Interpreting Fluence DAO: Cultivating for 4 Years, a Strong DePIN+AI Project Favored by Multicoin

Written by: Joyce

Source: BlockBeats

The wave of AI has also ignited the DePin track, with many new projects emerging recently that tout "AIxDePin" as their selling point. Most of these projects tell a similar story: establishing a distributed server market through a token incentive mechanism to create decentralized physical infrastructure for AI applications.

In fact, the construction of a "rental market + token incentives" is just the beginning of exploration in this direction. There is still much to be done to build a computable market that can operate on the ground and realize a business flywheel. For example, how to assess the quality of devices providing computing resources? The decentralized serverless computing market Fluence DAO has provided its answer to this question.

Founded in 2017, Fluence DAO was initially positioned as a Web3 native computing platform and raised $9 million in Series A funding led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Tiger Global and Protocol Labs in 2022.

On March 23, Fluence launched its token $FLT, which has increased by 64% over the past two days, reaching $1.28 at the time of writing. As a project from two years ago, what performance will Fluence exhibit in the new wave of DePin? BlockBeats has compiled existing information for readers' reference.

Fluence: Decentralized Serverless Platform

Fluence is a decentralized serverless platform and computing market driven by blockchain economics. Fluence is a global, permissionless, scalable, and secure alternative to centralized cloud computing platforms.

With Fluence, developers can build applications and deploy them to a network of computing providers, ranging from professional data centers to home computers. Providers compete on price and performance, continuously proving that they are serving applications to earn rewards.

Unlike other similar projects, Fluence has launched the programming language Aqua and the tool Marine, which provide concrete solutions for the decentralized computing resource needs from the developers' perspective, covering all aspects from task publishing to quality assessment.

Technical Foundation: Auditable and Cryptographic Proof

The Fluence network operates entirely on the Aqua protocol, which provides secure distributed execution without centralized coordination. The Aqua protocol is deployment-free, and all requests executed by Aqua scripts and each step of execution are signed by participating nodes, ensuring auditability and verifiability.

Since all computations are encapsulated within Aqua, it means that all operations executed on Fluence will receive probabilistic verification on-chain. Providers must submit the required executions to earn rewards; otherwise, they will be penalized.

Through Marine, Fluence enforces the generation of cryptographic proofs for each executed computing function. Providers generate computation proofs, and clients only need to pay for the work, accompanied by verified and correct proofs of the work.

Based on this, developers with computing needs will compile their business logic into Marine Wasm to create and manage their computing functions, and compile their computing functions based on Aqua scripts. After packaging the computing artifacts and deployment requirements, they will submit their quotes to the market, which will then match them.

Fluence is applicable to all types of applications currently existing in the cloud, such as web applications, distributed backends, communication software, and IoT, as well as decentralized applications that consider user data privacy, composability, and resilience. Specifically, this includes: P2P applications (communication, social, streaming), decentralized protocols (messaging, consensus engines, decentralized governance, oracles), community governance (DAO-managed applications, creator economy), and blockchain infrastructure (CEX, wallets, cross-chain facilities, etc.).

Overview of the Fluence Network

On-Chain Computing Market Built by Fluence

Fluence's on-chain market matches computing providers with clients who pay for the computing resources offered by providers. The market is hosted on Fluence's own chain, supported by IPC, and verified by Fluence computing providers anchored to Filecoin L1. The proprietary chain enables cheap and fast transactions, allowing for the rental of computing resources ranging from small loads to large-scale needs.

Computing providers in the Fluence market

Fluence ensures the existence and availability of resources published by providers through the enforcement of cryptographic proofs called capacity proofs. Providers continuously generate capacity proofs using their hardware resources to confirm that these resources are ready to serve clients, while clients with needs can choose providers based on price and other parameters.

For each deployed application, Fluence creates transactions on-chain between the client and the provider list. The transaction records financial details (price, prepayment, and collateral required by the provider), technical requirements related to the desired service (access to certain data, binaries, or web APIs), and links to the code installed in the network.

Matching criteria for selecting providers

The initial billing model is prepaid, with billing cycles based on the duration of resource rental. Subsequently, Fluence will introduce a flexible billing model. Currently, Fluence primarily targets the CPU market, with plans to gradually add GPU demand.

Token Economics

On March 23, Fluence released the token economics for the project. The total supply of $FLT is 1,000,000,000 tokens, with an initial circulation of 5%, allocated to the developer reward program that started on February 27. Tokens will be locked for two months from the date of receipt and will begin to be released on April 27. Rewards paid to storage providers will be distributed after the mainnet launch on March 20. These rewards depend on the amount of computation added to the network and will be locked for three months. Approximately 45% of the total supply of FLT will be unlocked within 24 months after the token issuance.

Long-term Efforts Recognized by Multicoin Capital

For most community members, judging the project's potential by analyzing the technical solutions provided by Fluence may be too high a threshold. At least from the dynamic disclosures of the project party, one can sense the preparations and efforts Fluence has made for the development of the DePIN industry. Its YouTube account has 149 videos, with the first video dating back to 2019.

The earliest video content focusing on developers and cloud computing appeared four years ago

Additionally, Fluence founder Tom Trowbridge is a successful entrepreneur in Web2 and the CEO of the RWA protocol Hedera. Before entering the Web3 space, he served as a vice president at Goldman Sachs and a board member of Stronghold Digital Mining. Tom is passionate about promoting the development of blockchain and Bitcoin and is an advocate for decentralized systems/blockchain technology.

At ETHDenver, Tom Trowbridge discusses with Kyle Samani, founder of Multicoin Capital

On Tom Trowbridge's personal homepage, one can see his shares on DePIN and decentralized technology over the past few years at various occasions.

In 2022, Multicoin Capital, which has invested in Livepeer, The Graph, and Render Network, chose Fluence, believing that Fluence's significance lies more in providing computing services for Web3 developers. Multicoin Capital managing partner Kyle Samani views it as a "crypto-native" tool for Web3 developers, stating, "Fluence has created a whole new way to build applications and protocols supported by powerful, flexible, and infinitely scalable p2p infrastructure."

As we move into 2024, with the potential of the DePIN track becoming a consensus among research institutions like Messari, Spartan, and Pantera, Fluence DAO's innovative thinking on decentralized computing infrastructure solutions has become its new development pivot. In the competition among numerous projects, what kind of development space Fluence will have remains to be seen over time.