In 2019, Fleek was founded under the name of Terminal, a development platform for Ethereum. A year later, it was rebranded to Fleek and transitioned to becoming a Web3 infrastructure platform that offers IPFS storage infrastructure and hosting of static websites.
The platform aims to give developers an easy-to-use and abstracted experience when building Web3 apps, abstracting the use of Web3 infrastructure to have seamless deployments and storage, similar to the experience you’d see in Web2 today.
Fleek Network – The Decentralized Edge Network
Web2 allows you to cover all your infrastructure needs from single sources, in a unified developer environment and experience.
Meanwhile, this is impossible in Web3 as all providers and pieces of the puzzle are spread out, have their own integration and use experiences, are disconnected from each other, and do not always have their use-case laid out for the user.
IPFS itself is not specifically built to host websites, which is an example. So, Fleek’s role is to abstract and surface use cases on top of those technologies like video streaming modules on Livepeer, SSR on Akash, or Fleek Network.
Fleek Network is the company’s 2nd project, a decentralized content and application delivery network, delivering edge services like computation, SSR, and dn-oriented services like cache/acceleration.
What Is Fleek Doing to Help Web3?
Currently, most popular Web3 apps and use cases use Cloudflare for accelerating their app and content as users are not tolerating slow loading apps/content.
Because Web3 protocols don’t incentivize performant delivery of content directly from their networks, users are forced to stick to a performant cache layer such as Cloudflare in between all these protocols and their apps.
Fleek Network is built for anyone who wants both fast and trustless content acceleration.
Also, the usage of the network will be fully transparent and publicly available for the world to leverage. Therefore, all content will be IPLD-based and content addressable, creating a public record, much like how smart contracts bring radical transparency to financial transactions.
The user would have access to an SDK and browser app experience to leverage Fleek Network’s cache and computation.
The user submits files or data to be cached by the network, and the network outputs an endpoint/URL that the user will consume somewhere in an application or project.
In the terms of computation, the user would be able to leverage Fleek Network to execute compute tasks and operations (e.g. Server Side Rendering, data processing), and the network would utilize the decentralized edge network of nodes to performantly execute the code/instruction and return the user their needed output.
Fleek Network will play a very important role in the decentralization of the CDN and edge layer, ending the Cloudflare and AWS dependence on Web3.
On the other hand, new consensus methods continue to drive Web3 innovation such as some of the better-known consensus methods like PoW or PoS. However, fair exchange is still a challenging problem in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks where two parties exchange information and want to be protected.
Fleek Network uses secret symmetric encryption keys to create a commitment and Shamir’s Secret Sharing algorithm to share every node’s secret key with the consensus committee members. So, they also can be used to resolve disputes.
Shamir’s Secret Sharing is one of the most popular cryptographic algorithms allowing a secret to be split into multiple parts, or shares, and distributed among multiple parties.
The secret can only be reconstructed by combining a certain minimum number of shares and any subset of shares fewer than this minimum number reveals no information about the secret.
Fleek Network’s symmetric encryption key is not only used to encrypt data but also can be split into multiple shares.
Therefore, if there is a dispute or failure to share the decryption key, committee members can share the shares of the decryption key with the client. The client can reconstruct the decryption key independently with a certain minimum number of shares available.
As a result, this makes an additional layer of security and redundancy to Fleek Network’s fair exchange mechanism and the data exchange is more fair and secure.
NFAs
Well, you’ve heard of NFTs, so what about NFAs?
NFAs are implemented based on the ERC721 NFT standard holding the on-chain metadata for everything about your app, including name, domain, build history, infra endpoints, and many more.
However, unlike most NFTs, NFA’s will probably update frequently. This is a new standard for placing apps and infrastructure on-chain.
Today, Web3 apps are still using centralized solutions. This not only leaves Web3 frontends vulnerable to censorship and hacks but also creates financial and even criminal liability for Web3 projects and their founders.
In this case, NFAs allow smart contracts to own and control all of the infrastructure and assets that encompass your Web3 app.
You can mint your app as an NFA, meaning transferring the app. As so, anything you’d usually do/own/pay for as a founder can now be automated to the NFA. In other words, you can do with NFAs the same as people are doing with NFTs.
In addition, you can own or update the content hash on your app that your ENS name or other domain points to with NFAs.
Furthermore, it also includes the ability to pay for your apps’ decentralized hosting, storage, delivery, databases, or RPC endpoints. It can be said that NFA is supporting bringing novelty and usefulness to the new primitive of the ecosystem.
The combination of Fleek Network and NFA is to remove the control over infrastructure to the NFA itself and out of the company/team’s hand as well as allow the decentralized hosting and creation of access points.
Therefore, users have decentralizing control and can sell or transfer their projects with full control of the infra. In addition, users can mint a copy of the NFA and point to their hosting/infrastructure to create an access point to that application’s backend.
What Fleek Network Offers
As said, you will have access to an SDK and browser app experience to leverage Fleek Network’s cache and computation.
You can submit files or data to be cached by the network, and the network outputs an endpoint/URL that the user will consume somewhere in an application or project.
Also, you can leverage Fleek Network to execute compute tasks and operations and the network will use the decentralized edge network of nodes to performantly execute the code/instruction and return your needed output.
Furthermore, node operators can join the network by running node servers, staking many tokens in the network, and providing computing, storage, cache, etc, as well as validation in the network itself.
They are the spine of the network, and the ones that provide the resources for it to operate to users. In return, they will receive rewards for these services based on their throughput, quality, and behavior.
Fleek: The Takeaway
Fleek could be better than existing tech due to the superior infrastructure, but also a sandbox experience that connects all decentralized protocols into a single experience.
Centralized CDNs and Edge providers like Cloudflare and AWS, there is no decentralized competitor on edge live today like what Fleek Network does.
With Fleek, there are loads of Web3 options, and it is all build on leading decentralized infrastructure. With new ideas come new opportunities!
