šŸŽ™ļø AMA recap: Cudos x 8BTC āœ”ļø

CUDOS
CUDOS
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8 min readDec 9, 2021

December began on a high note for us! We launched phase 3, Armstrong of our incentivised testnet, Project Artemis, on December 6. The announcement came after the successful completion of Buzz, phase 2 of Project Artemis.

Add to that, our Founder and CEO, Matt Hawkins, had an insightful ā€˜Ask Me Anythingā€™ (AMA) session with crypto enthusiasts on 8BTCā€™s telegram group on 7th December. The AMA turned out to be an interactive session where Matt addressed questions related to Cudosā€™ plans to phase into the mainnet in 2022 and the exciting future of Web3.0 and metaverse.

If you missed the session, donā€™t worry, weā€™ve got you covered. Read the whole AMA below!

1st segment: Introduction

Q1: Can you please introduce yourself, your background, and what Cudos is all about?

Matt Hawkins: To introduce myself, Iā€™m Matt Hawkins, CEO, and Founder of Cudos, and itā€™s a pleasure to be here.

Cudos is a decentralised cloud computing network and a first-layer blockchain. It aims to provide decentralised, permissionless high-performance computing on a large scale, expanding computing resources to hundreds of thousands of nodes.

Cudos is built on the existing hardware computing power monetisation software Cudo Miner, which currently has more than 500,000 registered users (hardware providers) in 145 countries worldwide, including blockchain practitioners, gamers, and cloud service providers. The number of concurrent devices at any time exceeds 50,000, and the total computing power exceeds 50 trillion floating-point operations.

Cudos is an essential infrastructure leading to an open and decentralised meta-universe.

By building a bridge between blockchain and cloud computing, Cudos not only realises secure, transparent, and decentralised cloud services but also lets the blockchain break through the limitations of existing smart contracts, handle Turingā€™s complete high-performance computing, let the blockchain bring subversion to more application scenarios, and empower Web 3.0 and meta-universe.

Prior to Cudos, I previously built C4L, one of the UKā€™s largest cloud and data centre providers. We ended up providing for 1% of the UKā€™s infrastructure and had a global business. The Cudos journey began in 2017 to make the same in software using blockchain to use the worldā€™s spare computing capacity.

Q2: As Cudos is a decentralised cloud computing network, how does it differ from the traditional cloud services that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft provide?

Matt Hawkins: Centralised networks are a single corporation with a limited number of locations and few networks that provide all the infrastructures. They are typically also costly solutions if you want to scale, as a limited number of providers can provide this.

Also, they can only provide a limited number of locations/countries, meaning you cannot get the best performance when connecting to the network from many worldwide users.

Cudos can scale across hundreds of thousands of service providers, all with the resilience of hundreds or thousands of different networks. Because this includes so many providers, a well-designed network can scale higher, and also, by using spare capacity around the world can be substantially more cost-effective. Cudos nodes can also be run across the globe, in over 150 countries providing the lowest latency and highest speed network performance.

The compute can also be scaled directly from a smart contract. If developers want, they could create their own decentralised service like Livepeer or VideoCoin network, just by building on top of the Cudos network. At the moment, this is not possible with any other networks today.

Q3: Facebook recently rebranded itself to Meta, demonstrating its determination to make a foray into the Metaverse sector. What is your opinion on thisļ¼Ÿ

Matt Hawkins: Itā€™s an interesting angle, but one we are starting to see across other industries as well, such as Square renaming themselves to Block, Twitter integrating crypto, and so on. Itā€™s taken many years, and now crypto and blockchain are becoming mainstream, and these large social and commercial networks are integrating and rebranding themselves around this new technology.

Learn more: šŸ¢ A new walled garden: Big Tech centralisation and the threat of monopolies in the metaverse āš”ļø

The metaverse will become the next version of the internet over time. It took the internet 10ā€“20 years to become the fully engaging network that it is today. The metaverse will follow along the same lines. We will see convergence and blurring of lines between environments. Facebook is about user content. We have seen the success of metaverses like Minecraft, which again is about user content. When you blur these two together, thatā€™s when some fascinating new technologies will evolve.

Q4: Will metaverse evolve into different models of centralisation and decentralisation in the future? What will the infrastructure of the future decentralised metaverse consist of and what are its advantages over a centralised metaverse?

Matt Hawkins: As a chain built using the Cosmos SDK, we are already bridged to Ethereum and will support EVM soon. But our roadmap is to bridge to many chains as interoperability is key, in our opinion.

Learn more: šŸ’» Why it would be risky to host NFTs in a centralised metaverse šŸ”®

In essence, the whole ethos of the metaverse is in being decentralised. Essentially, users can create their content, be rewarded for contributing to the network, and single entities donā€™t control environments. Instead, they are created by the many on a single platform. Decentralised networks support this ethos, enabling anyone to contribute and earn, in a decentralised manner, rather than everything to a single corporate entity.

The advantages are metaverses need distributed nodes around the world, they need to be low latency and close to the users, they need to scale on-demand to cope with massive networks. They should also never fail, so support from thousands of different networks and providers is essential. This is only possible in a decentralised network. There is not a single provider today that can offer this.

Learn more: šŸŽ® How gaming in the metaverse will depend on the infrastructure that supports it šŸ•øļø

Q5: Do you have any specific developments or plans for the near future that you would like to share with us?

Matt Hawkins: Weā€™re currently in mid of our testnet, ā€˜Project Artemisā€™, with over 22,000 developers registered, and we are expecting a large amount of developer engagement and highly creative builds in the upcoming phase 3, where developers will be able to write smart contracts on Cudos. You can find more detail at docs.cudos.org

Next up is the mainnet in January, along with the Cudos Launchpad. We already have many projects looking to launch on Cudos ranging from DeFi applications to full metaverse projects. The big attraction to Cudos is the scalable compute layer that will launch in H1 2022. This means that we can power any computing task over a decentralised tech stack. So we are powering the metaverse, not just the metaverse transactions!

We have recently signed a contract with a telecom company that will onboard 10 million smartphone handsets to our network next year, creating a huge distributed computing network for researchers and Web 3.0 developers in Nigeria. The revenue paid in CUDOS will be shared across the network.

Please join and follow https://t.me/cudostelegram for more announcements.

2nd Segment: Live questions

Q1: Whatā€™s the role of Cudos in the metaverse ā€” as a builder or creator? What are your technologies/services supporting this role?

Matt Hawkins: Neither. We are the foundation on which builders and creators have the freedom to build and create upon. Our network provides the infrastructure so that the metaverse creators can focus on the cool stuff like games, NFTs, and experiences on top. Think of us as a decentralised version of Alibaba Cloud that incorporates the Airbnb model. Any business can contribute to the network and earn from it. Using smart contracts, any developer can access this scalable compute via the Cudos layer 1 blockchain.

Q2: Please share your opinion on Web 3.0. Do you think the concept will likely explode in a new bull run of the market and see real-world applications?

Matt Hawkins: 100%, Web 3.0 will flourish and eventually replace Web 2.0. But weā€™re still at a very early stage, and there is a long way to go yet. As exciting as this space is, and even though one week feels like one year inside the industry (because of how fast everyone is innovating), technology evolution takes time. And with Web 3.0, you also have a cultural and educational shift needed to advance mass adoption on both the development and consumer side. So weā€™re right at the beginning of that initial upward trend, in my opinion, but this is a 10ā€“20 year cycle.

Q3: And what about the bull run?

Thatā€™s for the market to decide, and many external factors contribute to a bull run. So letā€™s talk about the long-term growth as those projects building now will be the next Amazon, Facebook, eBay of this world in a decentralised way. Everything takes time.

Q4: Can you talk about the security of your platform? How do you ensure the safety of our funds? Do you have an independent security team to superviseļ¼Ÿ

Matt Hawkins: I am pasting snippets here from our online docs page. Please visit for more info https://docs.cudos.org/learn/#cudos-network

Developers, individuals, and businesses will deploy next-generation smart contracts that leverage CosmWasm (and later EVM via Ethermint) with the security assurances of distributed ledger technology. This higher level of performance and security is possible thanks to the Cudos blockchainā€™s ability to leverage a strong community of validators with a robust node infrastructure. This gives users of the Cudos network a high level of confidence in the various enterprise and developer use cases that are subsequently deployed.

The Cudos network is built using Tendermint Core and inherits its Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) algorithm. In addition to leveraging Tendermint Core, the Cosmos SDK supports the Cudos network to achieve high throughput, availability, and security. This architecture allows easy cross-chain compatibility with many other blockchains, particularly those already built on the Cosmos SDK, leveraging the nascent IBC protocol for securely moving assets between these systems.

The Cudos network is powered by CUDOS, the native token on the network, which can be used for funding compute workloads (as gas), contributing to network security (as stake), and governance participation.

In addition, we have also partnered with AMD and our validator nodes will each run either AMD SME/SEV or Intel SGX, providing the capability for hardware/memory level encryption.

Q5: Thank you so much for everybody being a part of this AMA. Thank you for your support. Thanks also to Matt and Jason for joining us and sharing so many wonderful ideas.

Matt Hawkins: Itā€™s been fun, and wait to experience exciting times ahead!

About Cudos

The Cudos Network is a layer 1 blockchain and layer 2 computation and oracle network designed to ensure decentralised, permissionless access to high-performance computing at scale. It enables the scaling of computing resources to 100,000ā€™s of nodes. Once bridged onto Ethereum, Algorand, Polkadot, and Cosmos, Cudos will enable scalable compute and Layer 2 Oracles on all of the bridged blockchains.

Learn more:
Website, Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, Discord, Medium

Originally published at https://www.cudos.org.

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