Ramo Cloud Storage: Reliable and performant storage at a fraction of the cost

Vaduz, Liechtenstein, Dec. 20, 2023 - web3mine, an open-source innovation lab building Web3 tools that help humanity transition to community-owned and -governed internet infrastructure, is coming out of stealth mode after raising $6 million in seed funding in 2022. The funding round was led by leading Web3 investors, including 1kx, PL Ventures, and a community of angel investors.

web3mine aims to empower the world to collectively coordinate capital and hardware to build an open, performant and resilient compute infrastructure for everyone. A graduate of Alliance DAO's prestigious demo day and accelerator, web3mine seeks to eliminate common Web2 pain points like location-referenced data, siloed cloud-specific tooling, vendor lock-in, complex legal structures, which often results in the concentration of market power in a few large corporations.

Vukašin Vukoje, founder of web3mine said:

“Time and time again we have seen how the Web2 model for storage and compute poses massive challenges: Cloud providers lock users’ data, are slow to innovate, and command sky high prices and governments across the globe come to have power over citizens far outside their jurisdictions. By providing common infrastructure for storage, compute, and liquidity providers, we’re driving the next iteration of the cloud. web3mine is building new technological primitives and new incentive structures powered by crypto networks. These will enable humanity to collectively gather and coordinate resources to solve the world’s hardest problems.”

To get there, web3mine is building the world’s largest open access compute network to democratize the process of creating and capturing value on new or established decentralized networks.

Over the past year, web3mine has made substantial progress in building out two key offerings.

• Hardware monetization: Hardware owners can easily and efficiently deploy and monetize their assets and the utility that they provide (e.g., hard drives for storage, circuits for computational workloads and networking equipment to move data) by completing jobs.
• Liquid staking: Cryptocurrency holders can deploy their tokens to aid the growth of the decentralized networks and in return participate in the value they create by collecting staking rewards.

"web3mine is not only building a critical coordination layer between capital providers and hardware operators for various networks but also serving one of crypto's most important use cases in liquid staking”

stated Michael Hua, Research Analyst at 1kx.

“Creating a liquid staking layer for infrastructure networks has vastly different challenges than building a Layer 1 liquid staking layer and web3mine is uniquely qualified to address all of them. 
We are excited to see web3mine's first product go live for the Filecoin ecosystem and look forward to its expansion into established and emerging decentralized networks.”

The initial offerings help simplify, optimize and open access to the process of mining FIL, the native token of the Filecoin network.

• By leveraging technology developed by web3mine and capital provided by stakers, hardware operators are able to scale their operations efficiently, drive substantial cost savings and reduce their exposure to the volatility of cryptocurrencies.
• web3mine passes these cost savings to its stakers thereby allowing them to benefit from the growth of these network economies at an estimated annual percentage yield of up to 25%.
• Thousands of machines are connected to web3mine's network already. Together, these machines provide petabytes of necessary storage capacity and complete tens of thousands of computing jobs daily.

“web3mine has built some of the most important tooling for the Filecoin network” stated Brad Holden, Investments Lead at PL Ventures. “Their innovations continue to ensure that cloud infrastructure such as Filecoin’s storage network benefit everyone rather than a select few organizations. Protocol Labs was founded with the aim of supporting projects across the entire Web3 ecosystem that will help radically improve the internet. We are proud to be working with web3mine as they drive the next iteration of the cloud, pushing open-source decentralized infrastructure and protocols to the world.”

web3mine's liquid staking solution for the Filecoin network is the first of many: The team is expanding their reach to service other web3 utility networks allowing greater access for staker participation accelerating the advent of lean, performant and open access networks.

Towards open access internet infrastructure: Announcing Ramo Computer

Today, we are launching Ramo Computer (visit ramo.computer). The software tool allows anyone – from consumers to enterprise-grade operators – to commit and consume hardware resources on decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs). 

DePIN refers to a system where physical infrastructure, such as data storage, computing power, or networking, is operated and coordinated in a decentralized manner using blockchain technology. The approach distributes control and management across a network of participants rather than one central authority and enhances scalability and resilience while reducing costs.

The users of Ramo Computer act as the main actors in the Ramo Network. Via Ramo Computer, users participate in and execute workloads from several DePINs that are aggregated by the Ramo protocol. This allows anyone running Ramo Computer to participate in various DePINs simultaneously and seamlessly.

For example, with Ramo Computer, activities like providing and consuming storage on the Filecoin network – which previously required large-scale operations managed by teams of skilled engineers – can now be run on consumer-grade hardware by anyone. This democratizes access to networks like Filecoin and other DePINs. As a result, more providers and users are able to commit resources thus fueling the growth of DePINs. 

Ramo Computer: A new way to commit and consume hardware resources

Today, most of the world’s public cloud infrastructure is controlled by a few large organizations. These companies succeed because they provide a highly convenient service at competitive prices relative to alternative options (e.g., on-premises infrastructure). Specifically, they abstract away much of the complexity of running compute and storage infrastructure with powerful tooling designed for their specific infrastructure environment. This locks users in.

In the context of web3, tools that are functionally equivalent to those offered by the centralized cloud today are defined as protocols. They are typically designed for a set of specific use cases (e.g., storage, video encoding etc.), have protocol-specific incentives and validation mechanisms and provide rails that facilitate the payments between users and providers of the services. The various protocols can also be stitched together to create higher level services.

Importantly, these protocols are not opinionated about the infrastructure they run on. Instead, they allow an arbitrary number and type of resource providers to participate so long as they can correctly execute the workloads specified by the protocol.

The community working on Ramo believes that reducing the barriers to participate in decentralized networks as providers is key to catalyzing the transition away from proprietary cloud infrastructure and tooling towards open compute protocols. Ramo Computer is a major milestone in reducing complexity and leveling the playing field, thereby allowing a growing number of compute protocols to run on a more open, performant, scalable network of infrastructure providers.

By using Ramo Computer, users today have the ability to provide both storage or compute resources for some of the largest open access storage and compute networks: Visit ramo.computer and start committing storage hardware at the click of a button. Over time, Ramo Computer will give hardware owners more opportunities to commit additional resources (e.g., hard drives for storage, circuits for computational workloads and bandwidth to move data).

In short, the Ramo network is a network running other networks. By becoming providers on the Ramo network, qualifying hardware owners will be able to tap into a steady flow of monetizable workloads streaming in from various DePINs. This allows them to access a large open market of jobs without having to manage the complexity of being a provider across multiple decentralized networks. The goal is to allow them to generate profits with their hardware more rapidly and efficiently.

Starting today, providers using Ramo Computer are beginning to make large volumes of storage capacity available via the Ramo Network. Storage clients interested in tamper-proof, performant and S3-compatible storage capacity are welcome to register their interest at use.ramo.computer.