Introduction
NuPeerStack is a project that aims to build decentralized, permission-less and censorship resistant alternative to OpenStack by combining the latest from Blockchain, Distributed Systems and Peer-to-Peer Networking technologies.
Philosophy
Technology Stack
Instead of building from the ground up, at NuPeerStack we decided to accelerate our road to market by utilizing existing technology available on the market today and combining them into unified platform similar to OpenStack on the IaaS and PaaS front; while providing series of SaaS applications on top.
We have chosen Cardano Blockchain for our base layer, and constructed NuPeerStack as a side-chain of it.
Tokenomics
For more details about the tokenomics of NuPeerStack please refer to the Tokenomics page.
Current Landscape
Current landscape of IT Infrastructure and Services can be separated into three major categories, On-Premise, in the Corporate Cloud Providers and Decentralized and Distributed services providers.
We will not go into details of On-Premise IT infrastructure, however it still represented 58% market share in 20201 according to Business Wire.
Current landscape of Cloud Services is largely dominated by several major services providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba, Google, Huawei and others2. These may be consider the established and highly centralized players.
| Company | 2020 Revenue | 2020 Market | 2019 Revenue | 2019 Market Share (%) | 2019-2020 Growth (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | 26,201 | 40.8 | 20,365 | 44.6 | 28.7 |
| Microsoft | 12,658 | 19.7 | 7,950 | 17.4 | 59.2 |
| Alibaba | 6,117 | 9.5 | 4,004 | 8.8 | 52.8 |
| 3,932 | 6.1 | 2,367 | 5.2 | 66.1 | |
| Huawei | 2,672 | 4.2 | 882 | 1.9 | 202.8 |
| Others | 12,706 | 19.8 | 10,115 | 22.1 | 25.6 |
| Total | 64,286 | 100.0 | 45,684 | 100.0 | 40.7 |
Decentralized and Distributed Competition
In addition to established and highly centralized players, there are several disruptors from the Decentralized and Distributed areas, these are however still trying to find their right positioning and although being priced comparatively cheaper to the major cloud players are not being very successful which is caused by both last of aggressive sales tactics oriented at the end customers as well as lack of unified service portfolio.
To name just few projects in the IaaS Data Storage area, we have identified projects in the table below:
| Project | Development Company | Used Blockchain | Payment Token |
|---|---|---|---|
| SIA | Nebulous, Inc. | Bitcoin | SC |
| Storj | Storj Labs, Inc. | Ethereum | STORJ |
| Filecoin | Protocol Labs | Filecoin | FIL |
| IAGON | Iagon AS | Ethereum | IAG |
Technology Stack
Instead of building from the ground up, at NuPeerStack we decided to accelerate our road to market by utilizing existing technology available on the market today and combining them into unified platform similar to OpenStack on the IaaS and PaaS front; while providing series of SaaS applications on top; all of that as a Cardano Side Chain.
Blockchain
Our chosen Blockchain is Cardano due to several factors:
- Ouroboros Proof of Stake family of protocols
- High power efficiency
- Native Fungible and Non-Fungible Assets (Tokens)
- High assurance Smart Contracts
- Milkomeda M1 Side Chain for Solidity Smart Contracts
- Interoperability as initial design requirement
- Built-in Venture Capital Fund — Project Catalyst
IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service
IaaS — Data Storage
IaaS — Networking
IaaS — Computation
General Computation
GPU Accelerated Computation
For GPU Accelerated Computation, we have decided to partner with another Blockchain project, Ergo, which is a GPU minable Extrended UTXO Programable Money Platform founded by one of the former Cardano researchers.
FPGA Computation
PaaS — Platform as a Service
SaaS — Software as a Service
Tokenomics
We have chosen relatively uncommon tokenomics model within the cryptocurrency world, as we have no limited supply, instead our game-theory relies on continuous earning, bonding and slashing of our staking and governance tokens.
Our native token is also not meant to be used as currency for payment as we rather leave that space to more established currencies such as $BTC or $ADA or several stablecoins.
Fungible Tokens
NuPeerStack Fungible Tokens delegating to NuPeerStack Stake Pools receive fungible KYC NuPeerStack tokens.
Non-Fungible Tokens
NuPeerStack Fungible Tokens have several types:
NuPeerStack Fungible Tokens
All NuPeerStack Fungible Tokens are issued as native assets on Cardano mainnet. And NuPeerStack delegators receive fungible KYC NuPeerStack tokens by delegating to NuPeerStack Cardano Stake Pools thru DripDropz.
Types of Fungible Tokens
$IaaS Token
$IaaS tokens are distributed to IaaS Stake Pool delegators as well as few other Stake Pools, such as:
- RV64 - because RV64 is running on RISC-V ISA Open Hardware CPU...
$PaaS Token
$SaaS Token
NuPeerStack Non-Fungible Tokens
Executive Role Tokens
Developer Role Tokens
Hardware Owner Tokens
Organizaton Tokens
NuPeerStack Revenue Streams
NuPeerStack ISPO
NuPeerStack operates three Cardano mainnet stakepools all of which charge 25% fees and minimal fixed fee to their delegators. In return for these fees, delegators have the option to pick-up reslective fungible NuPeerStack Governance and Staking tokens.
Cardano Project Catalyst
NuPeerStack applies for funding thru Cardano Project Catalyst, below you may find a history of submitted proposals:
| Fund # | Proposal Status | IdeaScale Proposal Name & Link to Details | Requested Funding | Voting results | Delivery Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fund 7 | Vote Ongoing | Open-source Catalyst voting app | 75,000.00 USD | Pending | Not-started |
| Fund 7 | Withdrawn | [CRUST] Cardano Node in Rust | 200,000 USD | Not Applicable | In-development |
| Fund 6 | Not Funded | Rust Cardano Networking Crate | 14,000.00 USD | Over budget | In-development |
| Fund 3 | Not Funded | Ouroboros Networking Rust Crate | 7,000.00 USD | Over budget | In-development |
| Fund 2 | Not Funded | Decentralized Cloud Platform | 24,075.00 USD | Over budget | Refinement |
Fund 7
| Funding Status | IdeaScale Proposal Name & Link | Requested Budget | Notes of funding | Delivery Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Not Funded | Open-source Catalyst voting app | 75,000.00 USD | Pending Results |
Open-source Catalyst voting app
[CRUST] Cardano Node in Rust
Fund 6
| Funding Status | IdeaScale Proposal Name & Link | Requested Budget | Notes of funding | Delivery Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Not Funded | Rust Cardano Networking Crate | 14,000.00 USD | Over budget | In-development |
Rust Cardano Networking Crate
Fund 3
| Funding Status | IdeaScale Proposal Name & Link | Requested Budget | Notes of funding | Delivery Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Not Funded | Ouroboros Networking Rust Crate | 7,000.00 USD | Over budget | In-development |
Ouroboros Networking Rust Crate
Fund 2
| Funding Status | IdeaScale Proposal Name & Link | Requested Budget | Notes of funding | Delivery Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Not Funded | Decentralized Cloud Platform | 24,075.00 USD | Over budget | Refinement |
Decentralized Cloud Platform
dCloud using DLT technology and Cardano will empower everyone, individuals and large enterprises alike to provide cloud services.
NuPeerStack DAO Governance Model
NuPeerStack DAO governance leverages a combination of NuPeerStack Fungible Tokens as well as NuPeerStack Non-Fungible Tokens. There are three types of Fungible Tokens associated with NuPeerStack:
Owners of fungible tokens use their voting power to elect holders of pre-defined non-fungible executive roles tokens. Holders of executive role token take timely decisions (in form of a proposal for the DAO to execute certain action) on behalf of the entire community in their respective areas, however, owners of NuPeerStack Fungible Tokens may always vote against any given proposal in reasonable time, depending on the time sensitivity of the respective action being proposed by the holder of executive role token.
Holders of non-fungible executive roles tokens may, or may not be limited in their term, depending on the character of the respective role, however each executive role token may be revoked if it’s holder loses the support of the community.
Each non-fungible executive roles tokens validity is directly tied to the voting power which supports the individual executive role NFT instance.
Exact game-theory mechanics are yet to be researched and defined, however it is already decided, that NuPeerStack Fungible Tokens holders will be able to revoke their support for any given non-fungible executive role token (de-facto elected executive).
If support from community drops below certain threshold new executive will have to be elected and new instance of respective executive role NFT will be issued and given to newly elected representative.
For each executive proposal made by an elected executive representative, based on the proposal classification period of time and different thresholds will be assigned so that the community of NuPeerStack Fungible Tokens owners can vote in favour or against any specific proposal. For certain types of proposals, especially those with legal impacts, agreement of several elected executive representatives may change quorum requirements in either direction, or votes casted by elected executive representatives may have different weighting.
For instance, the Chief Legal Officer’s proposal to settle a lawsuit if supported by 50% of other elected executive representatives may require 90% of the community participating in the vote to vote against the proposal with at least 50% quorum in order for the proposal not to be executed by the respective smart-contract.