0Chain — MAGMA Initiative | Bandwidth Marketplace

Recently we announced 0Chain’s partnership with MAGMA. This initiative was originally started and open sourced by Facebook in 2019. Magma was then transferred to a neutral governance in early 2021 under the Linux Foundation, comprising of Facebook and other industry heavy weights as founding members.

While Magma started off with a single initiative, namely Facebook’s desire to improve wireless connectivity in rural areas, multiple initiatives have since branched out. Rural coverage still remains an initiative of Magma, while our involvement and focus with them has been to solve the capacity issue in urban areas.

The Problem

The generation and consumption of data has increased exponentially; a primary cause of this is an ever increasing number of devices coming online. In order to accommodate this increase in demand for bandwidth, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), such as AT&T and Deutsche Telekom, are forced to build out additional base stations and other capacity infrastructure.

This approach is expensive, inefficient, and lacks elasticity and cannot be scaled for on demand. Capacity is a multi-dimensional problem — time, season, ROI, cost, and customer behavior. For example, regular vs seasonal traffic at an airport. For a carrier to provision such capacity takes time and planning, is expensive to roll out, and maintain and operate the base stations, and in most cases does not justify the ROI, and they may be okay with unhappy customers leaving their network. So if a carrier can help off-load such capacity in a more efficient manner then it benefits all parties. This is a perfect use case for a decentralized solution.

The concept of ubiquitous wireless connectivity has been talked about for a long time since the early days of WiMax, a precursor to 4G/5G platforms, to broaden the spectrum to provide unprecedented speeds close to the user. The advent of WiFi coupled with fiber backbone has enabled businesses to provide high speed WiFi coverage to their customers. However, the switch from Cellular to WiFi has not been prevalent because establishments do not have an incentive to share their WiFi network, and customers turn off their WiFi if they don’t receive good connectivity from public WiFi. This results in siloed coverage spots and puts undue burden on the cellular networks to provide a better coverage experience.

The Solution — 0Chain powered Magma

Mobile operators and WiFi hotspot owners have often had idle capacity in certain geographies during different hours of the day. Exchanging such idle bandwidth between operators and WiFi providers led to a new Magma initiative.

This bandwidth exchange approach provides a way to morph an operator’s old burden of hardware expansion, addition of new base stations, and associated capital expenditure into a software driven solution. A Magma server is able to orchestrate bandwidth exchange between MNOs and augmented network providers , such as Boingo, which has small cell towers and WiFi access points.

In essence Magma establishes a converged core for bandwidth utilization and exchange across different radio spectrums, 4G, 5G and WiFi — hence called the Magma Converged Core as shown in the diagram.

Augmented Network as a Smart Contract

An ideal solution to accelerate the uptake on Magma initiative would be to have an incentivized distributed platform with economies of scale and a self-managed framework to enable seamless connectivity between WiFi providers and carriers without prior agreement through a set of decentralized validation nodes that manages such relation onboarding and billing settlement programmatically on chain, based on a set of smart contract rules. This is very similar in concept to what 0Chain already does with its storage protocol, matching storage consumers and storage providers (blobbers) via a smart contract that essentially drives a dynamic autonomous marketplace.

The goal of 0Chain within this Magma initiative is to make such seamless connectivity a reality by having a liquid capacity.

What does it mean for 0Chain token holders?

Our immediate focus is on successfully completing the design phase, including a demo to the operator of a functioning marketplace; after which we plan to launch this on our public network with an incentive pool for service providers and users. We will have a set of decentralized Magma operators (Validation Nodes) who’d need to stake tokens to participate. The incentive pool will initially be funded by our network tokens to get the initiative off the ground quickly, and later with successful offload data statistics, we expect MNOs, enterprises such as Facebook, governments, and other entities to fund the pool.

With mainnet and subsequent release of 0Chain Magma, token holders will enjoy dual marketplaces on the 0Chain blockchain platform with users consuming storage and bandwidth with ZCN tokens. Blobbers can leverage the same infrastructure to provide an additional service, and just need to stake more tokens.

It is also exciting to note the benefits of cross marketing between the two markets as mobile users of Magma will organically market 0Chain benefits to their friends, and so will users of 0Box. Additionally, service providers of storage may also become providers of capacity.

How does bandwidth marketplace compliment 0Chain decentralized storage?

0Chain already has a fast blockchain and a fast decentralized storage platform. The latter speed is at the server and not at the last mile. With Magma, the mobile client using 0Box app will experience a fast upload and download speed, which will drive user experience and consumption of our storage, and in turn a higher capacity for blobbers to earn rewards. More people can stream HD quality video content on their mobile. More developers would use our platform to have an end-to-end fast speed solution, and they would integrate and use our platform not only for high speed storage but for an end-end high quality content experience and delivery.

More details will be outlined in the next article on how to become a Magma operator, a capacity service provider, and how to use this service as a consumer. We will also give an idea on the staking requirement, the access point gear, and expected rewards. Additionally, we will provide some network estimates on growth of the service providers based on Helium statistics, and the number of consumers we expect to use this service.