…These spaces support micro-versions of various software, 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”

Essentially, ThreeFold leverages proprietary, built from scratch software to host micro software, stripping away other virtual machines and host OS systems that would otherwise consume more energy.

On top of this, ThreeFold’s efforts towards a more sustainable future revolve directly around their use of a peer-to-peer network: a distributed architecture that splits tasks and workloads between Farmers on the ThreeFold Grid. In direct coordination with each other, Farmers make their resources like storage, computing power, and network bandwidth directly available to other users on the grid. In this manner, Farmers are both suppliers and consumers, as opposed to a traditional system that has supply and consumption of resources divided.

Ultimately, this allows ThreeFold Grid to be fast, cost-efficient, and sustainable. By removing all intermediaries and allowing users to directly exchange data with each other, peer-to-peer optimizes the path for data which therefore mitigates energy consumption. In this manner, ThreeFold can save up to 90 percent in energy compared to data centers and can compensate for any other energy consumptions through their partnership with Take Action Global (TAG) and the usage of carbon credits.

The Threefold Grid

Threefold invites customers, partners, and investors onto their peer-to-peer internet platform, which aims to liberalize a now centralized and unequally distributed internet. The ThreeFold Grid is made up of over 600 servers based in 30 countries around the world. This enables it to deliver approximately 80 PB in storage distributed across 16,000 CPU cores worldwide– effectively the largest storage and compute peer-to-peer internet grid in the world. Each of ThreeFold’s servers runs the aforementioned Zero-OS, their stateless and lightweight open-source operating system. This OS is maintained by independent individuals and organizations called Farmers. Because it is stateless, Farmers can’t access data via the hardware, emphasizing the operating system’s security with regards to user data.

Farmers can earn TFT tokens for connecting hardware, and also providing network services like IP addresses and their reputation on the grid. A portion of TFT will also be reinvested back into the foundation to be converted into carbon credits. Every TFT token represents a unit of storage and compute space on the platform, and can thus be utilized by users to reserve storage needed to build and share on the platform’s network.

About Take Action Global

Take Action Global (TAG) works with students, teachers, and educational institutions to use climate education as a force for sustainable and environmental change. TAG centers aim to empower students and communities to be proactive about our climate and collective future. Through a multitude of projects and resources, TAG hopes to make a difference in our world through education and curiosity.

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