Perlin: The Next Wave of Distributed Tech
Neutrino Japan, Shibuya, December 6, 2018
Tonight I was lucky enough to catch a talk given by Dorjee Sun and Kenta Iwasaki in OmiseGo’s Shibuya coworking space, Neutrino, which is quickly becoming the epicenter of blockchain innovation in Tokyo. They delivered an in-detail introduction to their distributed ledger technology, Perlin.
Someday soon, if the project plays out the way they have it planned, we’ll all be able to rent out computing time on our smartphones, idle desktops, and even Playstation consoles that will power machine learning models, process research data, host websites, and share files in a massive worldwide network — and earn incremental revenue while doing so.
What is Perlin? According to their website, “Perlin is the first practical, trustless and decentralized cloud computing marketplace that leverages underutilized compute power in everyday smart-devices to make supercomputing economically viable and accessible globally.”
What this means is that someday soon, if the project plays out the way they have it planned, we’ll all be able to rent out computing time on our smartphones, idle desktops, and even Playstation consoles that will power machine learning models, process research data, host websites, and share files in a massive worldwide network — and earn incremental revenue while doing so.
Perlin is not an ERC-20 token project. It is its own network and will be powered by a native PERL token, which serves as both the reward for making your hardware usable by the network, and the mechanism for staking and securing Wavelet, the ledger that powers the system. The ledger itself is the first real-world implementation of the Avalanche consensus protocol, a directed-acyclic graph (DAG), and has been clocked so far at 10,000 transactions per second.
For comparison, Bitcoin currently handles approximately seven transactions per second, and the Ethereum network is still waiting for the layer two scaling solutions that will bring it above fifteen.
The project contrasts with other distributed computing networks, like Golem, in that the data is not accessible or visible to the hardware doing the processing, and the token itself is/will be pegged, like a stablecoin, to some fraction of the comparative computing cost of similar retail services like AWS, which they maintain will represent a much higher cost per unit of computing power compared to Perlin once the project is live.
The business: Dorjee is a veteran entrepeneur, who got into the blockchain space in 2014 when he helped start a company called ChangeCoin, which anyone who received virtual currency via ChangeTip on reddit in 2015 may remember.
Perlin currently has over 100 strategic investors and has raised approximately 49 million USD in private funding. You can see them next week in San Francisco at the next World Digital Assets Summit if you want the chance to learn more in person.
The tech: Computing providers will be able to set exactly how much of their computing capacity they wish to be made available for network use, and users of the network will be have full control over how and to what degree their processes are split up among different machines at processing time.
The ledger itself is written in Go, but contracts are written in WebAssembly, which promises faster development and greater simplicity than a more specialized language like Solidity.
You can run the testnet on your own machine, and build a decentralized application on the Wavelet ledger today.
Wavelet is designed with extensibility in mind and the team is currently welcoming ideas for plug-ins and use cases from the developer community.
You can learn more about Perlin at https://www.perlin.net/
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