Decentralized Cloud Platform

Our plan is to develop a suite of applications which will enable construction of Distributed and Decentralized Cloud Platform powered by Distributed Ledger Technology for accounting data, telemetry and payment settlement for services rendered.

IMPORTANT: This proposal and the amount we are requesting is not to develop the entire solution mentioned above, but to develop the MVP of the dStore component and fund further research into these topics so that carefully crafted and actionable proposal can be created and enable wider community to have a voice on the trade-offs that will certainly come with implementation of such products.

Looking at the landscape of IT Infrastructure Services we can recognize three major pillars of what makes IT infrastructure, it would be Storage, Networking and Compute. We call these components dStore, dNET and dComp...

From the perspective of complexity, designing decentralized, distributed storage is somewhat simple, and many projects in this area already exists, namely it would be SIA, Storj and Filecoin as leaders, however each of these projects use their own tokens and some even use own blockchain which we consider unnecessary. We would combine features of Filecoin and Storj and add some other innovative improvements into which I would rather not get into right now. But for instance, combination of Storj model with the zero-knowledge cryptography from Filecoin would provide already a huge benefit.

There are several storage types used in the industry, mainly it would be persistent storage and ephemeral storage. When it comes to persistent storage, they are also classified by longevity ranging from days all the way to so-called forever retention widely used in pharma and finance verticals.

Another factor to consider when it comes to Data Storage services is time-to-first-byte, bandwidth and latency, we have planned a complex Service Level Offering suitable for wide range of different providers and wide range of services.

Second easiest domain to tackle is networking, in the area of networking, there are several sub-domains when it comes to networking, while we have many ideas in this area, we will keep them to ourselves until second funding round. But they would enable dCloud to provide dVPNs, dCDNs, dDDoS protection and other services.

Most of the projects in all three pillar areas suffer from using own, custom tokens for payment from consumers, and also reward service providers in these tokens, which causes variety of usability issues, effectively harming addoption. In our model, we would prefer consumers to pay in already established assets such as ADA or native Cardano stablecoin, thus reducing volatility for both consumers and service providers alike.

The third, most difficult area is compute, with current technology, this is a very tricky part to be done securely, one could use something like Intel SGX or ARM TrustZone to execute secret code by untrusted service providers, however we would personally prefer to wait for viable RISC-V processors which, given their open-source nature should provide more security and further supply chain diversification, which would improve resistence even against Advanced Persistent Threats. We expect viable hardware to be on the market within 3 years with the current pace of development in the RISC-V and OpenPOWER ecosystem.

This proposal benefits both regular Cardano users who may consume the services, Cardano dApps developers as it provides them with the infrastructure required to run off-chain code and store data in decentralized, distributed manner as well as tech savy infrastructure providers such as Stake Pool Operators, who may, in addition to running stakepools also run dCloud infrastructure and gain additional revenue streams.

Examples of applications that may leverage this sort of infrastructure would be (short list):

* GitHub alternative - both Cardano core components and Cardano dApps (as well as all other open-source projects) require some sort of a Source Code Management system, it would be relatively easy to move 75% of GitLab onto this platform, with the remaining 25% requiring some additional work, but it could still be done over time, as soon as we would get the compute part figured out, which is just a matter of time as the R&D is already ongoing by other silicon companies...

In addition, Cardano has already need to develop such solution for Decentralized Software Updates, see: https://github.com/input-output-hk/decentralized-software-updates/issues/150

* Spotify / Apple Music alternative - artist identity, song metadata… may be stored on-chain… but actual music files in different quality would be stored off chain on a Decentralized Cloud Platform

* Netflix / Hulu alternative - use-case similar to Spotify / Apple Music Alternative

* Wikipedia alternative

* YouTube alternative - recently, many people are frightened by the number of censorship / curation platforms like YouTube do, Decentralized Cloud Platform would provide foundation for building decentralized alternative

TL; DR I have seen many proposals here, which would benefit from a Decentralized Cloud Platform such as this, because storing all the required data on-chain would not be feasible from a financial perspective as well as it would just cause unnecessary chain size bloat…

DELIVERABLES:

* Implementation of dSTORE MVP enabling service providers to join the marketplace

* Proposal for few high value applications such as end-point backup client, for instance cloud backup is ~ 10 bn. / year industry

* Competitive Market Analysis of already existing decentralized and centralized solutions

* Research of governance model make effective decision about roadmap priorities

* Business plan, incl. total addressable market, partner identification, ...

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