TEA Talks: TEA Project Differences With Competitors
In a recent TEA Talk, founder Kevin Zhang talks about the meaning of the term “serverless” as it relates to our infrastructure. Amazon has their own version of serverless (called Lambda), but in TEA Project, the meaning is different. The number of actual hosting nodes for any particular TApp will fluctuate according to a variety of factors including profitability of hosting the TApp. In the TEA Project ecosystem, no miner is required to host any app. The miners choose to host apps out of their own free will and according to how much economic benefit they can derive. Kevin explains more here:
Besides competing with centralized cloud providers, the TEA Project is also competing with other Web3 infrastructure projects.
One of the major differences we have with competitors is the use of trusted hardware. By using TPM hardware security modules that adhere to the TCG standard, we allow miners to use low-cost Raspberry Pi machines to mine on our network. This is in contrast to competitors who have taken a different approach to dealing with encryption.
• Some competitors leave everything encrypted, unlike the TEA Project which can leverage TPM chips to decrypt code and data within protected enclaves. The cost of leaving everything encrypted is that these projects must require datacenter-level hardware for their miners. The resource requirements to become a miner on these competing blockchain projects introduces a level of centralization to their infrastructure as becoming a miner is out of the reach of most common users.
• Other competitors opt to use Intel’s SGX technology as the basis of their trusted enclaves. The issue is that not only do you have a centralized decision making entity for your security chip, SGX technology is only available for datacenter CPUs. We run into a similar centralization concern where only deep-pocketed miners can afford the hardware to run a node.
You can read more about the TEA Project’s use of trusted hardware in the following article:
Here our founder Kevin talk about the hardware differences with other competitors in the following TEA Talk video:
