Why Unigrid is a market disruptor
By: The Unigrid Foundation
Tags: Unigrid, VPN, Storage, Cloud, Blockchain

With this post, I want to discuss the heavily disruptive role that the Unigrid network has the potential to play, analyzing several key data communication and storage market segments within the IT industry. The Unigrid network and the underlying protocol create a situation where several of these market segments either become obsolete or merely completely redundant. We have said it before — the Unigrid network is the next natural step in the evolution of the Internet. In a similar way that VHS, CD and DVD players all became obsolete with the release of online services such as Netflix, YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music — the Unigrid network makes anonymization networks, VPN providers, backup services, storage services and cloud service providers completely obsolete.

So how will Unigrid change the landscape of these market segments? Why do we believe that the network will disrupt these segments so heavily and why would people switch to using the Unigrid network rather than relying on the old and proven providers? We will break it down, segment by segment.

Goodbye backup provides and secondary storage solutions

The Unigrid network is backed by a collection of blockchains that use striping and parity blocks to ensure data integrity and achieve fault tolerance and redundant storage. Gridnodes on the network organize themselves into shard groups, with each individual shard group governing exactly one blockchain.

With a deployed Unigrid network, storage providers and backup services become completely obsolete. The Unigrid network simply creates a situation where these services no longer have a role to play because the network itself already provides these services.

The Unigrid network uses the shard groups to create storage arrays similar to legacy RAID arrays. However, while a normal RAID array consists of a collection of magnetic disks or SSD’s, the Unigrid network relies on collections of shard groups and by extension collections of blockchains. This means that each entry in an array is an individual blockchain. Each entry then either contains data or parity information.

The result is a network where the data you store can never disappear by accident. Because of the fault-tolerance and redundancy, nobody can ever remove your data by force. This creates a situation where there simply is no room for traditional storage solutions or backup providers — the Unigrid network has you covered. Store your data once and only once — it’s there forever.

With the Unigrid network, there is no need to pay for costly VPN providers. Anonymous communication and encryption is an integral part of the network.

Goodbye VPN providers and anonymity networks

The Unigrid network provides anonymous network access not only to the Unigrid network itself but also to the ordinary Internet. The communication layer will be compatible with all your traditional application and allow you to access the Internet completely anonymously. While networks such as TOR (onion routing) can be broken and hacked by deploying enough nodes onto the network, the Unigrid network is more resistant to eavesdropping, as it employs a completely different design with in-memory communication blockchains and shard groups to achieve anonymization.

While TOR uses traditional onion routing, the Unigrid network uses fingerprinting and its underlying communication blockchains to achieve anonymity. Unless you can scan the whole network at the same time, it’s impossible to know who initiated data traffic — nodes and gridnodes forwarding traffic are completely indistinguishable from the node that actually originated the traffic. This is analogous to the Bitcoin network and mined blocks. The Bitcoin network knows which Bitcoin address should be credited for a mined block, but it has no idea of the physical location of the node that originated the block. In the same way, originating nodes on the Unigrid network are hidden by the network.

When the network is completely anonymous there is no longer any purpose for VPN providers to exist. There is also the problem of trust. How do you know that the VPN provider will not give away your personal details? You have only their word. With the Unigrid network you can put your trust into the protocol and its design — there simply is no way for anyone to get your personal data unless you choose to disclose it.

Goodbye cloud service providers

Finally, the Unigrid network and The Unigrid Foundation also intends to address the currently very costly cloud services on the market. This is a huge market that has the potential to be disrupted in a major way when the Unigrid network gains adoption. With network participants providing compute cycles and storage not only from data centres but also from home servers and home connections, the network has the potential to provide similar services at a fraction of the cost. The Unigrid network rewards nodes on the network when they provide these services and the cost of these services relies on the exhaustion level of the network. If there are a lot of free resources, the cost for the end-user goes down. If the network is exhausted and highly loaded with fewer resources available, the cost for the end-user goes up. This is how the network regulates itself and controls how much the gridnodes on the network get rewarded when they provide their services.

The Unigrid network will greatly reduce the cost of cloud services and create an open market where anybody can join and provide their computing resources.

The fact that anybody can join the network and provide their computing resources to it, creates a truly open market that regulates itself and keeps costs for the end-user down to a minimum.

When the Unigrid network can provide the same services as the current cloud providers at a mere fraction of the costs — where will they fit in? Eventually, they will be forced to either close down or join the Unigrid network and provide their services under the same conditions as the rest of the Unigrid network.

The bottom line

The Unigrid network has the potential to change the IT industry and the way we work. It gives end-users the ability to store, view and use their data directly from their own computers without the need of having to rely on or trust external service providers. They can put their trust into the design of the network rather than relying on the assurances of an external company.

We welcome you to the next natural step in the evolution of the Internet. Visit The Unigrid website to learn more about the network, its development and what’s currently happening at The Unigrid Foundation.