General

What is Blockless in one sentence?

A WASM-based decentralized and verifiable serverless functions platform

Why do you need Blockless?

To build the next-generation decentralized applications, you need more than just a distributed blockchain ledger. Oftentimes, your application requires high-performance computation, data IO from/to IPFS, connection to various blockchains, managed databases, and integration with various Web2 and Web3 services.

Blockless helps with your decentralized application development process in 3 major ways.

With Blockless Functions and Blockless App Engine (coming Q1 2023), you can offload the heavy computation from a blockchain or centralized cloud service platform to the Blockless decentralized node network.
You can access your familiar Web2 and Web3 services through Blockless SDK. Currently, Blockless supports IPFS, AWS S3, Ethereum, BNB Chain (Q4 2022), and Cosmos (Q4 2022). The platform will add more service support every month down the road.
With Blockless Marketplace, you can use and integrate community functions and extensions into your own application architecture in a plug-and-play fashion. You can also sell and distribute your function to the community for profit.

What is Blockless’s value proposition?

Blockless is solving the L1 blockchain scalability and fragmentation problem. These are the two fundamental roadblocks prohibiting Web3 from gaining mainstream adoption.

Blockless offers a customizable execution layer for building decentralized serverless applications.

By offloading executions from L1 to the performant, customizable execution layer provided by Blockless, dApps are not constrained by on-chain capacity and throughput.

How innovative is Blockless’s solution?

We are the first verifiable serverless functions platform for Web3. When building complex business logic outside of a blockchain, with Blockless developers can enjoy zk-empowered computation integrety without having to rely on centralized servers or to recruit and manage a decentralized node network.

Developers on Blockless will only have to provide serverless functions they wish to deploy (in any language!), along with a manifest file that customizes the minimum number of nodes needed, hardware requirements, geolocation, and node topology. Their services will then be running with ultra-high availability and hands-free horizontal scaling in no time.

We are the first to offer a product-ready x86 machine emulation within our WASM runtime. This allows devs to run ANY 32-bit software on our decentralized execution layer.

The serverless platform is capable of many things. For instance it allows for web3 native, decentralized & dynamic web hosting which enables complex yet censorship-resistant web pages. Here is a demo: https://youtu.be/aITDeEtkl5I

Thanks to recent development in WASI, our compute resource contributor node software can be installed onto anything that runs a browser, such as android phones, laptops, or dedicated servers.

Who are Blockless network's users?

Blockless is a decentralized serverless platform serving two groups of users, one being our network contributors who contribute their idle computing resources in exchange for token and service fee incentives, and the other being the developers who seek distributed, verifiable, and affordable compute services.

What makes Blockless different?

Blockless is designed with security and UX/DX (user experience/developer experience) first principle.

Under the hood, the Blockless execution engine is a WASM/WASI-based secure runtime (sandbox) that allows for fine-grained control over various system hardware and file system. It also enables the Blockless network to be truly multi-platform (as small as an IoT device to a full-fledged server cluster) and expandable through community-driven extensions.

In addition, the system incorporates a Cosmos-based orchestration chain and a Pub/Sub mechanism that handles work orchestration and load balancing. This way, all functions and applications are dispatched automatically without the developer and network contributor needing to be interfaced with each other.

For developers and network contributors, the Blockless network can be accessed via both command line interface and graphical user interface, providing best-in-class system interaction flow. The Node software can be automatically installed onto the host machine, without the user ever needing to decipher the CLI commands.

Will there be a token?

Yes. BLS is the official token of the Blockless network. It will be used for all in-network transactions and staking for nodes.

Explain the design of your token supply

The Blockless token (BLS) can be acquired by running a node to provide service. Nodes received service payments based on how much work they’ve done (our runtime allows for CPU instruction level monitoring).

Light nodes in the network can go on and offline at will, as we expect many of these nodes to be personal devices such as phones and laptops.

But if the node runner is confident that his device can provide stable service (has good internet and/or a server at home), the node runner can sign up to become a full node to receive bonus BLS rewards. But if the node goes offline during the contracted period, its stake will be slashed.

Explain the design of your token demand

All node runners are required to stake to join the network. All payments for execution services will be done with the BLS tokens. We also allow developers to share or even sell their WASM functions to others (with BLS).

What is the roadmap for Blockless?

Q3 2022

(a) Release of Blockless Functions Private Alpha

(b) Release of Blockless Developer Console

(d) Release of Blockless SDK

(e) Release ofV1 Developer Documentation

(f) Product tests with 15 partners

Q4 2022

(a) Release of Blockless App Engine

(b) Release of Blockless Site (dynamic web hosting)

(d) Release of V1 Network Contributor Documentation

(e) Launch of collaborative educational campaigns with partners

(f) Onboarding of initial dynamic web hosting clients

Q1 2023

(a) Release of Blockless Public Beta

(b) Release of GPU support

(d) Mass-onboarding of paying clients

(e) Launch of Incentivized Testnet

(f) Become open-source

EoY 2023

Mainnet Launch

EoY 2024

Decentralized Full Sevice Platform

Where can I find more information?