One of the simplest ways to reclaim control is to use a privacy-focused smartphone like OwnPhone, which keeps your data on your device instead of sending it to corporate clouds. Paired with Nextcloud, an open-source personal cloud where you manage your own files and communications, everything stays securely stored on the ThreeFold Grid. Together, they make true digital ownership practical and accessible from your device to your cloud to the network itself.

🔗Step 1: Owning Your Hardware

The OwnPhone is a privacy phone built for those who want technology that works for them, not against them. No forced accounts, no background profiling, no analytics engines quietly feeding corporate models. The operating system is open-source, lightweight, Google-free, and designed around personal autonomy.

You choose what apps run, what permissions they receive, and where your data flows. Files can remain only on your device, or sync directly to your private cloud, without passing through Big Tech infrastructure. Nothing is extracted or observed without consent.

Plus. Ownership does not stop at the phone. You can own your laptop, you can own your own node, you can choose the software you trust, and you can participate in the internet as a contributor rather than a product.

OwnPhone treats ownership as a right, not a privilege.

🔗Step 2: Run your private cloud on your own device

Nextcloud delivers all the everyday features people rely on from services like Google Drive, iCloud, or OneDrive file storage, syncing, backups, document editing, video calls, calendars, contacts, and team collaboration, but without giving up privacy or control. It’s already trusted by tens of millions of users and thousands of organizations worldwide, including governments, universities, hospitals, and companies of all sizes. The experience feels familiar, but the architecture is fundamentally different: you stay in control of your data, not the platform.

That same idea lies at the heart of Project Mycelium. The Mycelium Network forms the foundation, a decentralized IPv6 overlay that mirrors the adaptability and reach of biological mycelium. Through YourData Network, Nextcloud runs on the decentralized ThreeFold Grid instead of a corporate-owned data center. You choose the amount of storage you need: 200 GB, 400 GB, 1 TB, or more. Deployment and maintenance are taken care of fStep 3: How it comes togetheror you, while you keep full administrative control.

It is a sovereign software layer operating on a decentralized internet. You control access, visibility, and permissions, and if you wish, you can even run your own node to host your cloud directly on your hardware.

🔗Step 3: How it comes together

OwnPhone provides sovereign hardware. Nextcloud provides sovereign software. ThreeFold provides a sovereign network. Together, they form an end-to-end ownership stack where no single layer depends on corporate control.

Nextcloud is preinstalled on OwnPhone and is also available through app stores such as Google Play, App Store, F-Droid, and Aurora. Most users simply receive a ready-to-use private Nextcloud cloud space deployed through ThreeFold partners with no technical setup required.

Daily interaction is intuitive. You log in to Nextcloud on your OwnPhone or computer, and your photos, files, contacts, and calendars sync privately and securely to your ThreeFold-powered cloud environment.

The phone is also equipped with Mycelium, a decentralized, end-to-end-encrypted IPv6 overlay network. In the future, communication, storage, and services will flow directly between devices and nodes across the decentralized internet.

🔗Why Does This Matter? Benefits & Impacts

• Digital ownership is foundational to autonomy in the modern world, not a minor feature.
• Owning your hardware and using sovereign software on a decentralized internet enables a true private cloud without tracking, profiling, or corporate oversight.
• This model embodies the principles of a decentralized internet: user agency, transparency, energy efficiency, and human freedom.
• It is more sustainable than hyperscale data centers, which consume massive amounts of energy and concentrate power in a few global entities.
• A distributed infrastructure increases resilience, strengthens digital sovereignty, and uses resources more efficiently.
• From individuals and families to remote teams and communities, this ecosystem enables private, secure digital collaboration without compromise.
• It extends beyond any single device, allowing phones, laptops, nodes, and cloud tools to operate as one unified, user-owned digital environment.

🔗How to Get Started

• Step 1: Acquire an OwnPhone. (And optionally, a node if you want to run your own infrastructure.)
• Step 2: Deploy Nextcloud yourself on the ThreeFold Grid.
• Step 3: Setup: Within one working day you’ll get your login details for your own Nextcloud environment
• Step 4: Configure your device to connect to your Nextcloud instance, then start storing, syncing, sharing, and collaborating across devices (phone, laptop, tablet) just like with a mainstream cloud, but now on a decentralized infrastructure.
• Step 5: Manage access, backups, encryption, and user rights. Enjoy full control over data ownership and privacy.

🔗Conclusion

Centralized systems built for extraction and monitoring are not the only way. OwnPhone + Nextcloud on the decentralized ThreeFold Grid offers a powerful digital sovereignty solution that’s already live and in use.

Reclaim autonomy.

Own your digital life completely, without compromise.

🔗Yin-Yang Economy In Practice

In our modern economy, we have a dominance of Yang. So while modern civilization is highly competitive and productive, it’s financially fragile, socially fragmented, and ecologically depleted. A balanced economy needs the Yin circuit to maintain cohesion and resilience.

When both circulate together, economic systems become self-correcting, capable of creating prosperity without undermining the very social and environmental foundations on which that prosperity depends.

All this sounds really good, but what about in practice? Let’s see how it works in Bali. The island is known for its artisans, farmers, and craftsmen, each contributing to a vibrant creative ecosystem.

On one side lies the Yang economy. We have tourism, export trade, and monetized craftsmanship, all powered by cash flow, pricing, and market exchange.

Running parallel to it is the Yin economy, sustained through the “banjar” system. The local village cooperative that governs community labor, temple upkeep, festivals, and mutual aid. Neighbors exchange time, skills, and support through “gotong royong” (collective work), maintaining both social harmony and shared prosperity. The result is an economy that sustains both body and spirit.

We have another example in Japan’s Fureai Kippu (caring relationship tickets) system. Introduced in the 1990s, it allows individuals to earn credits by helping elderly or disabled members of their community.

The help includes shopping, cooking, cleaning, or simply providing companionship. These credits can later be redeemed for similar services when the giver grows older, or even transferred to a family member in another part of Japan. By design, it reinforces trust, empathy, and reciprocity, the core traits of a Yin system.

Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) follow a similar principle across many parts of the world. LETS allows neighbors to trade skills and services using locally created credits instead of national money.

A graphic designer might earn 20 credits for a logo design, then spend those credits on carpentry, tutoring, or home repairs offered by other members. Each transaction strengthens relationships and keeps value circulating within the community rather than flowing out to centralized markets.

These systems don’t replace national currencies, they complete them by filling social and ecological gaps that money alone cannot reach.

🔗Applying The Same Principles In Project Mycelium

Let’s see how SPORE and AUR work together to reflect Lietaer’s philosophy.

🔗SPORE: The Force of Growth

In nature, spores are small, resilient units that carry the potential for life. They drift through the air and across the earth until they find the right conditions to grow. When they do, they become mycelium, which are vast underground networks that connect, communicate, and share resources across ecosystems. It’s a living system built on balance, movement, and renewal.

That same idea lies at the heart of Project Mycelium. The Mycelium Network forms the foundation, a decentralized IPv6 overlay that mirrors the adaptability and reach of biological mycelium.

On top of it sits Mycelium Cloud, a platform that allows anyone to run scalable Kubernetes clusters with strength and flexibility.

The Virtual Data Center (VDC) layer adds another dimension by making it simple to run applications on Mycelium Cloud clusters. It removes much of the complexity behind Kubernetes, giving users an intuitive interface to deploy and manage workloads without needing deep technical knowledge. For those who prefer full control, the underlying Kubernetes layer is still available for direct configuration and resource management.

At the top of the stack is the Mycelium AI Agent Framework. These agents sense, decide, and act within the network, optimizing resources and automating complex tasks. Together these layers create a digital ecosystem that grows, adapts, and self-organizes just like its biological counterpart.

This entire stack is powered by SPORE, representing the Yang energy of expansion and reward. It fuels the competitive, entrepreneurial side of the ecosystem. Hosters, farmers, builders are all incentivized to grow the network and earn value through contribution.

🔗Core Characteristics:

• Type: Tradable, utility token. Supply capped at 10 billion.
• Purpose: Compensation and incentive
• Mechanism: 80% of every rental payment flows to hosters in SPORE. 10% is burned, creating long-term scarcity, and the other 10% flows into the Project Mycelium development fund.

SPORE channels ambition and innovation. The controlled minting and burn model ensures that growth remains disciplined, not inflationary.

🔗AUR: The Force of Stability

AUR is the stabilizing currency of the Mycelium ecosystem. The Yin counterpart to SPORE’s growth-oriented energy. In most decentralized systems, service pricing fluctuates with token volatility, creating uncertainty for both users and hosters. Mycelium solves this through AUR.

AUR’s design emphasizes reciprocity, trust, and sufficiency over speculation. It is non-tradable, meaning it cannot be hoarded, pumped, or gamed on external exchanges.

Every AUR in circulation exists to facilitate real economic activity. Users paying hosters, hosters providing services, and the network sustaining itself. Its value is anchored to gold (1 AUR = 0.001 g), ensuring that transactions remain fair and predictable across time.

🔗Core Functionality

• Reciprocity: AUR circulates within a closed ecosystem. It moves between users, hosters, and the protocol, never leaving the community.
• Sufficiency: Supply expands only as needed for real demand, avoiding the scarcity-driven competition of Yang currencies.
• Trust & Continuity: Gold-backing and internal use preserve value without exposure to speculative volatility.
• Community Flow: Because AUR can’t be hoarded or traded externally, it continually recycles through the system, mirroring the mutual-credit flow that Bernard Lietaer identified as the heart of cooperative economies.
• Predictable Economics: Users know exactly how much they pay. For example, “1 compute slice = 9,375 AUR.” That value remains constant in gold terms regardless of token market swings.

🔗The Balance

Most of today’s systems lean too far toward the Yang side. That’s why markets swing wildly and communities fracture. Mycelium was built to correct that imbalance.

The dual-token model is how we bring balance into a system that’s often one-sided. AUR allows Mycelium to decouple network utility from market volatility. Users and developers can plan, price, and deploy services with confidence, while hosters earn in SPORE. This separation of functions between AUR (stability) and SPORE (growth) keeps the ecosystem in equilibrium.

By giving equal weight to cooperation and competition, we’re building something that can scale without breaking the people who make it work.

For more information on our tokenomics, read this.

🔗The Grid: The Foundation

At its core is the ThreeFold Grid, a global network of independently operated nodes. These nodes are run by “farmers,” aka individuals and organizations that contribute resources and are rewarded for making reliable resources available. Unlike hyperscalers, there is no central owner controlling pricing, access, or usage. Anyone can contribute hardware, anyone can consume capacity.

From a technical perspective, the grid offers the primitives developers need to run modern workloads: Linux VMs, private networking, IPv4/IPv6 routing, and the ability to deploy and manage infrastructure.

A key challenge in decentralized hosting has always been network access, especially scarce and expensive IPv4 addresses. The grid solves this with smart gateway models, such as the Web gateway that turn ThreeFold nodes with public IPv4 addresses into reverse proxies, making any workload accessible from the internet, even if it runs on a node without a public IP.

Farmers can offer gateway services using their own IPv4 addresses, so users can deploy anywhere on the grid without complex networking. This way, small operators can deploy apps without buying lots of expensive IPs.

Gateways can also bridge Mycelium with the traditional web. Mycelium is a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted network built on the ThreeFold base layer. Developers building directly on Mycelium can often skip IPv4 gateways entirely.

🔗The Builders: Turning Infrastructure into Products

Above the raw grid sits a growing layer of builders and companies who package its primitives into usable, commercial-grade products.

As concrete examples, we have YourData Network, a seller of hardware and software, and Shiloh Code, experts in privacy and managed services, that both leverage the grid in their own ways. We also have interesting experiments like this Ukrainian underground radio which can safely run using the Mycelium network without worrying about centralized censorship.

Independent developers are also using the grid to offer hosting and app gateways. A recent project showed that a single person could set up a reliable front door for many apps in just a few evenings – something that would normally require a lot more time and expensive infrastructure. This gateway experiment helps work around the current limits of decentralized hosting, such as IPv4 scarcity and the fact that many nodes run in residential settings without direct inbound access.

Each of these efforts turns the raw ThreeFold Grid into accessible, commercial-grade services, without the specific need of a central rollout.

This builder layer is critical and serves a clear purpose: by abstracting away the complexity of the grid, it makes it possible for end-users to access apps and services running on the grid through easy to use builders’ products.

🔗The Users: Plugging Into Decentralization

At the top of the stack are the end users, people and small teams who want to use products without running servers themselves. Thanks to the builder layer, there are already products and services offered on the internet that run on the grid, making it possible to benefit from a decentralized backbone without managing the infrastructure.

They do not need to know how the network works. They simply use products like a hosted drive, a secure gateway or a custom web service that runs on a decentralized backbone. For them it feels as easy as a normal cloud, but without lock-in, tracking or sudden price changes.

🔗Why This Matters Now

This is no longer just a vision. It’s a functioning ecosystem where people are building and deploying. The technology is ready for production. Compute, storage and networking primitives are live, open source and easy to automate with modern tools.

If you’re a developer or small company wanting to launch a product in a secure, decentralized environment, this is it. Here is what you should do:

• Explore the ThreeFold Grid
• Read through our manual
• Join the forum

The future of the internet isn’t coming – it’s already running. ThreeFold is ready for adoption.

The world is standing at the edge of a technological revolution. Quantum computing, once confined to theoretical discussions in labs, has begun breaking into reality. With advancements like Google Willow and the race towards more powerful machines, quantum computers are an approaching storm, and most of us are not even close to being ready.

🔗The Quantum Threat to Security

For decades, the bedrock of digital trust has been cryptography. Public-key encryption (RSA, ECC), digital signatures, and hashing algorithms are what secure our bank accounts, blockchain transactions, confidential files, and online identities.

But here’s the problem: quantum computers are tailor-made to break these very defenses. Shor’s algorithm allows quantum systems to factor large numbers and break asymmetric encryption at a speed classical computers could never match. Once a quantum machine with sufficient qubits (the basic unit of information used to encode data in quantum computing) and error correction is operational, today’s standard cryptography becomes obsolete.

This danger unfolds in multiple ways:

• Harvest-now, decrypt-later: Encrypted data stolen today can be stored and easily decrypted by quantum machines in the future.
• Compromised blockchains: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies are secured by vulnerable cryptography. A sufficiently advanced quantum computer could forge transactions or drain wallets.
• Broken trust in communications: VPNs, HTTPS, and secure messaging would be exposed, jeopardizing global internet security.
• Critical infrastructure risk: Power grids, defense systems, and financial networks could all be destabilized by quantum attacks.

In short, quantum computing threatens the very assumption of “safety” on which the digital world has been built.

For businesses, governments, and individuals alike, this presents both unparalleled opportunity and unprecedented danger.

🔗Why Existing Systems Can’t Adapt Quickly

Crypto networks, cloud providers, and enterprises face a brutal truth. It is absolutely critical for them to get quantum-safe.

For blockchains, transitioning means changing the very essence of their algorithms, requiring contentious hard forks that could split communities and collapse valuations.

For cloud storage providers, petabytes of vulnerable data are already locked in centralized infrastructures, making retrofitting costly and slow.

For governments and enterprises, complacency is the biggest risk, assuming quantum is “decades away” when in reality, technological breakthroughs are accelerating faster than anyone expected.

What’s needed isn’t retrofitting. It’s rethinking.

🔗Enter ThreeFold’s Quantum Safe Storage (QSS)

Zero-OS provides several core storage primitives like disks, volumes, and 0-DB. Quantum Safe Storage is constructed on top of these primitives, adding the encryption, encoding, and dispersion mechanisms that deliver a storage layer that is unbreakable, sovereign, and efficient.

QSS is the productized form of Zero-OS storage, designed specifically for the quantum age. QSS packages its core advantages into a clear value proposition:

• Quantum-Resistant Security: Mathematically encoded fragments and post-quantum cryptography protect against future quantum attacks.
• Immutable & Append-Only: Data can’t be altered or erased, ensuring integrity forever.
• Self-Healing: Automatic detection and reconstruction of lost or corrupted fragments.
• Sovereign & Compliant: Data placement can be controlled geographically for governance and compliance.
• Efficient: Achieves redundancy with only ~20% overhead, compared to 400%+ for replication systems.

🔗The QSS Storage Stack

The storage stack is made up of three core layers:

• ZDBFS (Zero-DB FS): A filesystem abstraction layer that makes the system accessible to applications, developers, and end-users.
• ZSTOR (Zero-Stor): The encoding, encryption, and distribution engine that applies error-correcting codes and disperses fragments.
• ZDB (Zero-DB): The append-only, immutable storage daemon that directly interfaces with physical drives.

🔗#1 ZDBFS (Zero-DB FS)

At the surface, Zero-OS offers the ZBDFS. In this layer, users and applications can interact with each other. To the user, ZBDFS feels like a familiar mounted filesystem. Beneath the surface, every action taken is translated into operations that the deeper architecture understands.

When applications interact with ZDBFS, it passes those instructions down to ZSTOR, which performs the real work of encoding, encryption, and dispersal. On retrieval, ZBDFS orchestrates the reverse process, seamlessly reconstructing files from distributed fragments.

The filesystem itself is robust at scale:

• It can hold petabytes of data
• Manage up to two million files per instance
• Transfer at speeds of 100 MB/s
• It is optimized for larger objects.

Metadata is redundantly maintained with configurable consistency, typically within a fifteen-minute window, ensuring durability without compromise.

🔗#2 Zero-Stor (ZSTOR)

In ZSTOR, raw input becomes mathematically encoded resilience. When data enters ZSTOR it goes through the following stages:

• The data is compressed to conserve space, then encrypted with user-defined keys
• Forward error correction transforms it into fragments redundant yet efficient equations that can survive node failures without loss.
• These fragments are distributed across multiple Zero-DB backends, with metadata carefully managed to map locations, redundancy, and integrity.

ZSTOR also watches over data. A built-in monitoring layer continuously checks the health of every connected device, automatically rebuilding missing fragments if one goes dark. ZSTOR can even synchronize across clusters in real time, ensuring redundancy and failover across geographies.

🔗#3 Zero-DB (ZDB)

Unlike conventional storage engines, ZDB is designed for simplicity. It is append-only by default. New data is added sequentially, references update to the latest version, and old data remains as history. Mutation or deletion requires a compaction process, which is possible but not part of normal operation.

ZDB is a general-purpose data store. It can hold entire unencrypted objects or the fragmented shards used by ZBDFS, and the engine itself remains indifferent to the content.

🔗Scalability in QSS

QSS is built to scale outward, not upward. Each use case runs on its own dedicated instance of ZBDFS and ZSTOR, which connect to a constellation of ZDBs spread across the grid. A typical configuration uses around twenty or more, but the exact number is configurable by the user.

These components can be distributed across geographies, giving the system reach without sacrificing integrity.

There is no ceiling here. The architecture can support an unlimited number of ZBDFS and ZSTOR instances, each operating independently yet harmoniously. Since data is always processed and consumed at the place of its creation, latency is minimized and sovereignty preserved.

The result is a storage fabric that grows horizontally, node by node, instead of demanding ever more powerful centralized machines.

🔗The Maths Behind QSS

Replication is the crutch of conventional storage. QSS leaves it behind. A file, once ingested, is broken into sixteen fragments. From those fragments, twenty equations are born. Any sixteen of those equations can rebuild the whole. Four nodes may vanish from the network, and the data remains untouched, its integrity intact.

Where traditional systems bloat themselves with 400% overhead just to promise redundancy, QSS achieves it with only 20%.

Example Implementation

Imagine a piece of data split into three fragments with values:

• a = 1
• b = 2
• c = 3

Instead of storing these fragments directly, the system encodes them as equations:

• a + b + c = 6
• c − b − a = 0
• b − c + a = 0
• 2b + a − c = 2
• 5c − b − a = 12
• …and more.

At first glance this looks like overkill: why so many equations for just three unknowns?

Here’s the math behind it:

In a system with three variables (a, b, c), only three linearly independent equations are needed to uniquely recover them.

Any set of more than three equations will be linearly dependent—they don’t add new information but can be expressed as combinations of the others.

From a storage perspective, that means only three equations are strictly necessary.

So why generate extra equations? For resilience. If some equations are lost or corrupted, the system can still pick any valid set of three independent ones and reconstruct the original fragments. This redundancy ensures the data remains recoverable even under failure.

In production, the model scales. A typical configuration splits each object into sixteen fragments, then produces twenty equations, each stored on a separate device. To rebuild the data, only sixteen of the twenty are required. The system can lose four entire nodes and still recover the file without corruption.

This mathematical method achieves redundancy with just 20% overhead, compared to the 400% overhead demanded by traditional replication systems.

🔗Deploy Quantum Safe Storage

The Quantum Daemon is designed to manage all aspects of QSS that don’t fit neatly into the roles of the core components. Its goal is to simplify deployment, operation, and recovery of QSS into a single binary with a single config file.

🔗Responsibilities

The daemon takes care of:

• Backend deployment: Initial deployment of backend zdbs and replacement of failed backends during operation.
• Service management: Installation of all required binaries and creation of system services (supports both systemd and zinit).
• Event handling: Processing hook events from zdb (replacing legacy shell scripts).
• Data integrity: Running checks and retries for failed uploads.
• Config management: Providing a single central config file for end users (QSS component configs and CLI args are generated automatically).
• Recovery: Automated restoration of QSS onto a new machine in case of frontend failure.
• Simplified operation: One binary and one config file can bring up the whole system.

🔗Usage

A subset of functionality is already implemented, with heavy changes expected as the project evolves. Today, QSS can already be deployed with quantumd using either local or remote backends.

• Local backends are useful for testing, and can be spun up quickly with a single command.
• Remote backends are used for real deployments, requiring a TFChain account and configuration details.
• Daemon mode handles retries, hooks, and caching in the background once set up.

For step-by-step installation and deployment instructions, see the official deployment guide.

🔗Comparing QSS With Traditional Storage Solutions

Here is a comparison between QSS and traditional storage to show how it outperforms conventional systems.

🔗In Closing

ZDBFS, ZSTOR, and ZDB form a storage stack that balances performance, sovereignty, and quantum resistance. Whether deployed for simple file storage, global applications, or blockchain-grade data integrity, QSS empowers organizations, developers, and individuals alike to move beyond the vulnerabilities of conventional storage and embrace a future where security, resilience, and sovereignty go hand in hand.

At the core of this design is Zero OS, an autonomous, minimalist operating system purpose-built to deliver compute, storage, and network primitives without relying on centralized infrastructure, traditional sysadmin practices, or hyperscaler capital.

Zero OS has been specifically designed to ensure that:

• A high level of computer expertise is typically not required to set up a node.
• There is virtually zero maintenance after initial setup. All updates happen automatically.
• Recovery from power or network loss happens without human intervention.

🔗What is Zero OS?

Zero OS is a stateless, bare-metal runtime environment, employing a minimalist design built from scratch around the Linux kernel. It exposes a tightly scoped set of primitives for compute, storage, and networking.

• Headless by Design: Runs entirely autonomously after boot. There’s no need for user intervention post-deployment.
• Ephemeral & Immutable: The root filesystem is read-only, and all system behavior is stateless and declarative.
• Ledger-Driven Provisioning: Nodes listen to a blockchain-based reservation system and respond by deploying the workloads described in those reservations.

It has no package manager, no local user accounts, no shell access, and no remote management via SSH. This drastically reduces the attack surface and operational complexity.

The OS acts as a waypoint, converting instructions stored on a distributed ledger into real-world compute deployments.

🔗Composable Primitives

Instead of exposing bloated APIs or fully fledged orchestration platforms, Zero OS provides a narrow but composable set of system primitives:

These primitives can be composed by developers or workload orchestrators (like ThreeFold Labs or TF Grid SDKs) into more complex services, such as Kubernetes clusters, storage grids, VPNs, or decentralized databases, all without a central coordinator.

🔗Programmatic Trust via Blockchain Coordination

Instead of relying on centralized control systems like AWS Control Tower or Google Cloud IAM, Zero OS nodes operate through a decentralized model driven by TFChain and peer-to-peer communication.

Each node is associated with a Twin ID, a unique digital identity stored on TFChain. When a user wants to deploy a workload (like a VM or database), they submit a reservation smart contract to TFChain. This contract includes a cryptographic signature from the user’s Twin and a hash of the workload deployment.

Here’s how it works:

• The blockchain confirms billing authorization and verifies the hash of the deployment. This creates an auditable, tamper-proof record.
• The full deployment instructions (including specs like CPU, memory, storage, and network) are transmitted off-chain via RMB (Remote Message Bus), end-to-end encrypted, from the user to the node.
• The node monitors TFChain for reservations tied to its Twin ID, verifies the signature and hash, and then automatically provisions the workload. No human intervention needed.

This setup ensures:

• Auditable Infrastructure: Every change is logged on-chain.
• Trustless Automation: No need for sysadmins or manual approval.
• Sovereign Ownership: Each workload is cryptographically linked to its creator.
• Efficiency: By transmitting heavy deployment data off-chain via RMB, blockchain usage is minimized, reducing on-chain storage and compute load.

Just like Ethereum smart contracts execute code, ThreeFold nodes execute real-world workloads. Driven by a hybrid architecture that blends blockchain trust with encrypted peer-to-peer efficiency.

🔗Grid Networks for Safe Testing and Rollouts

Zero OS runs across several different network environments, each designed for a specific stage in the development and deployment process. This setup helps the system evolve safely without risking the stability of the live grid.

Here’s how the networks work:

This tiered model makes sure that:

• New features are tested step by step
• Production remains stable and secure
• Developers can safely build and improve the system without risk to users.

🔗True Sovereignty at the System Level

ThreeFold, through Zero OS and the TF Grid, decentralizes the cloud and rebuilds it from the ground up, with sovereignty, automation, and composability at its core.

Zero OS isn’t just an operating system. It’s a self-operating system.

And in a time when data, identity, and computational infrastructure are geopolitical battlegrounds, that changes everything.

🔗What Does it Enable?

Think about this:

• A school in Uganda can run its own local cloud with no data ever leaving its premises.
• A nation-state can build a national cloud grid without relying on a centralized provider.
• A developer collective can launch resilient apps that survive even if core internet services go down.

This is infrastructure-native sovereignty. Not just ownership of software, but autonomy over the full lifecycle: deployment, operation, upgrade, and recovery.

With Zero OS and the ThreeFold Grid, you move from dependency to autonomy.

That’s what makes ThreeFold truly sovereign tech.
Not just infrastructure. Not just decentralization.
But total autonomy, by design.

The future is self-owned, self-operated, and borderless.

Whether you’re an individual, an enterprise, or a grassroots community, the tools to build your own cloud, on your own terms, are finally here.

Start building sovereignty today.

Explore how Zero OS and the ThreeFold Grid can power your next step.

🔗A Different Internet Is Possible

We need to restore the internet to its original intent,” says Kristof De Spiegeleer, founder of ThreeFold, in a recent interview at ETHDenver. “It was much more peer-to-peer. People could express whatever they wanted. We were no longer products. That’s what we wanted to bring back.

Kristof’s perspective isn’t nostalgic. At ThreeFold, some of our team has been building internet infrastructure since the early days, when the web still felt like a community garden rather than a corporate mall. In more recent years, we have been radically reimagining the plumbing of the web. And we’re doing it from the ground up.

🔗From CERN to Surveillance Capitalism

To understand what’s at stake, it helps to go back to the beginning.

The first ever website, info.cern.ch, was hosted on a NeXT computer in a physics lab in Switzerland. The web was conceived as a universal publishing system for scientists. It used open standards, interoperable protocols, and encouraged contribution. There were no paywalls. No targeted ads. No “walled gardens.”

All that changed in the 2000s. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others turned the web into a data-mining operation.

In exchange for “free” services, users unknowingly gave up control over their digital selves. What started as a peer-to-peer web became a hub-and-spoke model, where all roads led through Silicon Valley.

Today, more than 80% of online content is machine-generated. Most of the internet’s infrastructure is owned by a few centralized companies. Many countries don’t even control their own digital backbones.

This was not at all the vision that the early pioneers had.

Tim Berners-Lee:

“The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy.”

Marc Andreessen (Netscape co-founder):

“We thought we were building a publishing platform. Instead, we built the rails for an entirely new economy.”

Jaron Lanier (early VR pioneer and digital ethicist):

“The original idea of the Internet was that it would decentralize power… Now it’s become the opposite.”

🔗Rebuilding the Plumbing

This is where ThreeFold comes in as a decentralized, peer-owned infrastructure layer. Kristof explains it plainly: “We need storage, we need compute, we need GPUs, and we need to connect these things outside of the current web monopolies.”

ThreeFold makes it simple for anyone to contribute to this new internet by running a node. Whether you’re a developer, a farmer, or just someone with an unused computer, you can dedicate a machine to the ThreeFold Grid and become part of a growing decentralized network.

🔗More Than Decentralization

Attempts to “decentralize the web” are nothing new. But most failed because they tried to rebuild the application layer without fixing the foundation. ThreeFold flips that script. It starts with the physical hardware, real nodes owned by real people, and builds upward.

Its architecture is designed for resilience. It doesn’t rely on AWS or Google Cloud. It doesn’t store your data in one vulnerable place. It doesn’t treat you like a product.

And perhaps most importantly, it invites participation. Anyone can build a node, join the network, and help create something bigger than themselves.

🔗Back to the Future?

What ThreeFold is essentially doing is reclamation.

We are reclaiming the peer-to-peer ethos of the early internet.

We are reclaiming the right to compute, connect, and create without gatekeepers.

We are reclaiming agency in a digital world that’s increasingly extractive.

As Kristof puts it: “No is simply not an option. This will be done.”

For those who still believe the internet can be more than a marketplace of user data, for those who remember what it was meant to be, ThreeFold might just be the future we were promised.

And this time, we all get to build it.