PINGSTA: the community behind Multiven’s decentralized cyber-defense of Internet networks
How Multiven provides vendor neutral, apolitical and independent software maintenance and cyberdefense for all its clients.
At Multiven, we consider the internet to be one of mankind’s greatest inventions.
After working at Cisco for 5 years as the technical leader responsible for maintaining the integrity of IOS, the software that runs 75% of world’s internet networks, our CEO, Peter Alfred-Adekeye, knew that the internet needed an unbiased doctor. He thus founded Multiven in 2005, because (a) the companies that manufactured networking equipment software are incapable of independently maintaining it and (b) apolitical cyberdefense is neither a core nor competence for them.
Due to various geo-political agenda, economic discrimination and market concentration, network equipment manufacturers were putting the entire Internet infrastructure and ecosystem at risk of centralisation — think China, Russia, South Africa etc. asking LinkedIn to build data centers in their respective countries to locally hold the data of their citizens.
Multiven’s vision has always been to protect all internet connected devices,
regardless of the hardware or software vendor, and the product’s life-cycle. But our young company immediatly faced the difficult challenge of supporting companies all over the world with limited resources. When elaborating Multiven’s strategy, it became clear that agnostic software maintenance was difficult to achieve within the framework of a typical software company. In response, Multiven innovated: its services would be powered by a decentraliszed web of knowledge, exactly like the Internet.
The plan was to create a machine to aggregate this knowledge and autonomously deploy it around the world, to rectify software, security and cryptographic problems that afflicted the Internet, with as little human interaction as possible.
Multiven thus started developing an artificial intelligence called mySolvr, which tracks bugs and issues, and memorizes solutions, patches, and quick-fixes. It predictively pushes them when a new similar issues arises. However, mySolvr needed human experts to learn from and to adapt its solutions to a diverse range of problems.
Thus Peter invented Pingsta into existence in 2007:
With a vision that largely anticipated Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 whitepaper, Peter went out to build a decentralized network of inventors, cyber experts, cryptographers and engineers: Multiven reached out to 1200 of the most talented technology leaders, to bring them together in a community. He understood that they did not want to belong to corporates, valued their independence and would understand and embrace Multiven’s vision for the Internet. This community, called Pingsta, would become the first expertise-as-a-utility company in the world. Its was coined from the words ‘ping’ a network troubleshooting tool and ‘sta’ from the word ‘superstar’.
Multiven, Pingsta and mySolvr are tighlty knit together, and form a virtuous circle:
When a Multiven customer creates a task for one of its maintained network devices, mySolvr dynamically suggests known solutions from its knowledge repository which as of today resolve 50% of the issues. Otherwise, mySolvr assigns it to the Pingsta community member it deems has the most appropriate expertise for the problem at hand. It capitalizes on the members’ profiles containing relevant information on experience and areas of expertise, as well as their track record, and optimally matches the task.
The selected member then proceeds to solve the issue. When the task is resolved, the Pingsta member receives payment — in Fiat up to March 31st and in MultiCoin from April 2018. mySolvr adds this new solution to its repository, which improves resolution time for similar issues in the future. This entire workflow translates into an enhanced network reliability, security and availability for customers around the world, affordably.
There are only two ways to join the community: be invited by a Pingsta member or submit a request to join, subject to profile validation. 10 years of experience in network engineering, cyber defense, cryptography or related fields are a prerequisite. Some members are amongst the best-known experts in their field, such as:
- Dr. Lawrence Roberts, designer of the ARPAnet, the ancestor and precusor of the internet and the world wide web (bio)
- Tony Li, co-inventor of BGP-4 (Border Gateway Protocol) the routing protocol for the world’s Internet backbone (interview)
- The late renowned cryptographer Hal Finney, who was deeply involved in the creation of Bitcoin and ran the first Bitcoin node ever (bio)
Multiven gives unrestricted access to this pool of knowledge, at a fraction of the price that big corporates request for maintaining and protecting their networks, and with improved execution.
With the upcoming Multiven Open Marketplace (MOM), Multiven takes this network one step further by migrating Pingsta onto the MOM.
Thus, everybody will be able to leverage the expertise of Pingsta members directly on the blockchain, powered by smart-contracts to seamlessly execute transactions.
The MultiCoin (MTC), an ERC-20 compliant token living on the Ethereum blockchain, will be the sole medium of exchange on the MOM to ensure the orderly completion of transactions.
The aim is to scale the Pingsta network to 10,000 members over the next years, in response to increasing demand by customers of all sizes, around the world. They will still represent the top 1% of IT experts worldwide.
In other words, the Multiven blockchain project is taking decentralization one step further, completely democratizing software maintenance and cyber-defense, ensuring that everybody can easily access these services, without worrying about partisanship, concealed software backdoors or over-pricing.
We just want to make the internet a safer place for all.
Our ICO is live, and to get involved, please visit www.multiven.io
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