The hot spots of the blockchain track have changed, and defi, NFT and chain tour have continuously attracted the attention of the industry. Under the hot spots one after another, many high-quality projects have emerged in the field of blockchain infrastructure from distributed computing, storage to communication, and embarked on the road of conquering these extremely challenging infrastructure work.

Take distributed computing as an example. The traditional cloud computing market has witnessed rapid growth in recent years, with a compound annual growth rate of about 23%, highlighting the huge demand for enterprise digital transformation, integration of artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies for upgrading. However, although the global CPU / GPU consumption also shows exponential growth, the gap between computing power and demand in the traditional cloud computing market is becoming increasingly obvious. Without new innovative solutions, this gap will only grow, especially in the era of Web 3.0.

Distributed computing combined with blockchain is imminent. Decentralized computing networks represented by dfinity and cudos began to "rush to the beach" of traditional cloud computing. At the same time, their innovative solutions also bring new technological development possibilities. A confrontation between "new" and "old" is beginning. There have been many introductions about dfinity. This paper will talk about cudos, which focuses on building a cross chain decentralized computing network, and introduce how cudos brings decentralized and unlicensed high-performance computing to both blockchain and traditional cloud computing industries, so as to make more efficient use of global computing resources.

1. Low carbon and low price is a strong competitor in the traditional cloud computing market

The traditional cloud computing market is currently monopolized by a few large enterprises. Amazon AWS, Microsoft azure, Google cloud and Alibaba cloud have accounted for 70% of the whole market in 2019. Although the development of these large platforms is very successful, the excessive concentration and insufficient competition in the market have led to high prices. Their centralized architecture also implies the risk of a single point of failure. For example, the fastly failure in June this year led to the paralysis of many official websites of governments and media around the world. At the same time, in order to withstand the peak demand, many cloud service institutions have established large-scale hosting facilities in multiple regions, resulting in a waste of IT hardware. Is there an innovative solution to this situation?

The main members of the cudos team are from the traditional cloud computing industry. Previously, they founded c4l, which accounts for 1% of the UK Internet infrastructure market. After deeply recognizing these pain points, cudos combined with blockchain technology is their answer.

Distributed computing is not a new concept. In the computer field, it has long been practice to divide a large amount of engineering data into small blocks, calculate them separately by multiple computers, upload the calculation results, unify the results and draw a conclusion. One of the well-known projects is to analyze and calculate the internal structure of proteins and related drugs Folding@home project The project has a huge structure and requires an amazing amount of calculation. It is impossible to complete it by one computer. Even now there are supercomputers with super computing power, the funds of some scientific research institutions are very limited. However, similar projects were previously based on the model of volunteer participation.

With the help of blockchain and smart contract technology, large-scale distributed computing is possible. This allows the cloud computing market to be open to enterprises and individuals with idle computing power. Users can not only be users of computing power, call computing power from different devices on demand through smart contracts, but also become providers of computing power to realize the realization of hardware devices. Under the guarantee of blockchain network, the trading of computing power can be carried out safely and smoothly, and all participants in the network can also be effectively encouraged. Due to the full use of existing idle equipment, the cost of decentralized cloud computing network is only a small part of that of mainstream service providers, and in addition to significant cost advantages, it also has stronger scalability and availability.

"Cudos and its parent company, cudo, are building such a decentralized cloud computing network. It is similar to the airbnb shared economy model. Any enterprise or individual can contribute computing power to and profit from the decentralized computing network without license. These enterprises and individuals can be small and medium-sized service providers that lose the competition to large platforms, but have secure data centers, idle equipment and bandwidth; Cryptocurrency miners who want more stable income; Gamers who want to use their spare time to earn extra income to buy new games, etc. Therefore, cudos has created a 'cloud' with a wider range of users and lower cost, and the cost can be as low as one tenth of that of traditional cloud services, "Matt Hawkins, founder and CEO of cudos, described to us in an exclusive interview with panews.

Various vertical fields of traditional cloud services are possible application scenarios of cudos, including image rendering, artificial intelligence and machine learning, scientific simulation, medical modeling, etc. The deep cultivation in the traditional cloud service industry has also enabled cudos to obtain the support of many industry heavyweight participants, including chip giant AMD.

At the beginning of this year, cudos announced that it had obtained more than 10 million pounds of financing. The investors include many well-known investment institutions in the industry, such as moonrock capital, GBV, outlier ventures, moonwhale ventures, doublepeak, square capital, duckdao, brilliance ventures, BMW capital, etc. Subsequently, cudos successively announced that it had obtained additional investment from algrand ecological fund borderless capital and chain Unicorn animoca brands.

While competing for traditional cloud computing, the layout of cudos in the blockchain field is also gradually beginning.

2. Get through blockchain and cloud computing to help large-scale applications

Cudos does not stop at serving the growing demand for cloud computing, but also sees the great potential of introducing high-performance computing into the blockchain industry“ "Building a bridge between cloud computing and blockchain" is the positioning of cudos.

The rising demand for cloud computing is the computing demand of large blockchain networks. In fact, many nodes of large blockchain networks are hosted in centralized cloud services. For example, more than 6% of Ethereum nodes are hosted in the cloud, and most of them are hosted on Amazon AWS. This poses a great hidden danger to the dispersion and security of these networks, and also makes the computing cost on the blockchain expensive.

On the other hand, the types of tasks that blockchain smart contracts can automatically handle are far from complex enough, which has become an obstacle to the mainstream application of blockchain technology.

Cudos is committed to building a one-tier (layer1) blockchain and two-tier (layer2) computing and Oracle network, which allows developers to write a new smart contract in multiple languages including solidity and rust. This smart contract can realize the call of high-performance computing resources under the chain, making it possible to use smart contracts to automate complex computing tasks, such as complex logic in machine learning and risk exposure estimation in financial markets.

Cudos will also have cross chain characteristics and can bridge with mainstream blockchains such as Ethereum, algorand, Boca and cosmos. It will bring scalable computing services and layer-2 Oracle services to these bridged blockchains to effectively solve the scalability problem and make the transaction faster and cheaper. This means that blockchain applications and services such as defi and NFT will greatly improve performance.

It is worth mentioning that, unlike many distributed computing networks, cudos, which combines cloud computing and blockchain thinking, has a major layout on the supply side, and many "competitive products" projects seem to focus only on the level of smart contracts on the chain.

"It's like opening a store, you need to build up inventory," Matt said.

Cudo, established in 2017, is the parent company of cudos, a software company providing distributed computing under the chain. At present, cudo has more than 350000 registered users (hardware providers) in more than 145 countries around the world, including blockchain practitioners, game players, service providers, etc. The total computing power on the cudo computing platform has exceeded 500000 billion floating-point operations (tflops), more than 60000 concurrent devices at any point in time, and the average monthly income has exceeded US $600000.

In the plan of cudos, after the main network goes online, cudos will realize the integration of on chain and off chain, so that cloud computing users and blockchain users can call computing resources as a three-tier (layer3) cudo platform through smart contracts, so as to truly connect the real world with the blockchain.

With the advantages of blockchain decentralization and trust free, cudos gives the traditional cloud computing industry scalability and flexibility, and can make the maximum use of the world's idle computing resources, which will undoubtedly play an important role in the process of blockchain moving towards large-scale applications.

But Matt also admitted that regulation may become one of the challenges for distributed computing networks to enter the mainstream“ AWS was launched in 2006 and initially grew steadily, but it did not accelerate until 2011. It did not enter explosive growth until 2014-15. The reason is that regulatory policies allow highly regulated industries such as banking and insurance to migrate to the cloud. Distributed computing will face the same problem, but in view of the security and non tamperability brought by blockchain, we think the acceptance of regulation will be faster. "

3. Private test network and online pledge, and cudos main network is ready to come out

At the development level, the first layer blockchain architecture of cudos is built by Cosmos SDK and tendermint. The advantage of this architecture is to speed up the market promotion of the network, because cosmos has a very active developer community, its POS mode and Byzantine fault tolerance (BZT) governance protocol are also tested, and it also has good security against the common vector supply on the Ethereum blockchain. In addition, the inter blockchain communication (IBC) protocol used also strengthens the interoperability between cudos and other cosmos based blockchains. At present, more than 200 blockchain networks use this architecture, which ensures that cudos can be fully integrated into the ecosystem of cosmos's prosperity and development.

The second layer computing network of cudos is a verifier network, which is composed of independent verification nodes distributed all over the world. With high node configuration, they can not only handle simple transactions, but also complex computing requests, bringing Turing complete decentralized computing Oracle service to blockchain developers. The transaction processing capacity per second (TPS) can reach about 1000, and transactions can be processed in batches to achieve higher throughput.

Cudos launched the private test network cognitum on May 10. In the intensive development, cudos has made good progress in the first stage, and will soon enter the second stage to launch the public test network somniorum.

Recently, cudos announced the upcoming test network reward program "Artemis program". Within three days, cudos received more than 1.7 developers who wanted to participate in the test, which will also become a powerful help for the development of cudos test network and even the main network. It is worth looking forward to that the public test network somniorum is expected to be released this quarter, and the main network of cudos will be launched within this year. At that time, cudos will become a decentralized computing network that can cast and distribute NFT, host and develop online games, and provide different dapps including video rendering services.

Cudos token is the utility token of cudos network. It can be used as an exchange means for pledge, governance, obtaining computing services and giving priority to computing tasks. At present, the cudos token is erc-20 token. After the cudos main network is online, it will be replaced by the original main network token.

On August 2, cudos launched the online pledge platform for currency holders. Through its smart contract, holders of erc20 cudos tokens can act as verification nodes or entrust pledgers to pledge tokens on the Ethereum blockchain to obtain an estimated annual rate of return (apy) of 3%. Pledge is the process of locking the cudos token and entrusting it to a specific verifier to maintain the operation of the network. The online pledge platform is an important transition before the main network of cudos goes online, which helps to feed back the early supporters of the network and simulate the operation of the POS verifier network.

The pledgor can withdraw the tokens in the pledge at any time, but it needs to wait 21 days to release the pledge. After this stage, the pledged cudos tokens will be released. The pledge on the chain is carried out in the smart contract and the records are saved on the blockchain. Before the main network of cudos goes online, if cudos is erc20 token, the pledge record is saved on Ethereum. After the main network goes online, it will be transferred to the cudos blockchain network. At that time, the pledgers will not only get the incentive of pledge reward, but also get a part of the network transaction cost as they safeguard the economic interests of cudos network.

"We plan to connect cudos with the offline computing platform cudo next year, which will bring a qualitative leap to the distributed computing / cloud computing market! At present, many industries and use cases cannot run directly on the chain or layer2. After this is achieved, these use cases will be able to obtain high-performance computing from the chain, including CPU, GPU, storage, bandwidth and other services. This will be a necessary step before the blockchain industry moves towards large-scale application. " Matt revealed the development plan of cudos after this year to panews.

A good play is being staged. Cudos challenges the traditional cloud computing market and its determination to establish the world's largest decentralized computing network should not be underestimated. As the saying goes, the over centralized traditional cloud market has not brought about a significant improvement in efficiency. Instead, it has built a moat to block some enterprises and individuals out of the cloud market. Then it may be inevitable to build a decentralized computing network for everyone to replace traditional cloud computing with a first mover advantage like cudos.