Perlin Network is a DAG based distributed ledger built on top of the Avalanche consensus protocol. The first application of Perlin is a decentralized compute layer that provides computing resources to anyone in need of computational power.
In this article, we will forget all the FUD surrounding the project and break down Perlin to better explain the tech and team behind it.
Current blockchain solutions such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero etc have been unable to scale to the current demand and this poses a big threat to the mass adoption of crypto.
To add to this, the consensus protocols used by most of these currencies have many negative effects. For example, Proof of Work which is widely used by Bitcoin wastes high amount of electricity to carry out the complex computations in order to reach consensus. On the other hand, Ethereum is planning to move to Proof of Stake which even though energy-efficient, is prone to Denial of Service attacks.
This calls for other solutions which can offer a better and efficient consensus protocol.
Perlin attempts to solve both the consensus and compute problems. It is comprised of two layers
A high-throughput DAG using Avalanche consensus
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.
Let’s explore the ledger and marketplace in more detail.
Perlin’s ledger uses the Avalanche consensus protocol which was recently published by Team Rocket. The consensus protocol is designed based on the Gossip protocol.
Avalanche consensus uses the same idea and gets a consensus by picking random sets of nodes to pass information to others and after few recurring voting process, the entire network reaches a point of consensus. This is very fast than traditional consensus mechanisms and does not waste any electricity.
This allows Perlin many advantages of other blockchains
The first application built on top of Perlin is the decentralized cloud computing marketplace. The marketplace offers compute resources that can be used to perform massively parallelized compute work. This marketplace primarily targets startups, small enterprises, researchers, independent developers etc.
The marketplace comprises of three parties
Miners supply the compute power by registering their idle computing resources on Perlin network. Miners are paid out in $PERLs based on how long they rent out their compute resources
Customers are the individuals or organizations looking for renting compute power. Once the customers find a match based on their requirement of compute power, they can SSH into miner’s virtual machine and execute their tasks on that machine.
Validators come to consensus and log transactions between miners and customers through the distributed ledger. Validators receive incentives in the form of commission from the transaction fee of the transactions they validate and broadcast.
Perlin ensures that the miners prove that they own the computational resources before selling them to the customers. It also uses decentralized clocks on the miner’s machines to calculate the exact time the resource was rented out.
Perlin provides customers with SDKs to secure the privacy and security of both computation and data running on the miner’s virtual machine.
Since the customers are mostly using the commodity smart devices, they would be able to get resources at much cheaper price than the traditional cloud solutions of Google, Microsoft & Amazon.
Perlin can provide great speed, performance and efficiency by using more machines to perform a task.
Price
$0.04 : Seed Sale (Dec, 2017 to Jan, 2018) — 20% of Tokens Issued.
$0.12 : Strategic Sale (April, 2018 to May, 2018) — 20% of Tokens Issued
$0.20 : Private Sale (June, 2018 to July, 2018) — 7.5% of Tokens Issued.
Details of crowd sale are not announced as of the day of publishing this review.
From the discussions on forums and my personal research, the project seems to be the brainchild of Kenta Iwasaki, a very strong and talented engineer with heavy research background on distributed systems, cryptography, signal processing, mathematics, statistics and machine learning
At this point, its still not clear if all the other engineers are just part-time contributors or are with Perlin full-time.
Perlin has managed to get the attention and investments from many big investors in the crypto space. These are some of the major investors in Perlin.
In spite of all the FUD surrounding the project in the last few months around different investment rounds and prices offered to investors, the tech seems very solid.
Avalanche consensus is the first consensus protocol to come out in many many years and Perlin has taken the brave step of believing in it and more importantly using it for their project. This also leaves them at risk of using an untested protocol.
Perlin recently open sourced their decentralized P2P library Noise proving that there is serious development efforts going on behind the scenes.
I am very excited about the project and believe that if the project can deliver on the promises made, it can standout in this already crowded market of decentralized cloud computing.
Please let me what you think about this project.
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Disclaimer: MaverickCrypto is not a registered investment advisor, broker/dealer, financial analyst, financial bank, securities broker or financial planner. The information is provided for information purposes only. The information is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice or any other advice, is general in nature and not specific to you.
Please always do your own research before making any investment decisions.
