UK startup DADI (Decentralised Architecture for a Democratic Internet) officially launched today, six months after securing some £22 million ($28,750,000) in a blockchain token sale.
The Ethereum-based peer-to-peer network, founded by a group of marketing veterans from creative tech agency Airlock, aims to harness unused capacity on common networked household or business appliances; from routers to networked fridges.
The company is building a suite of services on top of this decentralised network, and says it hopes to help tackle a growing centralisation of online power.
It describes itself as an “enterprise-grade, deployment-ready web services stack, built around a microservices architecture.”
Computational Power Wasted
DADI founder and CEO Joseph Denne said: “A vast amount of computational power currently goes unused in homes and businesses, around the world. Expensive computers, games consoles, set-top boxes, smart televisions and other devices spend large amounts of their life unused or in standby mode.”
He added: “That’s the power we’ll harness for this new network – drastically reducing reliance on expensive data centres that harm the environment.”
Blockchain is used to incentivise participants in DADI, via a tokenised system of reward for contributing to this decentralised network, which DADI anticipates will be 60 percent cheaper than cloud services as a way to build, store and serve content.
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Some Technical Details?
The company says in its whitepaper: “You can think of DADI as a containerized layer on top of established P2P technologies – Protocol Buffer for performant language neutral data transfer and GRPC for distributing procedures across multiple hosts.
“DADI’s hybrid architecture layers a series of Open Source web services on top of container services and gateway layers that are distributed throughout the network. Working in this way removes the potential of performance impact form congestion on the Ethereum network.”
There are three key groups within the DADI Network: Hosts, Gateways (including Stargates), and Consumers.
Hosts are network node owners who contribute computational power. They run the DADI container service, which is implemented using VMs and Docker. Each node runs the host application as well as the client application within a single encrypted virtual machine.
Gateways are network node owners who predominantly contribute bandwidth. Stargates meanwhile provide vital functions in the network in the form of domain name mapping and contract negotiation. They are rewarded with a percentage of all consumer tokens.
DADI Web Services meanwhile are interconnecting Node.js applications, with shared modules and supporting tools, including a command line interface (CLI) designed to simplify the setup and deployment of the technology. (Source code for existing web services can be found here: https://github.com/dadi)
Recycling Revenues Back into Project
The DADI team say just 10 percent of revenue generated by the network will be retained for maintenance costs, while 85 percent will be passed directly to consumers and businesses offering up spare computing power to the network, whether that’s through a set-top box, a supercomputer or a smartphone.
The remaining five percent of revenues will be allocated to the new DADI Foundation – a charitable organization focused on the promotion of democracy and fair internet access for all. The foundation is led by Jennifer Martin-Nye – previously a human rights advisor to the People’s Postcode Lottery, the world’s third-largest charitable donor.
Paul Regan, Product Director at DADI, added: “In countries like the UK and US, we must From July, early adopters can begin contributing to the DADI network from July. The full public rollout of DADI network contribution will take place over the remainder of 2018, with onboarding managed through a controlled availability process by geographic region – on a first come, first serve basis.
Those wanting to register early interest can visit: https://dadi.cloud/en/network
Challenge Advisory partner Chris Burns told Computer Business Review: “I love the DADI concept from an ideological point of view – anything that offers a way to (re)democratise the internet is a winner in my book. Obviously the proof will be in the pudding with this though; what the team are aiming to do is extremely ambitious and it’s all about how they execute and scale.”
He added: “My main other concern for them is around the discounts they have offered to investors on their public sale as this always raises the question of whether people have invested because they truly believe in the project or whether they simply think it is a good deal financially. Let’s hope it’s the former.”
