$9 million Series A led by Multicoin Capital
We’re excited to share that Fluence Labs, the core developers of the Fluence project, has raised a $9,000,000 Series A led by Multicoin Capital to accelerate development of Fluence and enable the design space for p2p systems alongside blockchains. Fluence is a decentralized computing network for building, hosting, and running peer-to-peer applications and protocols.
Web 3 native computing
The big vision of Web 3 is to deliver better fault tolerance, censorship resistance, and ownership to systems that allow us to transact, collaborate, work and play together via the internet. The previous generation of these systems was built and has grown on top of the cloud computing paradigm, with centralized servers powering centralized databases of users and serving all of them together from a single controlled space. The new generation, which is generally called Web 3, heavily relies on blockchains, decentralized storage systems, and self-sovereign identity.
Perfect for storing and transacting digital assets, the blockchain computing paradigm alone fails to achieve the full Web 3 vision. By design, blockchains come with limitations that lead to trade-offs between speed and decentralization. That’s why most Web 3 applications today are using blockchain only as a financial backend, while serving user related data and APIs from their centralized servers in the cloud, losing resiliency and decentralization.
This is why we are building Fluence, a decentralized computing network which enables the full potential of Web 3 applications.
Fluence delivers the non-blockchain based decentralized computing model, which provides resilience of Web 3 and doesn’t rely on centralized clouds. With Fluence, applications including Defi, DAO, NFT, bridges, oracles, or exchanges can finally remove dependency on centralized infrastructure. By moving their off-chain components onto Fluence, they eliminate a single point of failure, censorship, and potential vendor lock-in.
How does Fluence work?
The off-chain Fluence protocol is powered by a flexible computation trust model that doesn’t sacrifice speed or decentralization. As opposed to blockchains where all nodes replicate all data, Fluence nodes opt-in to host only desired applications and related data. The choice of nodes, data replication or verification model are controlled by application developers themselves, enabling the ability to flexibly design a p2p system of any complexity.
Developers build on Fluence using Aqua, the new programming language for p2p applications and protocols, and Marine, lightweight and fast Webassembly runtime. Aqua makes building p2p systems very easy and handles the connectivity, peer and service discovery, request routing, allowing developers to focus on pure business logic of distributed computation. Marine provides universal runtime across the network for composable pieces of applications.
This technical foundation allows developers to deliver a wide variety of use cases from simple functions executable in the Fluence p2p network to application-specific p2p protocols. Any application backend becomes a p2p protocol with its own custom rules for data replication, computation verification, failover, and load balancing. And any p2p protocol plugs into external data layers coming from decentralized storage, databases or blockchains.
The design space for hybrid p2p off-chain and on-chain systems is enormous, you can see more use cases in the latest Multicoin Capital blog post. The power of Fluence is in putting p2p applications into a single permissionless ecosystem where they can be easily built, composed, and innovated similarly to the composability of smart contracts in blockchains.
The Series A
We are proud to be supported by top funds, projects and individuals in the Web 3 space. This round was led by Multicoin Capital and joined by Alameda Ventures, Angel DAO, Arweave, Hard Yaka, LayerX, OP Crypto, Peer VC, Polymorphic Capital, Protocol Labs, Signum Capital, Stakely, StreamingFast, Tiger Global, UOB Venture Management, Zerion, and a group of great individuals: Anna Vladi, Doug Petkanics, Eric Tang, Nathan Montone, Raphael Kim, Taiyang Zhang.
Since its founding in 2017, Fluence Labs has raised $15 million. Seed investors include 1kx, Blockchange Ventures, Dekrypt, Distributed Global, and Inblockchain.
What’s next
The Fluence network is up and running today, hosting thousands of p2p functions already deployed by developers.
In addition to building out the p2p application development stack, Fluence will be expanded with a global marketplace for computing and software resources that would help developers deploy protocols and applications faster. The on-chain marketplace will be expanded by an economic layer that allows open-source software authors to share in hosting revenue. For example, when software components are composed into new applications, the authors of those components will share in the hosting revenue based on use, providing open-source authors with a revenue model and making Fluence the leading choice for hosting open-source applications.
In the coming months Fluence Labs will be turning over the Fluence network and treasury to the Fluence DAO. The DAO will govern further development and drive community involvement. Fluence Labs will continue to act as the core development and ecosystem partner.
Fluence Labs is building a world-class, remote-first engineering team across the globe. We have open positions for engineering, product, community and marketing roles. Apply today at https://fluence.one/join.html
To start building with Fluence, visit fluence.dev and join the Discord / Telegram communities.
