🔗AI Sovereignty vs Data Feudalism

Why do we use the term “feudalism” in this context? Back in the day, landlords owned acres of land and serfs worked it in exchange for access and protection. We have a similar scenario going on now with data. Big Tech are the data lords” and we are the serfs. Their servers are the new estates of the digital world, housing the information, compute, and algorithms that shape how billions of people interact online. The AI agents will be running on these exact servers.

Each interaction, prompt, and data trace flows through their infrastructure. That means your data, your ideas, and even the patterns of how you think are all stored, processed, and monetized in someone else’s data center.

You never truly “own” the agent. You’re simply renting access to it through an API. The model weights, inference hardware, and even your usage logs remain locked behind corporate firewalls.

The question is no longer whether AI agents will act on your behalf, but who it ultimately serves. If intelligence remains centralized, it will reinforce old hierarchies of control.

So, what is the solution here? How do we introduce data privacy and sovereignty in our AI Agents?

🔗Decentralized Infrastructure Changes that Equation

When you run AI agents on a distributed grid like ThreeFold, you own the means of computation. Your data, memory, and logic stay under your control. You decide where your agent runs, how it stores information, and who can access it.

In fact, ThreeFold’s ultimate vision for the internet’s evolution is the “Sovereign Agentic Cloud,” a distributed internet built for privacy, autonomy, and collaboration. A key component of this new internet is the “Agent Layer,” the cognitive and operational core of the whole ecosystem.. In this layer, every person will have one or more Personal Agents that act as digital counterparts, managing communication, workflows, and decisions while keeping personal and organizational data fully under control.

Each Personal Agent can coordinate with Worker Agents that handle specific tasks like research, coding, analysis, or transactions. They run inside secure, encrypted environments built on semantic search, private active memory, and zero-knowledge storage.

Plus, the Agent Layer will be built on the concept of Augmented Collective Intelligence (ACI). In this model, each agent learns locally, contributes globally, and respects the sovereignty of its user. There is no surveillance, no hidden monetization, and no black-box decision-making. The agents evolve with the group and reflect their values and protect their privacy.

🔗A New Internet Built on Sovereignty

The AI Agent era doesn’t have to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can build an internet where intelligence serves people, not platforms. Where privacy is built into the foundation, not added as an afterthought. The Sovereign Agentic Cloud offers a path toward that reality. An ecosystem where users own their data, control their agents, and interact in a truly private and autonomous digital world.

For more information, check out our docs.

🔗The Root Problem: Centralization Happens at the Hardware Layer

As we have mentioned above, most decentralized cloud solutions still depend on Linux machines, humans, dockets, and data centers. Even when the orchestration logic is decentralized, the servers themselves rarely are.

In fact, many node operators for these networks simply rent virtual private server (VPS) instances from AWS, Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean, or other centralized cloud providers and run their “decentralized” workloads there. This may spread workloads across many providers, but it does not solve the core issue.

It’s quite simple. If the underlying hardware is centralized, the cloud is centralized.

Let’s see how Mycelium fixes this problem.

🔗The Mycelium Approach

Mycelium’s design begins at the physical layer. Every node in the Mycelium network is a machine that boots directly into Zero-OS, a lightweight, autonomous operating system built by ThreeFold specifically for running distributed compute. As such:

• There is no traditional Linux environment underneath.
• There are no hypervisors, VMs, or container engines to maintain.
• There is nothing for the operator to configure or update.

🔗Self-Running Compute

Zero-OS does not require the manual administration that other systems require. It handles networking, updates, self-healing, and resource allocation automatically, removing the entire class of DevOps complexity from the equation.

On the other hand, running a node on other decentralized clouds requires the skill set of a sysadmin: maintaining Linux, managing Docker or Kubernetes, configuring networking, and monitoring uptime.

To run a ThreeFold, you just need to:

• Plug it in
• Connect it to a router.

…and that’s it.

The node joins the network and maintains itself. Many of our node operators have reported that in the last four years, they have never once needed to reboot their node manually.

In the extremely rare case of an update hanging, briefly interrupting power (aka “switch off then then switch it on”) is enough to reset it. That is the full extent of node maintenance for the overwhelming majority of deployments.

🔗Deploy Compute Anywhere

Our main vision with Mycelium is to create a solution so simple and straightforward that anybody can deploy and run it. Since the nodes require no professional expertise, Mycelium can reach geographies, demographics, and physical environments no other decentralized cloud can touch.

The skill floor is roughly equivalent to “can plug in a computer.”

🔗Nodes Can Be More Responsible

Some nodes can also run as gateways, accepting inbound public connections and routing them into the network. This requires only basic networking setup and offers higher earnings, but it does not change how the node operates. Zero-OS still runs autonomously. The gateway role simply enables an additional function.

This requires a bit of networking setup, such as port forwarding, static IP configuration, etc. Even so, the skill level required is minimal compared to administering a Kubernetes cluster or maintaining container infrastructure.

🔗Easy Physical Scalability

Clusters of nodes can be deployed at physical scale, If a piece of hardware fails, the system keeps running with reduced capacity, and a low-skill technician can replace parts infrequently. In many cases, redundancy means even that isn’t necessary.

This makes Mycelium the only decentralized cloud model that is operationally viable outside of professionally staffed data centers.

🔗Mycelium’s X-Factor

Mycelium isn’t competing with container networks. We are offering an entirely different solution. A compute fabric that can run itself, anywhere in the world.

This is decentralization where it actually matters, at the root of the stack, inside the physical machines that power the cloud.

By taking this approach, we are democratizing access to critical infrastructure. Compute shouldn’t belong only to people with technical expertise, data centers, or privileged geographies. It should be available to anyone who can plug in a device.

If we can make global compute as simple as connecting a cable, then we will succeed in our mission of shifting digital power from centralized providers back to individuals and communities everywhere.

If you want to experience this shift yourself, join the Mycelium Network today. Install Mycelium, power up a node, and start running your own infrastructure.

However, we have seen this movie before. Last month, we saw websites going down due to a global AWS outage.

This really begs the question. How resilient is the world wide web, if it is constantly dependent on centralized service providers?

Let’s understand what exactly happened.

🔗The Update That Broke The Internet

Cloudflare’s global outage wasn’t caused by DNS issues, an attack, or any systemic failure across the internet.

Believe it or not, it just came down to a single configuration file used for bot mitigation. The file in question is automatically generated from live threat-intelligence feeds. It’s meant to update continuously to block bots, abusive traffic, and malicious patterns. At some point before the outage, its size expanded far beyond what the underlying software was built to tolerate.

Under normal circumstances the system reloads this file without incident. However, this time, the oversized file hit a latent bug inside Cloudflare’s bot-management engine, causing it to crash repeatedly.

Now, since this component sits in the request path for most Cloudflare products, its failure caused widespread 500 errors across the network.

Once that service collapsed, the effects rippled through Cloudflare’s global infrastructure. Websites depending on Cloudflare’s CDN, WAF, and bot filtering began failing almost simultaneously. Users saw generic “500 errors,” and even Cloudflare’s own dashboard and API became inaccessible.

Major platforms like ChatGPT, X, Shopify, Uber, Spotify, Indeed, Claude, Perplexity, Canva, NJ Transit’s digital systems, and countless others were unreachable for hours simply because they are all fronted by Cloudflare’s global network.

Eventually, a fix was rolled out by late morning Eastern Time. Engineers patched the underlying issue, reverted the problematic configuration, and gradually restored dependent systems.

🔗What Is the Solution?

To his credit, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht admitted that the company “failed” its customers. However, an apology isn’t enough when a system that is currently responsible for the global trillion dollar economy and other critical services is seemingly so fragile that it can’t handle a single company’s update.

Cloudflare “fixed” the issue. But did they actually heal the wound or put a flimsy little band aid? History tells us that it is likely the latter.

We saw the same pattern with AWS’s regional DNS failure, Microsoft’s global Azure collapse, and CrowdStrike’s faulty update that halted hospitals and grounded planes. Quick patches are applied, but the core fragility remains untouched.

This isn’t a Cloudflare problem.

It’s an internet architecture problem.

And that’s where alternatives must be taken seriously.

Fixing configuration files is not the solution. Rebuilding the foundation is.

🔗The ThreeFold Alternative: A Different Kind of Internet

Instead of patching over the centralization crisis, ThreeFold rebuilds the foundation entirely.

Instead of a few hyperscale providers powering the world, ThreeFold utilizes thousands of independent capacity providers to contribute compute, storage, and bandwidth to a unified, autonomous grid. Its Sovereign Agentic Cloud is designed around decentralization, autonomy, and distribution. The exact qualities today’s internet has lost.

ThreeFold works across three layers:

• The Cloud: A decentralized, Kubernetes-compatible cloud running on independent capacity providers instead of hyperscale data centers.
• The Network: A peer-to-peer mesh with built-in VPN, DNS, CDN, and gateways, creating a self-healing connectivity fabric.
• The Agents: Autonomous, user-owned digital agents running on decentralized compute, not Big Tech servers.

Together, these create an internet that grows more resilient as it expands.

🔗Why This Actually Fixes the Problem

ThreeFold’s solution represents a return to that original vision of the internet. A decentralized, sovereign, human-aligned internet that isn’t vulnerable to the failure of one company, one region, or one configuration file. As ThreeFold co-founder Florian Fournier puts it:

“The internet was meant to be a network of peers, open, resilient, and free. Over time, it became a network of platforms.”

ThreeFold’s work is aimed at rebuilding the web from the ground up. This is not a band aid. Our solution dares to restructure what is broken. And In a world where a single file update can cripple platforms worth billions, it’s clear that this is the direction the internet should have taken all along.

Do you want to join our mission? Start here and stay tuned.

🔗The Cracks in the Cloud

The irony of modern computing is that we’ve built the most advanced infrastructure in human history, yet it’s still held together by a handful of companies. When one of them sneezes, the entire web stumbles.

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp, has been one of the loudest critics of this model. In 2023, his team made headlines by leaving both AWS and Google Cloud, migrating all their apps, Basecamp, HEY, and others. onto their own hardware. According to him, they are projected to save $10M in over five years.

“The cloud was supposed to be cheaper, faster, and easier,” DHH wrote. “But the savings never materialized, and the team never shrunk.”

There was also another reason behind this move. For DHH, the decision wasn’t just financial. He argues that the modern internet has strayed far from its original design, a distributed network meant to survive even if one node went down. Instead, we’ve rebuilt it around a handful of hyperscale data centers like AWS’s US-East-1, turning the web into a system where a single outage can take out a third of global traffic.

Ultimately, his critique is simple. The cloud was sold as faster, easier, and cheaper, yet in practice it’s become more complex, more expensive, and dangerously centralized. AWS, once seen as a democratizer, now runs at nearly 40% margins, proof that the economies of scale no longer benefit users, only the providers.

And…he is right. For the most part. Centralization does indeed breed dependence. However, his approach is easier said than done.

Not every company can afford to buy, house, and maintain its own servers across multiple continents. Wasn’t that the whole point of the cloud in the first place? For most organizations, the choice still feels binary: go cloud or go home.

🔗Enter ThreeFold’s Solution

At ThreeFold, we believe the internet should belong to everyone, not a handful of corporations. At the center of this vision is the ThreeFold Grid, a decentralized infrastructure layer designed to make the internet more autonomous, efficient, and resilient. Each node on the Grid provides compute, storage, and network capacity through a peer-to-peer architecture. These nodes, operated by independent farmers, form the backbone of the network.

Anyone can access this capacity directly, no intermediaries, no corporate gatekeepers. The result is a self-healing data, network, and cloud layer that keeps running even when parts of it fail.

On top of this infrastructure runs the ThreeFold Cloud, a 100% Kubernetes-compatible decentralized cloud built on the global Grid. It allows developers to deploy applications anywhere in the world using familiar workflows, without renting space from Amazon or Google.

🔗The Three Paths Ahead

So, as a company today, you really have three paths in front of you:

• Centralized Cloud: You rent capacity from service providers, and when they go down, so do you.
• Run Your Own Servers: What DHH’s Basecamp chose. You buy and maintain physical hardware.
• Decentralized Cloud: Shared, decentralized infrastructure that combines the resilience of self-hosting with the accessibility of the cloud. (In this article we specifically focus on ThreeFold.)

As we see it, the answer isn’t to abandon the cloud, but to decentralize it, to distribute its power, its risks, and its rewards.

The choice to consume or provide capacity doesn’t have to be binary either. ThreeFold Grid users who want to install their own nodes can do so at any time, both to optimize their own use cases and earn additional revenue from spare capacity.

The ThreeFold Grid shows that a different kind of internet is not only possible, it’s already working. The future doesn’t belong to data centers. It belongs to people.

The next step is simple. Become part of it.

Take in the latest on the next phase of ThreeFold here.

🔗The Cloud

The Cloud forms the foundation, a 100% Kubernetes-compatible compute and storage layer that operates as a global, distributed cloud.

Built on top of the ThreeFold Grid, it draws from independent capacity providers around the world. Each contributes compute, storage, and network resources, forming a resilient, peer-to-peer infrastructure that’s already live today.

This layer makes decentralized Kubernetes real and accessible. Developers can spin up clusters directly across the grid using familiar declarative workflows, autoscaling, monitoring, and logging tools – all without reliance on centralized cloud vendors.

The result is a production-grade environment that offers the usability of conventional clouds combined with the sovereignty, security, and resilience of decentralization. Developers gain the freedom to deploy applications anywhere, anytime, without gatekeepers.

While ThreeFold’s community-driven open-source cloud has been live for years with builders already commercializing its resources, this new Kubernetes-based solution marks a major evolution: simplified, commercial-ready, and purpose-built to host the next generation of autonomous agents. It’s the necessary foundation for the sovereign agentic cloud.

Stay tuned this month for the release of the Kubernetes Cloud.

🔗The Network

The next step extends this foundation into a living, intelligent network layer.

This step introduces a full suite of decentralized network services – including VPN, DNS, CDN, and LLM gateways – all designed to make the underlying grid fully reachable, programmable, and autonomous.

These gateways transform ordinary grid nodes into public-facing endpoints, solving one of the hardest problems in decentralized hosting: achieving global accessibility while providing greater independence from scarce IPv4 addresses and centralized ISPs.

Traffic moves dynamically across the mesh. Every connection is encrypted end-to-end. And instead of relying on fixed routes or central ISPs, the network forms a peer-to-peer overlay that automatically discovers and maintains the most efficient path between nodes.

When a node or connection goes down, the network self-heals, rerouting traffic in real time to maintain uptime. This allows workloads running anywhere on the grid, even on devices without public IPs, to communicate securely and act as if they were hosted in a single, unified data center.

What sets this network apart is not just its autonomy, but its evolutionary behavior. As the grid grows, it adapts, reconfiguring routes, optimizing performance, and expanding reach.

Parts of the network are already operational, with ongoing developments making it ever more powerful, efficient, and resource-rich.

🔗The Agents

The final phase brings the architecture to life: the Agent Layer, the cognitive and operational tier of the Sovereign Agentic Cloud.

Within this layer, every person can have one or more Personal Agents – intelligent digital counterparts that manage tasks, workflows, and communication while maintaining full sovereignty over data and identity.

These personal agents can coordinate networks of “Worker Agents,” each capable of handling specialized functions such as research, coding, analysis, or transactions.

Supporting them is a secure foundation of semantic search, private active memory, and long-term, zero-knowledge storage, allowing agents to learn, reason, and operate within encrypted, self-contained sandboxes.

🔗Agent Layer Evolution: From AGI to ACI

While much of the world is racing toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) – massive centralized systems aiming to replicate human cognition – we’re charting a different course.

Today’s AI giants control nearly all of the compute, data, and infrastructure required to train and deploy large models. This concentration of power brings enormous risks such as surveillance-driven data collection, bias embedded at scale, and energy consumption rivaling entire nations.

ThreeFold’s approach is rooted in Augmented Collective Intelligence (ACI). Not a machine trying to mimic humans, but a system that grows through shared human experience while protecting each individual’s privacy.

There’s no hidden monetization model, no surveillance layer, no opaque black box where your information disappears. Each agent learns locally, contributes globally, and respects the sovereignty of its user. It’s a model of intelligence that grows organically, not hierarchically.

🔗Building The Vision

That is the vision of what we call the Sovereign Agentic Cloud: a fully decentralized ecosystem where the Cloud provides resilient compute and storage, the Network connects nodes into an intelligent, self-healing mesh, and the Agent layer brings autonomous, personal intelligence to life. Together these layers form a self-sovereign foundation for the next generation of digital life.

Development toward this vision is well underway, with the Cloud and Network systems already live and evolving, and agents coming in Q1 2026. Stay tuned via our news channel and chat as the rollout unfolds.

🔗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.