Overview
What is Fluence
Fluence is a decentralized serverless platform & computing marketplace powered by blockchain economics. Fluence is a global, permissionless, scalable, and secure alternative to centralized cloud computing platforms.
Using Fluence, developers build and deploy applications to a network of compute providers, where providers can range from professional data centers to home computers. Providers compete on price and performance and, to be paid and earn rewards, they constantly prove that they are serving applications.
Fluence is powered by a cryptographic token which is used by providers as collateral for participation and as a monetary incentive. Providers earn both the Fluence token and payment (usually stablecoin) for serving applications.
For Developers
Developers can use Fluence to build and deploy applications, backends, APIs, and other digital services. Fluence’s serverless platform provides a developer experience similar to the traditional serverless cloud but additionally allows developers to manage an application’s execution over the distributed network; choose providers and switch them at will.
Unlike on cloud platforms, when using Fluence, developers may verify that their applications are served as intended and computations executed correctly by checking proofs posted by providers on-chain.
Fluence integrates both Web2 and Web3 data storage and management platforms to plug data inputs and outputs for application execution. While Fluence isn’t designed for large scale data persistence, it perfectly fits for data caching, indexing, processing, and querying.
| Fluence Component | Web 2 Analogy | |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Functions | Marine | AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions |
| Distributed Workflows | Aqua | AWS Step functions, Google Workflows |
| Cloud services | Aqua libs | Route53, ELB, Consul |
| Data services | Subnets of Ethereum, IPFS, Filecoin, Arweave, Ceramic | S3, RDS, DynamoDB, MongoDB |
For Compute Providers
Compute providers earn rewards for offering their capacity for rent on the marketplace.
Providers can offer for rent any device connected to a network including a professional rig or data center or even a personal computing device (even a laptop or raspberry pi). The Fluence protocol rewards providers only for useful work: serving customers applications and contributing to improving network performance and latency.
It is easy to become a provider; providers are not required to establish complex setups for fault tolerance. Instead, reliability is provided by the protocol. Performance though depends on the provider's hardware and internet connection, so professional server hardware would most likely be favored by customers in most cases.
Providers also don’t need to specifically advertise their services as the marketplace connects them to customers interested in their services.
For DAO/Communities
Fluence enables the infrastructure needed to host applications governed by DAOs. Typical applications living in the cloud are unmanageable by digital organizations because they depend on centralized admin accounts and fiat payments.
Building on Fluence, DAOs can deploy their applications to the decentralized network, pay for hosting and compute services in crypto, or even restrict hosting to only providers run by the DAO community members and can be rewarded in the native DAO token.