Review of 2018 & Vision for 2019
Perlin’s Progress to Date & the Way Forward
“The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.” Malcolm Gladwell
Perlin started 2018 with just an idea, a white paper and a close-knit team of passionate hackers and builders with a shared vision. Challenges have come and gone… and come again as the crypto market languishes. However, instead of being distracted, our tireless team has continued to focus on building out the platform, growing the business and expanding our already formidable partner network.
As true believers in the profound and transformative power of decentralization, we view our industry’s current growing pains as merely temporary. We’re convinced that some truly amazing developments are on the near horizon as distributed tech continues to mature, and projects with strong business fundamentals like ours will rise to the challenge.
As more poorly conceived projects continue to fall by the wayside and speculators run for cover, we remain confident that 2019 is going to be a tremendous year for Perlin and all of our supporters.
For all of you who have been following the project thus far, this post is intended to summarise our achievements and milestones we hit in 2018. Towards the end, we’ll also share our vision for 2019 and the key goals we’ll be working towards.
MAJOR TECH RELEASES IN 2018
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” Socrates
We believe the key to success for every quality project is the ability to match vision with action. Not content to just dream about all the things we could build, we set out concise developmental milestones and have worked tirelessly to hit these consistently on schedule. Our development progress has been on point, with our CTO Kenta Iwasaki leading the charge with our team of top tech talent.
Our code has been externally reviewed and supported by the developer community as can be seen on our github, Cryptobriefing code review and another external code review by the guys over at OpenToken. Notably, two of our popular libraries; Noise and Life have been extremely well received by the community!
Our major releases and open sourced code are detailed in these previous posts by the tech team:
- Wavelet Pre-Alpha Launch (Nov, 2018)
- Wavelet Introduction (Sep, 2018)
- Life Library Release (Aug, 2018)
- Noise Library Release (Jul, 2018)
We’re incredibly excited for all the new dev releases coming up in 2019. For more detail on our 2019 development timeline, look out for Kenta’s technical update in the coming weeks.
IN THE MEDIA
“I’ve always thought that it’s good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that’s how consensus is constructed.” Barbara Kruger
We intentionally kept a relatively low profile in 2018 and we’ve only released some news and updates on our milestones, releases and partnerships. For this reason, we’ve been generally quiet on the media and community front as we’re focused more on actually developing the tech and building our product for market.
Here are a few of the more interesting posts and articles that covered us this year:
The rest can be found on our website media section.
Perlin video interviews:
Press Releases on major distribution channels:
- Businesswire on India Partnership
- VentureBeat on the Next Billion
- The Economic Times on Hackathon
- Indian Government (NITI Aayog)
STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” Ancient African proverb
In addition to our 180+ strategic token holders, we’ve also already signed on 60+ additional strategic partners (with more to come). Many of these partners include incubators and funds with large portfolios of investee companies/startups across a range of industry sectors with significant cloud demand.
We’re also focusing on partners across a range of countries to ensure we get truly global coverage — with a foot already in the door in major markets including India, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Singapore, the US, UK and larger APAC region.
We’ve intentionally avoided the usual empty partnership announcements, because we’d like to wait until we have actual collaborations ready to deploy with our partners. So while our partnership agreements are signed and sealed, we continue to explore specific opportunities for meaningful collaboration.
This includes working closely with partners for: compute power supply onto our platform, cloud user demand, technical development, product development and distribution channels, and other strategic areas. The team continues to aggressively pursue strategic partnerships to help us realize our goals on technical, commercial and social impact fronts. If you are interested, please get in touch with us via contact@perlin.net.
Some major partnerships we have already announced include: the Indian Government’s Innovation Think tank NITI Aayog , PT Telkom, and Global Brain.
We are continuing to work closely with our partners and look forward to announcing more of these as we approach our Mainnet release. There are a few we can’t publicly announce just yet — so keep watch on our community channels for these in 2019.
We are also continuing discussions with government officials (at a ministerial level) and telecommunications company C-suite executives in a range of developing countries, including: Bangladesh, Kenya, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Turkey, and Uganda.
COMMUNITY MEETUPS AND EVENTS
“Eloquent speech is not from lip to ear, but rather from heart to heart.” William Jennings Bryan
More than anything, we believe in building the right community and vision for Perlin to have a meaningful positive impact on the world. We were greatly honored to speak at events and meetups globally, including in Singapore, Japan, the US, India and Australia.
Taking full advantage of the global stage we were offered, the team evangelized our key vision: to introduce truly disruptive decentralized innovation to the rapidly growing cloud market, and help drive substantial new mainstream user adoption across sectors and global communities.
The key events and meetups we spoke or participated at included:
- 10–11th Dec, 2018: WDAS — San Francisco
- 7th Dec, 2018: Global Brain Alliance Forum — Tokyo
- 6th Dec, 2018: Community Meetup @ Neutrino — Tokyo
- 4th Dec, 2018: Forbes Asian Forum — Singapore
- 26–27th Nov, 2018: United Conference of Internet Money — Singapore
- 26th Nov, 2018: Crypto Explorers Pilot Event — Singapore
- 15–16th Nov, 2018: ORF/NITI AI 4 ALL Conference — Mumbai
- 14th Nov, 2018: CNBC Brainstorm Event — Future of Fintech — Singapore
- 11th Oct, 2018: Singapore Accountancy Commission — VAS-IVSC Business Valuations Conference
- 8th Oct, 2018: Community Meetup @ Polychain Penthouse — San Francisco
- 20th Sep, 2018: FBG Capital Singapore Social Event — Singapore
- 19–20th Sep, 2018: Consensus Singapore — Singapore
- 18th Sep, 2018: Eleven Global Meetup by WXY Group — Singapore
- 27th Aug, 2018: Community Meetup @ Google Singapore HQ — Singapore
- 25th Aug, 2018: Blockchain Ecology Summit — Melbourne
The team also attended a range of other major events to network and spread the word on Perlin:
- 27 Nov — 1 Dec, 2018: Blockshow Asia — Singapore
- 30th Oct — 2nd Nov, 2018: Devcon 4 — Prague
- 5–10th Oct, 2018: SF Blockchain Week — San Francisco
- 11–13th Sep, 2018: World Economic Forum (WEF) on ASEAN — Vietnam
PERLIN’S ECOSYSTEM POWERED BY 180+ STRATEGIC TOKEN HOLDERS
“We need to value donors as much as we need value from them.” Reinier Spruit
We also have the strategic support of many leading and influential token holders (and in numerous cases their portfolio companies and wider networks). Demand from these token holders will be more than sufficient to bootstrap our cloud platform and distributed ledger in the early days. This support covers: compute power supply, cloud service demand, technical collaborations, distribution partnerships and more.
Our major token holders are listed on our website, but some to note include leading funds and industry leaders such as: FBG Capital, Bitmain, Global Brain, Danhua Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, Dekrypt Capital, Blocktower, LD Capital, ZhenFund, GBIC, Signum Capital, Bitrise Capital, Node Capital, YouBi Capital, OKEx, Tapas Capital, Origin Capital, 1kx and many more.
We are continuing our discussions with new highly strategic long-term token buyers whom we hope to bring online in 2019. This includes traditional VC firms and funds who see incredible potential in Perlin’s solid business model and unique disruptive tech. We can’t wait to announce these new partnerships to you and we’ll also be diving into more detail on some compelling new innovations to our tokenomics, which should stir fresh excitement for our supporters in 2019.
AND ALL THE OTHER STUFF…
“We have a strategic plan, it’s called doing things.” Herb Kelleher
This past year had an incredible amount of moving parts and competing priorities, so it wasn’t just a matter of getting things done, but also formulating our key strategic vision and action plan. To support this, we’ve hit quite a few important internal goals, summarized below:
- Based on supply from just our strategic token holders, we have already got 377 pFlops of compute supply ready for deployment. This means that we already have the world’s largest grid computer at our disposal. For context, the largest supercomputer in the world (currently the Summit in the US) only has 200 PFlops at its disposal (or the equivalent of 6.3 billion people doing calculations at the same time, every second, for an entire year).
- Despite being in stealth mode for most of 2018 and remaining relatively quiet on the media side, we’ve managed to build a 2.4k+ Discord developer-focused community and a 30k+ Telegram community . We’re looking forward to ramping this up in 2019 as our platform goes live!
- We launched the AI 4 ALL Global Hackathon in partnership with the Indian Government (NITI Aayog) and PT Telkom to positively impact up to 1.6 billion people living in India and Indonesia. We have also invited submissions from teams around the world looking to drive meaningful positive change.
- Our offices in Singapore, New York and Hong Kong were properly established and we’ve established the personnel for the next few years as we continue to grow. For anyone interested in what we’ve committed to building and our vision, we’re also actively hiring!
We’ll continue to refine our focus in 2019 as we transition into more active user acquisition and business development to support the cloud platform and distributed ledger.
VISION FOR 2019 & BEYOND
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Alan Kay
There are a few key themes at the heart of everything we’re doing, which many of you in our community would already know well. Just to ensure our existing and future community members are clear on who we are, here are some of our core values and goals.
DISRUPTING THE CLOUD
We will fundamentally disrupt the lucrative cloud industry and seize a share of the $200 billion market by pioneering cheap, fast, secure and more abundant decentralized supply. This huge market is rapidly growing, with some reports showing that demand for cloud among some sectors such as AI/ML are doubling every 3.5 months.
Our goal is to simultaneously grab a share of the cloud market while helping to drive greater and more efficient innovation across all conceivable industries and sectors.
REDISTRIBUTING INCOME & EMPOWERING GREATER FINANCIAL INCLUSION
We will channel massive existing cloud revenues to the millions of individual device owners in our ecosystem instead of the big incumbents. In doing so, we will empower struggling and marginalized communities to achieve greater financial inclusion by giving them access to an ongoing new source of passive income.
By allowing device owners to rent out the compute power on their idle computers, phones and other devices — our dream is to create a new kind of Universal Basic Income. Impoverished device owners living in developing countries all around the world will be soon be able to actively participate in the growing global share economy.
Companies and organizations with social impact goals and ethical investment governance will also have the option of channelling their existing cloud spend to needy communities, charities and other chosen not-for-profits on our network.
SOLVING THE WORLD’S BIGGEST RESEARCH PROBLEMS
We will help solve the world’s greatest research problems that are currently hindered by their vast unmet requirements for compute power. This involves climate change modelling, modelling the nature of terminal diseases and other research aimed at benefiting humanity. By allowing device owners to donate compute power (or the funds from that power), we will provide researchers with the precious computational power they need.
Unlike previous initiatives that asked for donated compute power (like Folding @ Home and the SETI Program, which enjoyed very limited success), Perlin will allow this to happen securely without compromising on privacy.
MOVING INTO THE MAINSTREAM
The goal of every worthwhile project in crypto is to drive greater mainstream adoption for decentralized tech. To that end, we’ve specifically designed and built Perlin to be a major player for achieving mainstream adoption. In particular, we are providing compelling real-world economic incentives for new users to get onboard the blockchain space. Basically we’ll make it easy for them to get paid for their idle compute power without needing detailed knowledge of crypto or how it works.
By giving non-crypto users an enticing taste of the incredible power afforded by decentralized tech, we believe we’ll help usher in the next million users to the distributed tech ecosystem. By building an easily accessible bridge between the mainstream consumer base and crypto, our overarching goal is to help lift the industry and market as a whole.
NOT JUST A CLOUD PLATFORM
It’s important to remember that Perlin isn’t just a powerful decentralized cloud platform. We’ve also built a fast, scalable and secure distributed ledger based on Wavelet (benchmarked at 10,000 transactions per second), which other projects and enterprises will be able to build on. Decentralized cloud is simply our first compelling use case. More will come as we establish strong revenues and invest into other use cases for our ledger across other industries and market sectors.
Inspired by the much-anticipated Avalanche family of consensus mechanisms, we’ve developed the novel Wavelet Protocol. Introducing significant and unique practical enhancements to security, scalability and speed, Wavelet provides us with a powerful infrastructure foundation which we’ll continue to refine and improve with the help of our fast-growing community. A number of crypto project partners have already started exploring how they can build on Perlin’s ledger. We’ve also pitched Perlin as a viable commercial option for more traditional firms looking to build their own distributed systems and applications.
Bringing all this together, we hope you can see how much we’ve already accomplished in under a year, and the amazing things we’re striving for in 2019 and beyond. We are a team of experienced entrepreneurs combined with a team of skilled developers widely recognised as being at the leading edge of blockchain and distributed systems. All of our passion and energy is being directed to making Perlin a viable option for all of its users, supporting innovation in distributed tech, and creating a practical bridge for everyday users to engage with the cryptocurrency space.
Thank you for all your support in 2018. Looking forward to a bigger and better 2019!
