FAQ

What is the Threefold Connect?

The ThreeFold Connect is ThreeFold’s 2-Step authenticator app that allows you to connect to the ThreeFold Grid and it’s ecosystem.

It will protect your account with both your password and your phone. ThreeFold Connect is more than just an authenticator app, it is also ThreeFold’s official digital wallet, allowing you to store your TFTs in the most secure way.

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How ThreeFold compares to similar projects in the space?

We’ve been asked how we differentiate from projects like Dfinity, Akash, Holochain and other so we’ve opened conversation threads around it on our forum.

Feel free to join the conversation at ThreeFold FAQ.

What is ThreeFold?

The ThreeFold Foundation is a not-for-profit organization based in Ghent, Belgium that oversees the research and development centers in Belgium, Switzerland, Egypt and the UAE as well as teams in India, Brazil, and the United States.

The Foundation’s mission is to build, expand and empower a new Internet infrastructure owned by humanity.

Our team consists of some of the world’s best Internet and Cloud experts and technology visionaries, and after many successful exits with some of the world’s top Tech companies, they realized that the only way to have a truly sovereign, secure, and energy-efficient Internet, was to start from scratch.

ThreeFold is committed to making all it’s peer-to-peer technologies open-source and is committed to build the Internet humanity deserves. 

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How can I get involved with ThreeFold if I'm not very technical?

There are many ways for anyone to participate in the ThreeFold movement:

  • Become a Farmer and connect sovereign and planet positive Internet capacity from your home or office.
  • Buy ThreeFold Tokens to grow the new Internet economy and use it to reserve private and secure Internet capacity on the ThreeFold Grid.
  • Join a collaborative ecosystem of partners that choose to take action, and together build the most efficient and secure technological infrastructures, equalitarian and sovereign applications and regenerate our planet. Join us - the ThreeFold ecosystem or the Alliance for a Conscious Internet.
  • Become a ThreeFold Advocate by sharing about us within your networks. Wether one or thousands of people, with the butterfly effect, everyone counts!
  • Join our community, forum and github to support us in our growth by participating in our conversations and development.
  • And more.. we are very open to new ideas.

Look for the Participate section on the navigation bar or check our Collaboration section on wiki.

What is the ThreeFold Grid?

The ThreeFold Grid is the world’s most advanced peer-to-peer Internet infrastructure. It can scale limitlessly, and brings a more performant, secure and sustainable Internet to host humanity’s data and workloads.

Powered by ThreeFold’s Open Source Technology, the ThreeFold Grid enables anyone to join the Internet and Cloud economy, and it allows any IT workloads that can run on Linux to benefit from a peer-to-peer infrastructure.

By using the ThreeFold Grid, developers can create websites, enterprise IT systems and store any files using the world’s favourite tools and protocols such as Kubernetes and S3, and disperse their data and workloads across a decentralized cloud infrastructure.

For example, the ThreeFold Grid hosts its software within an unbreakable tamper proof environment, enabling systems to be developed and run without any firewalls, VPNs and security threats. It’s peer-to-peer nature allows interoperability between a vast array of systems and removes the need of any intermediaries to allow people and organizations to build their own private and secure infrastructure. This allows the ThreeFold Grid to host developing environments that are completely self-contained and free from all security challenges found in today’s cloud landscape. In a way, it flips the data center model upside down and eliminates all the exorbitant complexity, high cost and unsustainable models of IT.

The increased monopolisation of the Internet and Cloud by the big tech corporations of our world is threatening the neutrality of today’s internet. Censorship, data collection and manipulation is already very present. People are being turned into products of a big AI machine. The ThreeFold Grid allows for a peer-to-peer (owned by all of us) and autonomous (no humans involved in the system) Internet that would decentralize the ownership and secure the neutrality of the Internet.

ThreeFold, is the only project that started from scratch at the infrastructure level with a super lightweight and stateless operating system that built a full blown architecture to allow peer-to-peer systems to thrive.

We believe it is the only way to a liberalized Internet as imagined by it’s initial creators.

Does the ThreeFold use consensus?

ThreeFold uses blockchain technology only for what it’s good for - Smart Contracts and Transactions.

An alternative to consensus mechanisms are peer-to-peer systems. While offering many similar benefits they are quite different in their design.

Crypto networks are internet-based networks, they use consensus mechanisms such as blockchains and cryptocurrencies (or tokens), which in turn incentivize the participants of said consensus (miners or delegates). While ThreeFold does use a blockchain and has it’s own digital currency, instead of focusing on building a network that would be governed by everyone, it enables everyone to have their own governance mechanism. Every person or organization benefits from it’s own private and secure environment on the ThreeFold Grid.

For instance, on the ThreeFold Grid, every user is able to store, run and access data and wokloads via their private key. When hosting data and workloads, a smart contract is created and stored in ThreeFold’s blockchain database, which will then operate and execute their private environment via Threefold’s autonomous technology. This provides a fully sovereign infrastructure model.

Put simply, instead of using consensus, peer-to-peer technology is used to provide true data sovereignty.

Is the ThreeFold Grid live already? 

Answer here is a definite Yes!

The ThreeFold Grid has been live since 2019 and is approaching it’s 3rd version in 2021.

As of today, the ThreeFold Grid is present across more than 30 countries and connects more than 80 Petabytes of storage and 15 thousand croes of compute, making it the world’s largest peer-to-peer Internet Infrastructure on the planet.

See our live explorer

Is there anything done for the ThreeFold Grid to be sustainable?

By starting from scratch on the operating system level, ThreeFold was able to eliminate a lot of complexity from the current web2 and web3 models to enable a super lighteight infrastructure.

By doing so we are able to enable up-to 10x energy savings as compared to any other alternative on the market. Also with the future end-user solutions we are building, we should be able to host 20 digital lives for as much energy as a light bulb would consume. 

Nevertheless being sustainable is not enough in times of climate change. It is important for all of us to find ways to not only minimize our carbon footprints but also find ways to regenerate the surface and marine ecosystems of our world. ThreeFold commits to offset the ThreeFold Grid 3x in the form of carbon credits to support regenerative projects all around the world.