What is Unchainet?
The internet is continually evolving. Thirty years ago, only large enterprises owned big data centres and startups needed to invest large sums for their own servers1 . If they became successful, they often had a very short time to increase their capacity by spending even more in infrastructure. Times often were quite difficult for innovation.
Today there are multiple cloud providers which allow startups and large organizations to rent “servers,” or rather computing resources, on a per-second basis and to adjust capacity in a few clicks. However, cloud providers are dominated by a few large players.2 There is a risk of the whole server hosting market being consumed and dominated by them. Although there appears to be a price war at the moment that is lowering prices3 , it could change in the future and lead to decreased competition, price increases and dangerous centralization of power in the hands of a few.
We believe we present a solution, which could help individuals, hosting providers and companies owning unutilized datacenters to get worldwide reach within minutes by connecting to the Unchainet network, renting their available server resources to a broad audience, and earning money while supporting the open internet. We call this beneficial mining. We expect that the consumed energy might bring value (benefit) to clients and might not be wasted in large amounts merely to keep the network running.
Cloud clients could at the same time be able to access substantial computational power for research, AI training, or for web and API hosting at better prices. These would be based on current market pricing and very low Unchainet network maintenance fees.
Unchainet aims to be more than “just another” cloud provider. We expect to build the Unchainet network with blockchain technologies at its heart, allowing resource trading in its UNET cryptocurrency, which is intended to run on a fast custom-made blockchain with a Proof of Beneficial Work algorithm. Introducing a cryptocurrency as a mean of exchange is intended to enable true cross-border and real-time sharing of computing power without restrictions. Quality and trustworthiness of nodes (i.e., providers) is expected to be consistently and transparently monitored by QoS Chain technology, allowing free transactions on a massive scale while keeping true decentralization, all backed by a resource trading crypto-economy.
In later phases of the project, this is intended to allow UNET tokens to be used outside of the Unchainet platform, powering microtransactions in other apps. The modular Unchainet blockchain architecture and our “blockchain as a service” offering is expected to enable developers to create custom blockchain apps with significantly more use cases than current smart contract platforms.