TEA Project: Moving from Cloud Computing to Web3
Does TEA Solve Real Needs? Are These Needs Inelastic?
The Need to Decentralize the Cloud Computing Market
In recent years, privacy protection and information censorship of the traditional Internet has become more problematic. The cloud computing network which forms the backbone of the Internet, from servers to data pipes, is controlled by a few big players. The oligopoly behind the current Internet model means that they are the gatekeepers to the content we find online. The power they have to censor (for example, critical news stories) not only impacts the IT industry, but also the entirety of social, cultural and even political institutions. Decentralization is a fundamental solution to this problem.
Is it Necessary to Decentralize?
Centralized Internet and centralized cloud computing are mutually causal. If cloud computing cannot be decentralized, the Internet cannot be decentralized. It would be hard to imagine most of the processing power required of a decentralized peer-to-peer Internet being completed by a few giant cloud computing centers. 5G, edge computing, IoT, etc. are all working hard in order to solve the centralization problem of cloud computing from all different angles.
Need for TEA: Moving From Blockchain Computing to the Development of Web3
Blockchain grew in the opposite direction of the centralized Internet as it was originally created with an ethos of decentralization. The computing power of early blockchain was very limited due to the need for blockchain consensus. Although there have been various improvement schemes allowing blockchain to run faster and handle more applications, it will always be limited by its underlying architecture. Due to the limitations of the two roots of trust (cryptography and consensus algorithms), blockchain will not be able to reach the user experience and computing scale of the Internet any time soon.
Only relying on cryptography and consensus algorithms for decentralized computing is not enough. Fundamental changes must be made to truly achieve the vision of Web3. Our approach is to add a hardware root of trust.
Need for TEA: From the Perspective of Miner FOMO
The price of IPFS’s FIL and CHIA coins tells us that, even if Web3 has not yet arrived, there is real consumer demand driving up their prices. As long as there is an economically sound token distribution plan, this will entice miners to FOMO and greatly boost the project’s value. This method of relying on financial forces to raise resources in advance is a large driving force of technological transformation. In the past, a large number of technological transformations have been promoted this way. Just as the aviation industry and the Internet has benefited from people wanting to get in early, blockchain projects are also benefitting from the same driving force.
The goal of TEA Project is to decentralize the cloud computing market. It shares the same goal as Dfinity’s Internet Computer, but achieves the goal through decentralized and distributed independent miners rather than through large datacenters.
