iExec and Nerdalize Partnership: Blockchain Applications Now Heating Homes in the Netherlands

Wassim Bendella
iExec
Published in
3 min readMay 25, 2018

Lyon/Delft, April 25th, 2018. iExec and Nerdalize have signed a partnership agreement towards providing sustainable cloud solutions to blockchain applications. Nerdalize therefore officially sells its cloud resources through the the iExec decentralized cloud computing marketplace.

Partnerships Towards Green and Energy-Efficient Computing

iExec continues to gather computing resource providers that will act as the first workers on its blockchain-based decentralized cloud marketplace. iExec’s prior collaboration strategy has been to partner with not only distributed, but also sustainable and green computing providers. Earlier in the year, iExec teamed up two other companies, Stimergy and Cloud&Heat, that share a similar vision of providing energy-efficient computing resources.

It is increasingly becoming common knowledge how colossal the energy consumption needed to support traditional data centers is. The running and cooling of data centers have a combined electricity consumption often greater than that of entire nations, while C02 emissions from powering servers exceeds the whole airline industry.

Nerdalize: Sustainable and Affordable Computations at Scale

The vision of the Netherlands-based startup ‘Nerdalize’ is to eventually move away from traditional and centralized data centers. The company’s innovation is to place servers directly in residential homes and recycle the energy that dissipates from these servers into heating water. This process results in a reduced heating bill for homeowners, while removing the cost of setting up a traditional data center.

Moving servers to households saves 2 tonnes of CO2 per household per year, as well as the overhead cost of building a data center.” — Maaike Stoops, Business Developer at Nerdalize

Nerdalize owns servers called ‘CloudBoxes’ that are installed in households all across the Netherlands. Dockerized computations are distributed to multiple CloudBoxes to run jobs for an impressive 40% of the cost of centralized cloud providers.

Powering the First Decentralized Marketplace for Computing Resources

iExec’s V2 release planned for May 29 presents a new paradigm for cloud computing: a global and open market where computing power is traded like a commodity. The marketplace offers an easy-to-use interface through which applications and users in need of computing power can meet providers able to answer their demand at the best rate possible.

“Nerdalize has joined the initial group of private workers in the iExec marketplace. By combining efforts, our two companies are not just leaving a positive mark on the environment, but on society as well by making cloud computing an affordable commodity for everyone.” — Wassim Bendella, Business Developer at iExec

By not having to invest in building and maintaining expensive data centers, iExec and Nerdalize can provide more affordable cloud computing offers. This in turn allows developers to innovate more easily in the compute-intensive fields of artificial intelligence, IoT, scientific research or big data, therefore radically enhancing our existence in unprecedented ways.

About iExec

iExec is developing the first blockchain-based decentralized cloud marketplace. This marketplace will allow developers and users in need of computing power to meet cloud providers willing to answer their demand. iExec The network supports the most compute-intensive decentralized applications in the fields of AI, big data, fintech, cryptography or 3D rendering.

About Nerdalize

Nerdalize is building a different cloud. Instead of constructing huge data centers, the company is distributing its servers over homes. Homeowners use the residual heat for hot showers and to warm their house, without needing to build new infrastructures. Nerdalize enables users to scale up computations without wasting CO2 or money.

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Wassim Bendella
iExec
Writer for

Wassim Bendella is a business developer at iExec, a blockchain startup decentralizing the cloud market (previously at Shell and Cointelegraph).