Why TEA Project is the Future of Web3 Computing

The Evolution of Web Apps to Decentralized Apps

Most people’s first interactions with connected apps was through their web browser. The app might’ve been a social media site or an online store. These apps used technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript to deliver content that was constantly changing. These apps felt like they were alive as their consumer-facing frontends were constantly being fed by new data from their server backends.

But this duality between server backend and client frontend is becoming more and more problematic as these companies gain more power. The following are just a few reasons that the public is becoming less trusting of these centralized app platforms:

• Facebook has been questioned about their algorithm that has been implicated for, among other things, promoting poor mental health among teenagers.
• Numerous companies hosting our data have been hacked, leaking our private data. This causes complications for those affected and underscores how non-transparent many of these companies are regarding how and why they store our personal data.
• Censorship continues to be a problem with centralized apps. If you do something they don’t like even if it doesn’t reach the level of criminal behavior, you could have your access to their app revoked.

The Problem with Ethereum DApps

Ethereum dApps were among the first blockchain apps to gain wide use. Particularly influential in DeFi, Ethereum dApps like Aave, Bancor, Uniswap, and Curve have many billions of dollars worth of crypto locked in their smart contracts. Yet there are some issues preventing Ethereum from being an ideal dApp platform:

• Most Ethereum dApps still rely on centralized hosting and networks (CDNs or Cloudflare) as well as centralized domain name providers to make a suitable frontend for their users. Ethereum smart contracts maintain the computing and app state, but this backend is the only decentralized part of most Ethereum dApp’s tech stack.
• Ethereum’s smart contracts are not fast enough to run rich apps comparable to what’s available currently on the web or in a smartphone app. Layer-2 solutions for Ethereum can help speed up transaction times at a reasonable cost, but an app state could be changing a thousand times in the span of a few seconds. A dApp built on a blockchain like Ethereum couldn’t possibly keep up unless it was a simple app like is common in DeFi.

The TEA Project: an Ideal Space for DApps

The TEA Project offers both a fully decentralized platform for dApps as well a novel two-layer solution to allow dApps to run at full cloud computing speeds. Miners on the TEA network provide the decentralization necessary for the apps running on its platform. The TEA network incentivizes the miners to provide storage (for both customer data and developer code) as well as for using their machines’ computational power.

The TEA Project features two blockchains, and it only allows trusted nodes to transact on its layer-2. The goal of all blockchains is to reach consensus among its nodes, but this is often an expensive process that takes much computing power and time. Every node on the TEA platform has a hardware security module such as a TPM chip. TEA’s layer-1 blockchain only stores the “trust data” and performs basic validation on whether a node is trustable or not. Once it’s considered trustable, the node is allowed on layer-2 where consensus no longer needs to be performed (as all nodes here are trustable). It’s the Proof of Trust data on the layer-1 blockchain that allows the layer-2 nodes to run full speed without needing to check for consensus.

A typical dApp running on the TEA Project is referred to as a TApp and looks like this:

• The front end is hosted on IPFS and not on a centralized web server. Additionally, no domain names are needed in order to access the TApp as anyone can load it as long as they have its CID on IPFS.
• The back end is run on the more powerful nodes of the TEA Project (B CML mining machines). The client can access the TApp through the B CML node closest to them. At that point, the encrypted WebAssembly code of the app is loaded into the mining node’s protected enclave to execute along with any encrypted client data.
• The TApps will also have a database layer, namely OrbitDb based on IPFS. Proof of Time consensus will keep the proper ordering of transactions based on timestamps.

This is just an outline of the TEA Project’s improvements on existing crypto projects as we look to bring rich, full speed decentralized applications to the blockchain.