Led by Multicoin, the Web3 native computing platform "Fluence" aims to create a decentralized AWS

Author: Qin Xiaofeng/Odaily Planet Daily

With the rise of DeFi, the metaverse, NFTs, GameFi, and the entire cryptocurrency market, the demand for data storage, computation, and transmission is increasing, leading to a growing focus on underlying computing platforms.

Recently, the Web3 native computing platform Fluence secured $9 million in funding, led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Alameda Ventures, Tiger Global, Protocol Labs, Arweave Capital, Polymorphic Capital, OP Crypto, Signum Capital, and UOB Venture Management. (Note: Multicoin Capital has also invested in several Web3 computing/storage projects, including Arweave, Livepeer, The Graph, and Render Network.)

Fluence is an open-source, permissionless, decentralized platform and development toolkit for building, hosting, and running peer-to-peer (p2p) applications and protocols, aiming to become a decentralized and permissionless AWS Lambda. (Note: AWS Lambda is part of Amazon's cloud computing services, providing computing services to run event-driven code and automatically manage computing resources.)

Fluence can read data from any public data source (IPFS, Filecoin, Arweave, Ceramic, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Flow, etc.), perform computations on it, and store the newly computed data back into any repository.

It uses a custom programming language called Aqua—designed for building distributed systems in a trustless environment and managing execution on p2p networks.

Application developers can use Aqua to create custom p2p algorithms for data replication, computation verification, failover, and load balancing. In addition to scalable computation, this also makes it easier to establish the design space for p2p systems, allowing them to be seamlessly combined.

According to the official introduction, Fluence is suitable for the following needs: verification in the public domain; no single point of failure; resistance to censorship; data is messy and cannot be placed directly on the blockchain, but the output of the computation must be stored on a public ledger.

Specifically, Fluence can be used in the following application scenarios:

• On-chain voting: Users sign transactions and send them to the Fluence network, which computes and aggregates all votes and submits the final vote on-chain.

• Variable NFTs: Fluence can be used to design NFTs that can change over time, allowing for recombination.

• Gaming: As more games use tokens and NFTs, the computational load increases, often in a centralized manner (e.g., Axie Infinity). However, the demand for computational transparency from players will grow over time, allowing game designers to shift these computations to Fluence.

• Smart contract automation: Fluence can execute the full suite of functions required by DeFi and DAOs, including limit order execution, automatic liquidity supply management, protection against debt position liquidation, DAO proposal execution, and software updates.

• Cross-chain computation: Automatically transferring assets from one chain to another requires monitoring events on the initial chain (e.g., token transfers or NFT burns), generating corresponding data, and sending the resulting transactions to another chain, where assets are minted.

• Oracles: Since Fluence provides a fully functional framework for creating decentralized systems, it can be used to create subnetworks driven by consensus or any other data validation model. Developers can establish subnetworks to provide on-chain data sources and apply custom trust models.

• Off-chain P2P coordination and multi-signature wallets: Fluence provides a robust foundation for threshold signature setups and multi-party computation.

According to official plans, Fluence will launch an on-chain marketplace for hosting code and computing resources. Code authors will share hosting revenue based on the usage of their code modules. The code is immutable upon upload, preventing the insertion of malware later; as long as the module is used and hosted, dependencies will continue to function normally without the risk of being terminated by a centralized party.

As developers upload more code, all of this code will naturally be combined using Aqua, making the Fluence network more robust.

"Fluence realizes the ultimate dream of open source: being rewarded for writing high-quality open-source code that others can use. This monetization model is at the core of the Fluence spirit and will help reshape our thinking about value acquisition in open-source systems. Developers have dreamed of this monetization model since the advent of open source 30 years ago; Fluence is making it possible," the official introduction states.

In terms of governance, Fluence is currently community-driven. Although the initial code was developed and maintained by Fluence Labs, it has no governance authority over the network. No tokens have been issued yet, but there are plans for community governance through tokens in the future.