The wave of AI has also ignited interest in the DePin track, with many new projects emerging recently under the banner of “AIxDePin”. Most of these projects tell a similar story, aiming to establish a distributed server market through token incentive mechanisms to build a decentralized physical infrastructure for AI applications.

In fact, building a “rental market + token incentive” is just the beginning of exploring this direction. There’s much more to do in creating a grounded and operational computing power market, such as assessing the quality of devices providing computing resources. Fluence DAO, a decentralized serverless computing market established in 2017, has offered its answer to this question. Initially positioned as a Web3 native computing platform, Fluence DAO secured a $9 million Series A funding in 2022 led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Tiger Global and Protocol Labs.

On March 23, Fluence launched its token $FLT, which saw a 64% increase over two days, reaching $1.28 at the time of writing. As a project from two years ago, what performance can Fluence be expected to show in the new wave of DePin enthusiasm? BlockBeats has compiled the existing information for readers’ reference.

Fluence: A Decentralized Serverless Platform

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

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

Unlike similar projects, Fluence introduces the programming language Aqua and the tool Marine, offering concrete solutions for developers’ decentralized computing resource needs, covering everything from task publishing to quality assessment.

Technical Foundation: Auditable and Encrypted Proofs

The Fluence network operates entirely on the Aqua protocol, which ensures secure distributed execution without centralized coordination. The Aqua protocol is deployment-free, and all requests executed by Aqua scripts, along with every step of execution, are signed by participating nodes, making it auditable and verifiable.

Since all computations are contained within Aqua, it means that every operation performed on Fluence can be probabilistically verified on-chain. Providers must submit the required execution to earn rewards, or they will be penalized.

Through Marine, Fluence enforces the generation of encrypted proofs for every computational function executed. Providers generate computational proofs, and clients pay only for work that has been verified and proven correct.

Developers with computational needs compile their business logic into Marine Wasm to create and manage their computing functions. They compile their computing functions with Aqua scripts, package computation artifacts, and deployment requirements, then submit their bids to the market, which then matches them.

Fluence is suitable for all types of applications currently in the cloud, such as web applications, distributed backends, communication software, and IoT, as well as decentralized applications considering user data privacy, composability, and resilience. 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.).

Fluence Network Overview

Fluence’s On-chain Computing Market

Fluence’s on-chain market matches computing providers with customers who pay to use the computing resources offered. The market is hosted on Fluence’s own chain, which is supported by IPC and verified and anchored to Filecoin L1 by Fluence computing providers. The proprietary chain enables cheap and fast transactions, thus allowing the rental of computing resources of any scale, from minimal loads to large-scale ones.

Computing Providers on the Fluence Market

Fluence ensures that the resources published by providers are existing and available through enforcing cryptographic proofs known as capacity proofs. Providers continuously generate capacity proofs with their hardware resources to confirm that these resources are ready to serve customers, while customers in need can choose providers based on price and other parameters.

For each application deployment, Fluence creates transactions on-chain between customers and the list of providers. These transactions record financial details (price, prepayment, and collateral required by the provider), technical requirements related to the needed services (access to certain data, binaries, or Web APIs), and links to the code installations in the network.

Criteria for Selecting Providers

The initial billing model is prepayment, with charges based on the rental period of resources. Fluence plans to introduce a flexible billing model subsequently. Currently, Fluence mainly targets the CPU market, with plans to gradually include GPU demands.

Tokenomics

On March 23, Fluence released the tokenomics of the project. The total supply of $FLT is 1,000,000,000, with an initial circulating supply of 5% allocated to the developers’ rewards program starting on February 27. Tokens are locked for two months from the date of claim and begin to be released on April 27. Rewards paid to storage providers will be disbursed after the mainnet launch on March 20. These rewards, dependent on the computation added to the network, will be locked for three months. About 45% of the FLT total supply will be unlocked within 24 months after the token issuance.

After years of hard work, favored by Multicoin Capital

For most community members, judging the potential of a project based on the technical solutions provided by Fluence may be too high of a threshold. At least from the dynamics disclosed by the project side, one can feel the preparation and effort 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 focusing on developers and cloud computing appeared 4 years ago. In addition, Fluence founder Tom Trowbridge is a successful entrepreneur in Web2 and also the CEO of the RWA protocol Hedera. Before entering the Web3 field, he served as vice president at Goldman Sachs and a board member of Stronghold Digital Mining. Tom is keen on promoting the development of blockchain, Bitcoin, and is an advocate for decentralized systems/blockchain technology.

At ETHDenver, Tom Trowbridge interacted with KyleSamani, the founder of Multicoin Capital. On Tom Trowbridge’s personal page, one can see his shares about DePIN and decentralized technology at various occasions over the past years.

In 2022, Multicoin Capital, which has invested in Livepeer, The Graph, and Render Network, chose Fluence, seeing its significance more as providing computing services for Web3 developers. Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, regards it as a “crypto-native” tool for Web3 developers, “Fluence has created a new way to build applications and protocols supported by strong, flexible, and infinitely scalable p2p infrastructure.”

By 2024, as the potential of the DePIN track becomes the consensus of research institutions like Messari, Spartan, Pantera, Fluence DAO’s innovative thinking on decentralized computing infrastructure solutions has become its new development support point. In the competition among many projects, the development space of Fluence remains to be seen with time.

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