Fluence Explainer Article

Blockchain technology has been reshaping the whole digitalization ecosystem across sectors. The primary advantage of blockchain solutions is that they provide a lease on transaction transparency for both the recipient and grantee. Organizations have been managing data for blockchain-based solutions using either on-chain or off-chain storage strategies in the recent era. This may be accomplished by storing data in a private or public blockchain service.

What are Off-chain Transactions?

Off-chain does not always imply “not on the blockchain,” but it does indicate that it is not available to the public. Just as no business would keep its data in a publicly available database or directory, off-chain storage ensures that it remains private. If these notions are applied to a regular cloud service, the result is similar to the debate between public and private clouds.

Off-chain transactions provide significant value since they provide enhanced security and are not constrained by the transactional speed constraints associated with on-chain transactions. In a conventional on-chain transaction, each transaction must be verified by all nodes on the chain before being declared complete, which is very sluggish.

In contrast, an off-chain transaction does not need confirmation by all nodes before being marked complete or successful. Off-chain solutions are more secure because they are not exposed to the public internet — this is quite similar to the security achieved by deploying a server or piece of software inside your intranet rather than on the internet.

Fluence Network: what is it?

Fluence is an off-chain cloud that provides a base for backends, APIs, and peer-to-peer applications. The Fluence off-chain cloud infrastructure is interoperable with blockchain, storage, and other protocols.
Fluence provides an open Web3 protocol, framework, and tools for developing and hosting permissionless peer-to-peer applications, interfaces, and backends.

The Fluence protocol intends to provide interoperability, resilience, and security to internet applications. Fluence enables the publication, execution, composition, and monetization of apps without the need for intermediates or central servers.

Features of Fluence

Permissionless Protocol

Without the approval of a third party, anybody may join the network, operate a node, and install services and applications.

Modular Data

External data sources, APIs, and other decentralized protocols may be integrated into Fluence applications. Fluence’s primary technology is based on IPFS, which serves as the default data layer for distributing and updating services on network nodes.

Higher Scalability

Since applications will be able to build as many subnetworks as they need inside the global Fluence network, the global capacity is estimated in billions of peers. Peers in subnetworks have improved connectivity and place a lesser premium on external connections.

Service Recognition

The Fluence network enables the announcement and discovery of a variety of workloads. Applications may delegate work to external service providers identified publicly or through decentralized identity standards and verified credentials.

Computation Integrity

Fluence’s security approach enables programs to run on only known and trusted nodes. All computations are cryptographically signed, allowing clients to verify that they were executed by an eligible peer.

Customizable Consensus

When trustless consensus is necessary for a given task, it may be deployed. Consensus is optional, allowing applications to combine blockchain security with a larger scale of trusted calculations.

Fluence’s Components

Aqua

Aqua is a new programming language designed exclusively for developing peer-to-peer processes and scenarios. Aqua simplifies business logic development among dispersed peers and enables the decoupling of network techniques and computations. Turing-complete, process-calculus-based, and capable of implementing algorithms for any network architecture.

Marine

Marine Marine is Fluence’s global WebAssembly runtime that conducts Aqua-triggered calculations. The computations are carried out using lightweight and portable WebAssembly services that can perform pure computations as well as act as a proxy for external older APIs or binaries.

Fluence Network

Aqua and Marine replace the layered architecture of cloud backends with a peer-to-peer network of nodes and clients. Backend services are made available to the external network and are utilized by numerous apps. Nodes may re-host services, therefore increasing availability and resilience and competing for service quality. Application developers may utilize their own services or access services hosted by other network members, taking advantage of service instance redundancy.

Fluence Use cases

Peer-to-peer applications

Fluence provides robust and censorship-resistant applications that operate entirely on users’ devices and do not depend on any intermediate services. The Fluence stack enables the next generation of true peer-to-peer applications.

Decentralized protocol

Fluence makes it very simple to create and mix network protocols of any complexity, topology, or size using a single Aqua language optimized for peer-to-peer programming.

Cloud-native computing

Fluence enables cloud-native apps to manage microservice backends independently of a central coordination server. The Fluence programming paradigm enables applications to be upgraded and new business logic to be implemented without redeploying microservices. Backward compatibility is smooth with content-addressable functions and services, which means that nothing breaks when a service is changed to a new version.

Infrastructure for the blockchain

Fluence enables cryptocurrency exchanges, multi-sig wallets, and DAO administration tools to save gas costs by off-chaining signed transactions and order books while maintaining on-chain trade settlements.

Conclusion

Fluence is a platform that enables the development of apps that are not reliant on centralized cloud providers or APIs. And, using its P2P technology, enables its users to access these apps in a safe, quick, scalable, and censorship-resistant manner.